Shangri-La Frontier: Kusoge Hunter, Kamige ni Idoman to su
シャングリラ・フロンティア～クソゲーハンター、神ゲーに挑まんとす～
Second year high school student Rakurou Hizutome is interested in one thing only: finding "shitty games" and beating the crap out of them. His gaming skills are second to none, and no game is too bad for him to enjoy. So when he's introduced to the new VR game Shangri-La Frontier, he does what he does best—min-maxes and skips the prologue to jump straight into the action. But can even an expert gamer like Rakurou discover all the secrets that Shangri-La Frontier hides...?
I recently noticed that this anime is labelled to be adapting a manga, and not the web novel, which I was pretty sure came out before the manga, so I took to the web.
So this whole time I was under the assumption that the anime was based on the web novel as it came first, but no, from the articles I’ve read, the anime is based on the manga, WHICH was based on the web novel.
Which means, before anything else, the anime is technically an adaptation of the manga. That’s a really dumb way for me to be wrong, huh.
I wouldn’t have started watching this if my friend didn’t suggest it to me, and damn am I glad i did.
At first I felt like this show would be a classic “main character goes into VR game and is somehow esekai’d into the game” type anime, trying to make off with some of SAO’s popularity (years late), but honestly, I much prefer this show over SAO.
Shangri-La Frontier takes the SAO formula, and instead of overcooking it like [nearly] every esekai out there, the creators slow cooked it into the greatest fall-off-the-bone fulldive anime I’ve ever had.
In SAO the mc was thrown into a vr game and the show basically said “Okay, this world looks pretty, but there’s nothing else interesting about it except if you die in the game you die in real life.” Shangri-La Fronteir gives you a main character who isn’t locked into the vr game, and the anime plays through some plot points in other games, and our mc has, can you guess? ~real world interactions with other people~ crazy, right?
Not only that, but the world of Shangri-La is so well made, with a really well thought out lore that continues to build through the show in front of us, and our main [player] characters, with some very likeable npc characters. This show also includes the first time I’ve enjoyed listening to a character sing for three minutes.
Seriously, watch it.