Overlord adopts Kugane Maruyama’s light novel series. When YGGDRASIL’s servers, a deep-dive massively multiplayer online role playing game, are scheduled to be shut off, Momonga remains logged in to see the shutdown. He’s the guildmaster of Ainz Ooal Gown and spends the last few minutes of the game’s life in the guildhall of Nazarick. He reprograms the non-playable character, Albedo, to be in love with him, overriding her original difficult personality. When the servers turn off at midnight, however, Momonga isn’t forcefully disconnected. Rather, he and all the non-playable characters he and his guildmates had created are transported to a different world. Momonga discovers that all the guild’s bot defenders, the Guardians, now appear to be alive. Each have their core personalities as programming in the game, but now they speak and behave as if they were people. He discovers he can smell and experience things that the original deep-dive game console couldn’t do. He concludes he’s somehow been transported into a new world. And so he and the Guardians begin gathering information about the new world and its residents.
Spoilers ahead!
Over Them All
Overlord has a vast cast of Guardians and characters from the surrounding kingdoms. The Guardians view Momonga, who renames himself after the guild–Ainz Ooal Gown–as a god. After all, he and his fellow guildmates created everyone in Nazarick, and only he remains with them. Ainz is an Overlord class, the highest class of undead. While he retains his human soul–his internal dialogue acts as a comedic relief–he soon learns he is no longer human. He learns he feels no remorse in killing humans or anything else from the world he finds himself in. The Guardians were also designed to behave as villains. They disdain humans and the weak (which are the same thing) and stand at some of the highest levels possible in original game. Ainz is maximum level and has almost all the world items, powerful, game or in the case of the new world, reality-breaking items. He and the Guardians learn that the rules of the game apply to their new reality. They stand at the apex of power. Ainz decides to seek out other players because he feels isolated, but over time he starts to see the Guardians as his family. He decides to focus on protecting them and helping them flourish, which eventually extends to forging his own kingdom. To help gather information, he takes on the warrior persona of Momon and travels with the Guardian Nabe to join the adventurer’s guild in the city of E-Rantel. Much of what Ainz does as Momon works into his gamer behavior.
Ainz realizes he and his Guardians aren’t invulnerable when Shalltear Bloodfallen, a vampire and one of the strongest of the Guardians, falls victim to a world item that takes control of her mind. Unable to break such mind control, Ainz fights and kills her in the hopes he can resurrect her like in the game and also break the mind control. The plan works. In the process, Ainz learns how much the Guardians all mean to him. Without them, he would be truly alone in the world.
Although Ainz no longer feels anything toward killing humans, he still works to curb his Guardians’ bloodthirsty natures and complete disregard for humanity. When he was a gamer, he was as an office worker. He’s not mentally equipped to be the Overlord, so he often flies by the seat of his pants. The guardian Demiurge and Albedo are strategic geniuses. So, most of the time Ainz plays along with their plans. Demiurge folds Ainz’s alternative identity of Momon into his plans. Demiurge and Albedo believe he thinks far beyond them. In reality, he usually knows nothing of what they are talking about. His grasp of politics is simplistic, reducing to “carrot and stick,” and he leans on his and his guardian’s near-absolute power. This serves as the story’s comedy. Ainz is forever suffering from imposter syndrome; he even reads a few books about leadership he has in his item storage from his world. Whereas Demiurge and Albedo have multiple plans working, all aimed at increasing Ainz’s power and fame at the cost of thousands of human lives. When Ainz makes an off-hand joke Ainz made about conquering the world, they misunderstand the joke as an order, and so act accordingly. Three powerful nations surround Nazarick: Slane Theocracy, Baharuth Empire, and the Re-Estize Kingdom. Demiurge seeks to conquer all of them. Ainz, at first, wants to trade with them, but as the story progresses, he concludes the stick needs brandished and the carrot reluctantly offered as Demiurge plans. He makes the nearby kingdom, together with a plot hatched by the kingdom’s princess and Demiurge, an example of the stick Nazarick wields.
The village of Carne sits on Nazarick’s doorstep. The village serves as a model for how demi-humans and humans can live together. Ainz uses the humans Nfirea and his love, Enri, to research potions for him. The world’s potion making methods cannot yield healing potions of the quality the game world offered. Carne village offers an interesting side story of how Enri’s summoned goblins (thanks to an item Ainz as Momon gives her) help the village thrive. Her growth into a leadership role mirrors Ainz’s own leadership challenges. Only Enri does a better job as a “diplomat” that builds bridges between differing peoples. Ainz tries but doesn’t succeed as Enri does. Ainz functions like Rimuru from That Time I was Reincarnated as a Slime, but with a cruel, autocratic streak. The Guardians, while reticent about Carne at first, soon see the village as a template for their master’s grand design (he doesn’t have one) and so start to come around, if a little, toward the usefulness of humans.
