Shangri-La Frontier

Episodes 1-3

I never thought an anime about a half-naked dude running around in an open-world action RPG with a blue bird mask would go so hard. Sometimes I just want to enjoy an incredibly high-octane, well-animated ride and that's exactly what Shangri-La Frontier feels like it's trying to be. First of all, this show is gorgeous. The thick character outlines, and the bright contrasting colors help everything stand out, and the game interface feels like a more polished version of what people fell in love with when Sword Art Online, a big thing over a decade ago (Damn it has been over a decade) and the action choreography is a step above what I'm used to from similar shows. All of this is wrapped around a story that arguably doesn't have a lot of stakes at this point but to be honest, that kind of makes it come off as a breath of fresh air compared to what we've gotten in the past ten years of anime that focus around video games.

I wouldn't call myself a hard-core gamer but I do play a pretty solid mix of high profile modern games and retro games. This is the year that I started my retro game collection and where I started to revisit a lot of older, buggy titles that don't hold up today in the technical sense but still have their charm. These experiences have helped me get into what I think our main lead Sunraku is trying to do. He's a gamer who likes a challenge. He likes going into a game that is vehemently against him from the mechanics to the story progression and conquering those struggles as if he's constantly trying to relive his own underdog story. So what happens when you put a person who is used to playing broken messes into an actual well-polished and balanced video game? What you get is a rather unique explanation for why our lead is special and distinct compared to the 30 million other players that are logged into this game.

But that's not even the best part about the show. What I like about Shangri-La Frontier so much is that there aren't any major stakes in it. We're just watching a hyper-fixated guy play through a well-polished game. He has died, overestimated himself, and found himself in a very relatable gamer situation but there is no overarching threat to the world or his well-being. Any consequences that happen in the game are consequences that would happen in any other game and I noticed some of that might sound boring but for me, I find it very refreshing and relatable. The idea of grinding in the forest for rare items or experience points before you even reach your first town? Coming across a mythical creature that people have only heard about or speculated online and living to tell the tale? With the explosion in popularity around games like Elden Ring or Baldur's Gate 3, I feel like this is the kind of anime for gamers because those are all very relatable scenarios.

Granted, there is some foreshadowing about a potentially bigger thing going on in the background. There's a lot of attention drawn to the fact that the NPCs seem way more sophisticated than your standard AI and we get some looming shots over the company that is producing the game. We might end up taking the generic route down the road, but for now, I just want to appreciate the show as it is. It's fun, it's silly, it's relatable and it just goes way harder than it had any business going but it has at the very least earned my respect just three episodes in.

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Shangri-La Frontier is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.