Audience reviews
20 · Sample from the first available page, separate from the total number of ratings.
KatsumataJ
Shangri-La Frontier, a show that levels with you.
This was actually a surprisingly enjoyable watch. I don't really have anything bad to say about it. It has strong character identity, amazing animation, good fights, a great story, and the MC is a birdman. I mean, what more could you honestly ask for?
This show was great for me as a consumer. It really holds your hand as you go through it, and honestly, for the style of the show, that fit really well. It doesn't give you more information than you need, but it also doesn't slack off on information that you do need. Everything feels like it's explained at the right time without making the show feel overly complicated.
The main cast is quite enjoyable to watch. Arthur, Sunraku, and OiKatzo are all great, and even Emul is amazing. Their dyna…
Read at the sourcesajatusernamem
A story of a young man laying in his bed and talking to himself. The show doesnt frame the main VR game theme in any kind of real life struggle. There are no stakes, merely an otaku completely immersing himself in surrogate activities, paying no mind to the actual world around him. Would I be like him if I had access o such a perfect form of escapism? How long would it take before I got utterly weary of consuming media and games, no matter how finely crafted they might be, and how finetuned they are to my tastes?
The MC interacts with some of his friends from other games in the same way as his NPC companions. Truly these AIs have passed the turing test. This brings to mind philosophical questions about consciousness and the simulation hypothesis, but protag-kun or the show doesnt care abo…
Read at the sourceowidx_123
Quick review no spoilers:
Overall a low 7/10
It's a fun background watch imo. The story is probably one of the most captivating aspects to Shangri-La. But my god do some scenes drag on way too long with little plot development.
It's like someone who has never played an mmo made this. So many frustrating things occur like how Sunroku somehow discovers things within less than a month that others who are supposedly 'top tier gamers' can't figure out. Not to mention the over dramatics of certain deaths which are just... re-spawns. Another frustrating aspect has to be the power of the main Protagonist - it's absolutely all over the place. He pulls out random things from nowhere, with a random explanation, and it's never to be seen again, but struggles with certain bosses that are meant to be…
Read at the sourceLemonadeSamurai
Recommended viewing experience- Dub
Shangri La Frontier is a great time, it isn't like Dot Hack or Sword Art where there is an impending doom or the players are trapped.
The players are just logged in and enjoying their time in the game. The main character is genuinely a dude obsessed with trash games who tries a good game for once and gets hooked
The anime is a Shonen comedy, its pretty intense at times but there isn't any doom or dread because the characters can respawn if they die.
The animation is GORGEOUS and the action scenes are incredibly well animated and fluid
The cast is really likeable and interesting
The drawbacks however is the lack of interesting moments. They don't fight the main threat until the end of the season and even then, it isn't a main threat. They are do…
Read at the sourceLyceLyce
Banger series. When a great manga get a well made anime adaptations. Also, the author seems fully grasped the contents and the fun aspects in MMO games, unlike lots of other "gaming" anime series out there that much closer to an isekai than an actual "gaming" anime series. It's been a while that I fully enjoyed the gaming anime series, since Log Horizon season 1 (because LH fell off in the S2 and S3). The MC is overpowered, yeah, but still in the acceptable zone because he played trash and nearly impossible to clear games alot, also there's lots of him when he lose, train and retrying the challenges.
Read at the sourceSakshxm
Characters were nice.
Story was also good.
The premise was not the most original but it was actually better than mc getting stuck in the game.
Really liked the world building, was not emotionally invested until the wethermon arc, Mc is enjoyable to watch, animation is not one of my biggest concerns watching an anime but is was great, liked the artsyle, some people don't like emul but I didn't have any complaints.
Many things are still not explained probably for plot but i didn't really mind.
Some will consider mc to be OP but I don't think so, wethermon was a real struggle and it felt like it.
Hope they do some more explaining on the game world and the npcs in 2nd season.
Its a mid to high 7 for me.
Read at the sourceTea-O
Shangri-La Frontier is an anime I initially thought I would dislike. Between the main character and the fantasy video game setting, it didn’t immediately appeal to me. At first, I didn’t fully understand the scale of the world or the pacing, and the length of the series can feel intimidating since it requires some commitment.
However, once you stick with it, the story becomes genuinely satisfying to follow.
Through the video game setting, the anime gradually introduces a rich universe filled with side stories, secondary quests, and parallel adventures. I slowly got drawn into the narrative and found it surprisingly faithful to the real feeling of playing a game: exploration, progression, discovery, and constant improvement.
