The Leadale anime is... really good when it's on point and sort of "meh" when it's not.
For those of you unfamiliar with the series (novels, manga, and now *finally* anime), Leadale was one of the earlier trendsetters for the whole isekai-into-an-MMO thing. As I recall, it came out around the same time the original SAO did... and took the idea in a very different direction.
It even got its fair share of imitators. You may be familiar with one of them, which basically tried to do something similar to Leadale, only darker and edgier: Overlord.
The basic premise is roughly parallel: Leadale is a popular MMO, Keina is one of the top players... only she's a prototype of SAO's Sleeping Knights, and is so high-ranked in the game because she's playing from a hospital bed while on life support. Then there's a power outage, her life support fails, and she finds herself in the bed of an inn, in the body of her in-game self, not far from her guild base... two hundred years after the time-period depicted in the game.
And now she has to live with all the various decisions she made as an MMO player... only in real life. To give you one example: those three NPCs she took in via the game's foster system and designated as her children? Yeah, they now are
very much loving characters who've worked their way into important positions... and who
really view Keina (a 16-year-old virgin) as their mother.
This is also despite the fact that one of them is a dwarf... and Keina is a single, unattached elf. Any issues with this are handwaved away the same way they would be in an MMO, even though the series itself does almost everything it can to rub our faces in it. She also set their descriptions to what she thought was funny at the time... only, well...
The first of her kids she reunites with is said dwarf, Kartatz, who's become the head of a shipbuilding company.
This is how it initially goes.
When she visits Mai-Mai, who's become the head of the local magic academy, lead there by one of the students (who she's befriended)...
this happens.
When Skargo (the oldest) "finds out" that his "mother" is sick (she isn't -- she's just depressed because of something she found out), he... well.
Here.
And yes, the special effects are really happening with Skargo. It's a plot point. Keina gave him a special effects skill in the game, you see...
Like I said, the anime's somewhat hit or miss, although its "miss" is more "meh" than suck. Specifically, the original tends to zig-zag between genres (those who remember Slayers will have some idea of the concept, although Leadale does it between different genres and in a very different style), and the animation team really didn't seem to "get" that, instead treating it as a straight comedy.
Still a rec -- because when it's good, it's
good.