Ainz and the Guardians get embroiled with the Re-Estize Kingdom’s Eight Fingers, a shadow organization that pulls the strings of the kingdom. The involvement is part of a joint plan by Demiurge and Princess Renner to destroy the kingdom. The Princess, despite being the daughter of the king, has her personal goal of achieving immortality and power through Nazarick. Soon after the Eight Fingers are tortured (carrot and stick again) into service by the Guardians, official relations with the Re-Estize Kingdom sours.
As a result of this souring, Ainz attempts to establish trade relations with the Baharuth Empire. He leaves Albedo to handle the official political relations with the kingdom while he focuses on the Empire. He bumbles through negotiations and involves himself in a yearly, ritualized battle between the kingdom and the empire on the side of the empire. His involvement escalates the kingdom’s response, fielding 140,000 troops against the empire’s 50,000 or so soldiers. Ainz casts a summoning spell that requires the instant death of 70,000 kingdom soldiers. The creatures he summons proceeds to massacre the remaining forces. Understandably, this terrifies the empire. Later, when Ainz enters into a coliseum fight in the Empire’s capital to advertise how his kingdom wants to employ adventurers for exploration, he terrifies the emperor. The emperor happened to be meeting with representatives from the Slane Theocracy. He aims to forge an alliance with all the human nations to fight against Ainz. Ainz’s appearance, however, makes him think Ainz knows of the plan. Knowing Ainz’s power, the emperor publicly swears the empire as Ainz’s vassal. Uncertain what a vassal even is, Ainz says Demiurge will get in touch after the emperor sends a written agreement, and carries on with his adventurer recruiting. It’s an amusing example of Ainz’s bumbling around as a gamer does. He really needed to play some strategy games!
When Ainz discovers dwarves are able to create rune-empowered weapons, he wonders if another player had taught them how to do so. He discovers the dwarves had been forced from their home by a population of mole people known as the Quagoa. Ainz assigns the Guardians Shalltear and Aura with the extermination of all but 2,000 Quagoa. While they handled this, Ainz goes into the capital where he encounters Frost Dragons and proceeds to overpower them. Ainz gains an alliance with the dwarves, recruits the dwarven runesmiths, gains the 2,000 Quagoa, and the loyalty of the remaining dragons.
Back in the Re-Estize Kingdom, one of Ainz’s food deliveries is stolen by one of the kingdom’s nobles. This prompts the long-running plans to destroy the kingdom by Albedo, Demiurge and Princess Renner. Albedo declares war. Ainz worries that the war would be too easy and that the Guardians won’t learn anything, so he imposes some handicaps on the war, barring himself from using his powers to level the kingdom. The invasion sets up a future conflict with the Slane Theocracy and some powerful adventurers. The destruction of the kingdom ends with Princess Renner earning her desire. She becomes a demon. Her love and knight, Climb, after challenging Ainz to a duel and dying, is resurrected. Renner asks him to become a demon like her so she won’t be alone. He accepts.
A lot more happens. Albedo and the other Guardians have character development scenes, but few of them move much in their low opinion of humanity. They remain firmly villains from the human perspective.
Villainy, Virtue, Veneration
Unlike most isekai, Overlord‘s protagonists remain decidedly evil or, at best, gray. The Guardians were never human. They began as NPCs created within the video game to defend the guild. They were all created as demons, undead, dark elves, or other fell creatures and so follow their natures. Overlord touches on how they can grow a little from their original programming now that they are living. And they aren’t without virtues in their own ways. They see each other as a family and, at times, mimic their original creators in personality. They venerate Ainz as a god. From their perspective, he and the absent guild members are gods. The Supreme Beings, as the Guardians call them, created the Guardians and gave them everything. The veneration troubles Ainz, who wants the Guardians to become his equals and replace the camaraderie he enjoyed in the video game. But veneration becomes the chief virtue for the Guardians. All over actions do not matter, no matter how cruel, as long as they serve Ainz and the Nazarick family. Of course, they don’t view their actions as cruel. When they brutally torture the members of the Eight Fingers into servitude, the Guardians see it as a purification, as a virtue. Humans stand no better than insects to them.
Several of the Guardians enjoy more development time, such as Shalltear, Albedo, Cocytus, and Aura. Shalltear and Albedo love Ainz romantically. Albedo loves him because he tweaked her settings just before the video game went offline. This makes her love for him a source for discomfort because he knows Albedo has little choice. Shalltear, however, develops her love for him over time. Her affection wasn’t an original setting. She points to how the Guardians can change and stretch beyond their original programming. In typical anime-male style, Ainz feels uncomfortable about this romantic love and tends to avoid it. In a few scenes, he reciprocates, such as when he kisses (as much as a skeleton could kiss) Albedo on her cheek before she leaves on a diplomatic mission.
