After the Flander’s Company phenomenon, the NO Life channel brought us another original series produced by amateurs full of goodwill and good ideas. It is therefore logical that Kaze in turn offers it to us.
This series plunges us right into the world of MMORPGs (online role-playing games, it’s clear!) And shares with us the galleys of a noob guild (pejorative term designating newcomers who are cruelly lacking in experience) …
Clearly this is a series made for geeks who will find their way around and miss no reference, and yet god knows there are plenty of them. But you don’t have to be a geek to enjoy this series, thing, you don’t even have to have any knowledge of the MMORPG world, everything is sufficiently explicit, and anyway there is a quirky side that will speak to everyone.
In all honesty, we remain a little skeptical in front of the first episodes: certainly the references and the vocabulary are there, the universe is reproduced, it is credible, and despite the amateur side which emerges from it, we quickly observe a will and a realization which turns out to be of quality… except that it is not funny! We follow the first episodes without really knowing where the creators of the series want to take us … other than the references, we are not really having fun. But very stupid the one who does not go further! We end up getting caught up in the game, and the more we advance the more humor is present (or the more it hits the mark), the stories are more elaborate, longer, more worked … in short, we let ourselves be carried away in this imagined world intelligently.
One of the big assets of the series is its coherence… all the episodes follow one another and form a whole. The universe is growing, we discover game masters, a hacker, cheaters, merchants, insurmountable quests, bosses, level up … everything that makes the MMORPG!
We have been talking about references from the start, but what are they? They are many and varied, the extremely open universe of this world allows us to insert things that are a priori anachronistic. In addition to the different classes, references to RPGs, we also find Lord of the Rings (necessarily), Pirates of the Caribbean, and even Predator!
The music itself is references, it is taken from anime, games … Secret of Mana, Suikoden … enough to satisfy the most geek of us.
Despite the obvious amateur side of this series, we feel a lot of work and the particular care that is given to it. The actors, who are not at the origin, are overall convincing, and above all it really gives the impression of having fun, in fact we excuse the positing side, the excess and the over-playing of some.
In the bonus department, we are served and rather largely! The second DVD is full of them. We find cross overs with the team of Flander’s Company, the first episodes of the series having preceded Noob (in a totally different register … it seems clear that humor passes much more easily than seriousness, in particular with means amateurs), and a number of interviews with the various protagonists of the series, who are still surprised at the (deserved) success they are having.
In short, a premium supplement that goes perfectly with the series and which extends the adventure a little more.
A really nice series that will appeal to everyone and whose growing success it is enjoying reflects its quality well!
