Log Horizon: The West Wind Brigade

tl;dr: A spin-off with another perspective on a great story, but one that doesn’t really add much to it. Log Horizon is a light novel series about a group of players of the MMORPG Elder's Tale that mysteriously wake up in the world of the game as their avatars with no way to return. This manga is a spin off of Log Horizon that focuses on Soujirou and his guild, The West Wing Brigade, a guild that’s often referred to as a harem guild due to the fact that the guild master is a guy but the rest of the members are all essentially girls. Despitethat, this really didn’t feel like a harem manga at all. The standard harem type cast structure is there in terms of the male/female ratio. However, it really doesn’t have a harem like atmosphere at all, rather it felt like the whole harem aspect is only used for gags. There really isn’t any romance or romantic fluff in the manga at all. It more so embodies standard shounen tropes surrounding friendship and such, just with the group of friends being a group of girls centered around a guy. This manga is pretty good at showing this group dynamic at times, but overall character wise it felt pretty weak. The guild supposedly has 64 members, but only like 8 of them have any presence. Furthermore, it didn’t really feel like it fleshed out any of them all that well, with what little there was in terms of attempts at character arcs being pretty lackluster. The characters it handles best are actually characters outside of the guild, mainly Magus, who have some really good moments, but they simple aren’t present enough. Plot wise it also wasn’t particularly strong. This manga fleshes out and gives background to certain aspects of the main story, but in the grand scheme of things these don’t really seem be all that substantial. For example, it shows what happened in Akiba while Shiroe, the protagonist of the main story, and his party were away rescuing a girl named Serara. It turns out that Soujirou was involved in the deterioration of conditions in Akiba that occurred in the main story. However, ultimately as in the main plot, Shiroe is still the one that resolves things once he returns, so it basically just shows that from a new perspective without really adding anything to it. That’s ultimately the case with most all of the plot. The main story is set up such that The West Wing Brigade and Soujirou are constantly present so this spin off can’t just have them off doing something completely unrelated, but at the same time the main story doesn’t have them doing all that much. So this manga basically just shows them hanging around while every so often switching perspectives to the characters from the main story that are moving things forward, mainly Shiroe. The plot and world building of Log Horizon are strong enough that even this somewhat bizarrely structured and often rushed telling still comes across pretty well. But it isn’t as well told as in the main story, and it doesn’t really feel like this manga is contributing all that much that isn’t already in the main story. If the manga had gotten as far as the Fallen Guardian arc, then I think it could have done something more substantial as the West Wind Brigade actually has a strong presence there and in its aftermath so there was potential to go more in depth into things the main story glossed over. But while the manga does heavily start building up to this arc in the final volumes, the manga ends before it actually gets to it, and the ending overall wasn’t all that satisfying as it just kind of stops at a point that doesn’t leave much of an impression. The art is fine. The designs are nice and the style can look pretty great, especially in the color pages, but most of the time it doesn’t seem to be using it all that well. The translation felt solid enough judging solely by the English prose. It should be noted though that the terminology is inconsistent with the terminology used elsewhere, such as Overskills being referred to as Mysteries.