I won’t make an overly long analysis because overall, I simply…
Read at the sourceAndroidVL2
Extremely fun anime
The animation and art style are very well done, especially in the fights, highlighting the vibrant clash of blows between Sunraku and Wethermon.
The story is quite normal, a romance separate from the game but nothing special. In any case, the interesting thing is to follow the protagonist and his friends defeating the unique monsters and leveling up in the game.
Funny characters with good synergy between them, especially Emul, who makes an extremely funny duo with Sunraku. In terms of writing, the characters aren't anything special; they don't have much to lose due to the anime's structure, etc., so their actions aren't that significant.
Anyway, a super fun anime, I highly recommend giving it a chance.
Read at the sourceAntonyAV
In Shangri-La Frontier we follow Rakuro (Sunraku in-game), a gaming pro in a world where VR is able to almost imitate reality to perfection, and NPCs are intelligent and believable, while he's an fan of glitchy, buggy, trash games, he gets caught up in the "god-tier" game that is taking the gaming world by storm: Shangri-La Frontier.
The story centers mainly on Sunraku's adventure as he takes on this MMORPG-like VR game in an unusual way due to both his main experience being with glitchy games and his one-of-a-kind skills, being able to do incredible feats even while being a newbie. There's a big focus on action, and while the animation isn't amazing, it is very well crafted, as is the sound design. I liked the first opening a lot. Even if all the OPs/EDs aren't my cup of tea, they do a g…
Read at the sourcequezgot
[ hood review ]
Yerrrrr, wats hatnen , first off I want to say this anime is rated pretty high and I don’t see the reason don’t get me wrong. It’s a decent anime, but I don’t see the hype behind it.
The one thing this anime is missing is that sense of urgency the sense of eminent death it doesn’t have that in this anime when you die you just kinda respawn. Yeah you might lose your weapons or lose the battle or lose your progress but it doesn’t give a sense of urgency, the sense of death the other anime give.
Other than that, the lore of the anime is fantastic. It does make you want to see what happens next probably the best Lore in an anime I’ve seen in a while. It’s definitely a modern anime with modern anime graphics and modern humor. I give it a 7.5.
Read at the sourceLycanhunt3r
The moment I heard that triple-A games meant god-tier and made with passion, I should've realized I was up for a superficial storytelling with only good looks to back it up.
Most of it feels like watching someone play a random MMORPG with a glass-cannon character that can die in one hit; though somewhat cool action-wise, it's not that impressive when most of the 18-minute-ish episodes are filled with a bunch of thrown-in-your-face concepts to explain the combat and the grinding, all while having little to no real strategy that the average gamer can relate to. It is just a bunch of blabbering on how "this" weapon can do "this" exactly when "that" happens and I activate "this" skill to make "this" move, and I win. There's no weight to it, no risk of losing anything, no creativity, no palpab…
Read at the sourceNinjaKidKat2
Shangri-La Frontier may be one of the weirdest shows I've watched so far.
The animation is really good, the world-building inside of the game world is good, I like the characters a lot...
But the lack of significant stakes pretty drastically hurts the story so far.
While I was never bored watching the show, I was waiting for some scene to happen where all of the previous events get recontextualized to be actually important, and there was one scene in particular where I hoped to finally get that moment, but as the season ended I ultimately left confused. The reason why the main characters do what they do can mostly be described by one phrase, that being "I want to enjoy the game and find out everything about it". All of the consequences to characters failing are exclusively to their own e…
Read at the sourceElaestu
Shangri-La Frontier is an anime similar to Sword Art Online, set in a world of highly advanced virtual reality games.
First, I will start with the positives:
The animation is surprisingly solid.
The C2C studio, which is also responsible for Tsukimichi: Moonlit Fantasy, achieves fluid animation with well-choreographed battles and a brilliant use of colour. The effects in the fights against unique bosses, such as Wethermon, are impressive.
Now it's time to talk about the negatives:
Irregular pace. There are episodes where the story gets bogged down in explanations about game mechanics or side missions. While they contribute to worldbuilding, they can feel like narrative grinding.
Lack of emotional weight.
