While the Round Table of Akihabara is planning an assault on the stronghold of a fearsome genius-level monster, Krusty, leader of DDD, one of the strongest combat-focused guilds in Akihabara, is sitting on top of a mountain on the Chinese server and teasing the martenfolk who are looking after him. While he’s sitting pretty, Kanami, former organizer of the Debauchery Tea Party, is making her way towards that very mountain as well so that she can fulfill a very important side quest and obtain a fluffy wolf mount to pet.
Volume 11 marks the first volume of Log Horizon material that wasn’t adapted into the first two seasons of the anime, although it won’t remain that way for long since the third season of the anime is currently scheduled to premiere in October. This also might be the last volume we see for a while: Mamare Touno is an author who first publishes his stories online before releasing a print edition (with some revisions I believe) and while there are 13 web novels, as far as I can tell volume 11 was also the last print volume released in Japan (although the title for the third anime season matches up with the title of the 12th web volume, so presumably the wait for a print edition of volume 12 in Japan won’t be terribly long at this point).
I find all of this a tad ironic since volume 11, Krusty, Tycoon Lord isn’t technically speaking the next chronological installment in the series; rather this volume directly follows the events of volume 9, with Kanami and her merry band making their way across all of Eurasia on foot and how they and Krusty ended up where they were at the end of volume 10. So it’s been all these years since the end of the second season of the anime and yet we still haven’t truly progressed in the story yet!
Truthfully I am a little puzzled why Touno has chosen to backtrack on this. It’s true that he did need to finally explain what happened to Krusty when he was caught in some friendly fire several volumes back and just how Kanami and her group both met up with Krusty and ended up in the broadcast room that Shiroe connected to at the end of volume 10 (the answer is, as is typical for Kanami, “by sheer accident”). The rest of the volume is padded out with a bit of world building about how the game “Elder Tales” functions on the Chinese server and with a little bit of movement on the Genius-type monsters (i.e. aliens) aspect but again, not much happens on that plot-critical front either.
The part about how events are handled differently on the Chinese server was interesting in the moment, since China is physically so big (and the world of the game is “half the size” of the real world), instead of having many little dungeons the programmers set up regular guild wars for the players to participate in, which is rather different from what we’ve seen on the Japanese server. However, after finishing the novel, I was left wondering why this unique approach was used on just the Chinese server when the US, Brazil, Canada, Russia, and Australia are all also of similar size and would run into the same problem of event density. I suspect the answer is “Touno didn’t think about that” (just like how he didn’t think about giving the US server only five player towns, the exact same as Japan despite it’s huge different in size and population), but it’s still going to bug me.
I do hope that the scale of Log Horizon hasn’t gotten too large for Touno to handle. I’ve gotten the impression that the story is close to entering a “final arc” but with the constant introduction of new characters it’s hard to tell. Internet rumors say that Touno has up to volume 16 planned and to be clear I would be completely fine with this series running for that long or longer. By this point Touno’s writing feels comfortable, there’s a good balance of character moments and plot advancement, the fight scenes are both easy to follow and don’t drag out, and the setting is fun too. I’ve previously said many of the same things about the Baccano! light novel series and I wonder if the fact that these two series share a translator, Taylor Engel, plays any factor in this.
Regardless, while this was a “fluffier” volume of Log Horizon, it was still a fun read and I hope that the wait for the next volume isn’t terribly long.