Overlord Review: The One Where You Root for the Villain, and Then He Massacres a City

The villain's seat

Overlord follows Momonga, a lonely office worker whose only real friendships lived inside an MMO guild, staying logged in for the final minutes before his aging game's servers shut down, surrounded by the guild hall he and his long-departed friends built, and the NPCs they lovingly authored. The servers close. He doesn't log out. And he wakes inside his skeletal Overlord character in a new world, where the NPCs his friends created are alive, sapient, and worship him as their creator. Taking the guild's name, Ainz Ooal Gown, he sets out to learn where he ranks in this world, whether anyone else crossed over, and how to keep the closest thing he has left to family safe.

What makes this series singular is simple and rare: you are reading the bad guy's story. Not an antihero, the villain. Ainz conquers, executes, and orders atrocities, and the author has said outright that the harsher chapters from the human perspective exist because readers kept forgetting to stop rooting for him. That authorial honesty shows in the design: as an undead, Ainz's strong emotions are automatically suppressed, his morality wintering away with them, and his famous benevolence toward conquered subjects is pure practicality, happy workers produce, unhappy ones don't, applied by a man whose governing instincts come from middle management. He treats an empire like a company and dissent like a budget line. When he massacres a city purely so the next one surrenders faster, you understand exactly how he got there, and that understanding is the horror and the pleasure at once, because everything he does flows from love of his people and nothing else.

The Floor Guardians and the wider NPC cast are the other pillar: monstrous races only, every design distinct, all fanatically loyal to Ainz and none carrying a shred of human morality, viewing outsiders as somewhere below cattle. Watching Ainz rein in creatures who consider torture a hobby, using authority he privately worries he doesn't deserve, generates half the series' best material.

The flaws, honestly

Three, in rising order. First, the translation tax: word reuse and flattened prose, familiar from every imported series, though milder here than Solo Leveling's.

Second, the theory-crafting bloat. Ainz is a tactician and the author is clearly a systems lover, so you get long inner monologues cataloguing spell evolutions, testing assumptions about how game rules translated, explaining character-build decisions like his mage-to-melee hybrid switch. In small doses it's genuinely interesting, the game design underneath is thoughtful, but the world's lore caps almost everyone below level 78 while Ainz sits at 100, so most of this analysis decorates fights whose outcomes were never in doubt. Pages of preparation for problems his raw level already solved.

Third, and related: the later books drag. The engine of the drag is Nazarick's power-hiding doctrine, Ainz and his subordinates deliberately fighting at the natives' expected tiers to conceal their ceiling, which stretches encounters a single spell could end across chapter after chapter. The Sacred Kingdom arc is a genuine high point, two books of story-first momentum with the cast at its best, but the arcs after it spend enormous time building up adversaries whose confrontations then get excessively drawn out. The series' fundamental bet, that watching an untouchable being maneuver is as fun as watching a contested fight, pays off far more often than it should, and still not always.

Verdict

Worth the credit. A-low. The premise remains one of one, the villain's-perspective execution is the best I've encountered, and the cast around Ainz carries even the slower stretches. What keeps it out of the S tier is the pacing debt of the late books and exposition that outweighs its stakes. Format note, same as my Solo Leveling guidance: the anime is a strong, heavily condensed on-ramp, and the books restore the interiority, all of Ainz's anxious, middle-manager inner life, that makes the character work. If you've ever wanted to root for the dungeon boss and be periodically reminded why you shouldn't, this is the series that does it on purpose.