Crossover With Non-anime Series Fan Fiction ❯ Terdwilicker's Anime Reviews ❯ Log Horizon ( Chapter 31 )

Log Horizon is a mystery story disguised as the lighter version of Sword Art Online. Instead of battle royale and deaths for everyone, you get reincarnated at the church of your choice, but with a few memories missing. The story begins with characters logged into their favorite VR game when new content comes online. And they can't logout. But nobody dies, so its less creepy. There's still adventures to do, and guilds, and a cute ninja girl who might be a girl in RL or a gigantic guy who enjoys playing a girl online. We don't know, it's a mystery. 

The other mystery of the show is the memory loss which comes with successive deaths. And the gradual self-awareness of NPCs, who CAN die just the once, and are risking everything, including one who pretends to be a player because he admires them so much. During the course of several seasons the NPCs become self aware and object to these players running around, rudely going through their drawers, and demanding coins for quests or magic items just lying around in the treasury. 

They never finished this story. After 10 years they actually did a new season, though that didn't finish the story either. My personal theory is this: when the new content dropped it made AI copies of every single player's mind and put them on their server. This is why they can't logout. Its the copy that's playing, not the person. And they are such good copies they don't realize they're AIs. And the bigger mystery is their server was probably a backup and turned off when the online game company went under, went into some bunker, and survived the extinction of humans some millenia in the future. Then aliens, or mutated humans, or AI robots, find the server and try to communicate with the people inside after working out how to get it to work, but they lack language because higher order beings or something. So they run the game and try to sort-of communicate after players die, bringing them to the moon, as a message, and fail with each of them, but snag some memories from the AI code at the time, along with the memory of the moon, then reincarnate them back in the game none the wiser, but missing a few rare memories, which if you're missing them you might not realize it since you are your brain. They never explicitly reveal this in the anime, but it is strongly implied by the above circumstances. 

It think it is a much more interesting story than Sword Art Online.