Ainz remains a villain. He can be kind to those who follow him, but he takes a hard, brutal line to everyone else. And he has the power to murder all resistance. As isekai power trips go, Ainz stands at the apex. Only other players, his Guardians, and world items pose a true threat. The story underlines his cruelty by developing a few adventurers over a few episodes, sketching their personalities, loves, and stories. Then, a few episodes later, they are killed by Ainz and the Guardians. Usually, anime doesn’t spend time developing characters destined to die. Other dark fantasy like Goblin Slayer fall into this problem. The deaths become another bit of fodder, a tool to underline brutality or evil. But this method falls short compared to Overlord‘s method of taking a little time to make a connection between the audience and the characters destined to die. All characters are tools, but their effectiveness varies based on how well the audience connects. Even brief sketches Overlord uses works well to show the darkness of Ainz and the Guardians, which, in turn, shows the bright spots of their kindness, love, and virtues. This makes them more horrifying too. Ainz’s seat-of-the-pants bumbling, for example, makes his planned brutality even worse, but his behavior also underlines his kindness toward the Guardians and his glimmers of kindness toward Carne.
The Gamer Mentality Toward NPCs
Ainz’s brutality toward humanity reflects the gamer mentality toward NPCs. I’m a real-time strategy gamer. Compared to the religious and cultural genocides I’ve committed in Total War, wiping millions of NPCs from the games, Ainz is a lightweight murderer. Ainz is no RTS gamer. His strategy remains a simple carrot and stick approach, and he acts in the moment. As the series progresses, he often says to himself, “That’s a problem for future Ains to deal with.” This offers a fair bit of humor to an otherwise dark story and makes me facepalm as a long-time video game strategist. Ainz’s blase attitude toward death, other than a few off-hand musings, shows the gamer mentality. Overlord quietly explores the question: what if NPCs are real people? Ainz comes to this conclusion with the Guardians and a few other side characters like Enri, but over all, he retains his disconnect to non-playable characters.
Overlord doesn’t directly deal with this question, but it points toward this gamer thinking made me wonder about the future of NPCs. In the near future, large-language models and other artificial intelligence will be used to power NPCs in video games. This brings up the question of sentience. While right now these systems stand far from sentience, we struggle to put a finger on sentience in the first place. Some people don’t believe animals are as sentient as humans are. Sentience, in other words, has levels. AI systems simulate animal-like sentience. Poorly as of this article, but with increasing abilities. You don’t know if I’m sentient. You can read my words or, if you know me in person, observe my conduct. But you can’t know if there’s a ghost in the shell. All you can see is the exterior. We trust or conclude other humans are sentient because they are human, and we have an unexplainable ability to recognize sentience at different levels. While it’s not scientific, awareness seems to recognize itself. But you cannot know this with the certainty you know your own sentience. You can’t climb into another’s head and see their awareness. So too with the black box of “intelligent” machines. The difference comes down to blood and bioelectrics versus silicon and software. So if you deem an NPC that’s powered by an intelligent system as sentient, killing that NPC in a game could carry moral implications. Overlord points toward this question with how it contrasts Ainz’s gamer callousness toward the humanity of the characters he kills or has killed. We step into the definitions of life and consciousness. Overlord doesn’t dwell on these questions. It’s not Ghost in the Shell. But the story nudges and winks at gamers, encouraging them to think a bit about their own murderous behavior.
The Over-Powered Trip
Isekai stories focus more on the question of how than on if. Most stories play with both questions. If the hero is to rise to this challenge, how will they? With the overpowered nature, god-like abilities of most isekai protagonists, how becomes more important. We already know they will succeed. These stories are power fantasies with little chance for failure. Of course, not all isekai stories feature this. Inuyasha, Konosuba, Mushoku Tensei, and similar stories fall closer to traditional fantasy stories. They still have if as a feature. Overlord centers entirely on the how. There’s no if with how powerful Ainz and the Guardians are. Only another player and the suggestion that other “gods” like Ainz have appeared and died in the world’s past add ifs to the story. Stories like Overlord don’t rely on suspense. Isekai rely instead on interest and characterization. Ainz and the Guardians remain interesting with their behavior and gray-to-black morality. They offer slow character development with Shalltear offering the most, and most interesting, development arc.
Over-powered stories like Overlord offer catharsis. There’s a certain pleasure in watching a villain strong-arming the world to kneel to him. As an RTS gamer and as a writer, that’s what I do. While it’s all harmless fun in the end, such catharsis makes me ponder my own mentality. Fiction isn’t reality, but fiction acts as a mirror for your subconscious. Fiction also feeds your thinking.
Overlord offers an entertaining dark fantasy. It doesn’t offer a lot of depth despite what I’ve discussed, but there’s also more chipmunk-brained entertainment fare out there. Ainz stands, perhaps, as the strongest isekai character in one of the power-trippiest power-trip stories.