The focus is almost entirely on the game. Relationships outside of VR (for exampl…
Read at the sourceMache9
From the first episodes you can easily tell the source material is a novel, this is because of the incredible amount of chatter you're subjected to at the beginning, and it stays that way throughout the whole series which is meant to enhance the immersion, providing details of the world and its characters. This is something good as a concept when we consider these details were part of the original novel and some of these are portrayed in an excellent, meaningful manner (that forge scene), but most adaptations don't really know how to "translate" the details from the novels into anime and present them correctly, especially when most of these are jackshit that is not interesting or not that relevant to the story and ultimately fails in making the viewer invested and interested in the story.…
Read at the sourceAeroGunz
“Shangri-La Frontier” is what happens when you hire Ubisoft writers to write your anime.
For an anime that has a score of 8 I was surprised how boring and pointless this whole show actually is. There is no real story in it, only plot. Not even a good plot, the most basic thing you could think of when thinking about a shounen spiced up with cheap pop culture references.
Before we start I would like to explain something. I will be talking about “plot” and “story”. Many people use those terms interchangeably. I’m not one of those people, so to make sure everyone is on the same page…
I use the definitions for “plot” and “story” as Lisa Cron describes them:
“What happens in the story is the PLOT, the surface events.”
“STORY is about how the things that happen affect someone in pursuit of a…
Read at the source1stDecame4Danime
This is a sincere comedy(noncomedy) joke of a videogame VR (generic shitty kiddy isekai) series. It could've at least been a self-aware parody of this shit like Bofuri was, but it is far too braindead for that. The bar is literally on the floor. This is at the level of Fruit of Evolution in pretty much every way.
Pure brain-damaging exposition dialogue. Constantly explaining basic videogame terms like PKing like a special children's education show. Generic slop art/animation. Generic slop nonstory. Generic slop noncharacters. Generic slop videogame world. And the real life aspect it periodically returns to is pointless filler devoid of anything let alone plot. Joke of a virgin's self-insert fantasy of boring nonromance of some perfect noncharacter classmate girl who has never spoken to yo…
Read at the sourceKimuraTheHatoru
Honestly when i heard this to be an anime inside of a game i was skeptical... Since getting that right is quite difficult and all. But this anime does the whole game dwelling part pretty flawlessly i'd say.The game mechanics are sown well into the show overall.
The world's quite well built, the story inside that game is intresting ,and the way the MC gets into these unique scenarios simply makes sense in the world's context. After all SLF is sold this well because it's a well made and it appeals to a casual audience,and those casuals would never think the way a degen like MC does. Although making him like the only guy who thinks out of the box is.... iffy in the best of circumstances.
And since we are talking about the MC imma adress my only gripe: the characters. The supposed humans in…
Read at the sourceolokinprime
A web novel turned manga, turned anime that subverts expectations of similar stories of the fantasy genre in the video game milieu.
I read the manga first, then dived into the anime when I ran out of chapters to binge.
No harem, just stories centered around the main characters' gameplay. No ikemen main leads, the main character's avatar with the bird head's mask is the anti-Kirito. SAO and SLF may be both VR immersive games with dual wielding main characters, but that is where the similarities end.
It is a fantasy series with a lot of action, not like That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime Season 3 season three which disappointed it viewers by being mostly series of meeting that could have been emails.
It is an anime with a decent sized production budget, with great voice acting, and…
Read at the sourceJadedJorj
Absolutely in love with this series. The world-building is rich, the characters are full of personality, and the MC, Sunraku, is chaotic in the best quirky way possible. As someone who adores isekai but has been burned more than once (cough SAO cough), Shangri-La Frontier feels like a breath of fresh air.
What really makes this series stand out is that it doesn’t rely on the usual “I got hit by Truck-kun and now I’m a god in another world” formula. Instead, it drops us into a fully fleshed-out VR game world, and it respects the rules of its universe. The stakes feel high not because the world is ending, but because every boss fight matters to the characters—and by extension, to me as a viewer and an avid MMO player myself.
The pacing is also a standout. Every episode flows into the next…
Read at the sourceConflagr8
A refreshing take on the "videogames in anime" genre that actually uses the medium of video games as an important, interesting, and relevant piece of the setting rather than mere window dressing. This show doubles down on the videogame side of things, and it succeeds; in part, this show feels like one that was actually made by people who play videogames and know the shenanigans that players tend to get up to.
Instead of simply using the videogame setting as a shortcut, SLF uses the game setting and the presence of an in-universe community to enhance the show's worldbuilding. Be it bug hunting, glitch exploiting, spinning a bunch of abilities together to create broken combos, casuals struggling through low level content, or a guild that obsessively collects cute animals, this is the first…
Read at the source
