I was left with two, conflicting thoughts as I finished up this volume: Mamare Touno seems to have an interesting “solution” in mind for the end of this series and “Mamare Touno has no idea what he’s doing and he’s stalling for time until he does.”
This second statement may be a rather harsh assessment. But, after spending volume 9 following around a completely different cast in a different part of the world (useful and interesting to the reader but ultimately too long), spending at least half of volume 8 with the side cast instead of the main cast (good character development but meant that the “main” plot took a bit of a backseat), and both volumes 6 and 7 focused on only part of the cast, I felt like we haven’t had a real “story” in quite a while. The entire Log Horizon guild is back together for volume 10 but the story still spends what feels like a third of it focusing on an outside character, Issac from the roundtable, and honestly? This viewpoint felt especially pointless; I don’t mind when we get third party viewpoints for short segments but this went on way longer than was needed (for either character development or plot movement) and frankly, Log Horizon already has so many minor and side characters that I would have much rather seen that time spent revisiting with some of them (especially since it has been quite a while since we checked in with some of them, like Raynesia).
So, the story seems to keep stalling for time but at the same time, the main plot of the story remains fairly interesting. With the knowledge that there are aliens also in this world, and the reader guessing that they are probably the reason why so many people got stuck in this video-game-like world, Shiroe and the others are really beginning to have to confront the fact that there may be a way out of this world and who among them wants to actually leave and who wants to stay. The main conflict in this volume is that some of the cast think that an old radio station could probably put them in touch with the Moon (which is where the aliens seem to be based) but it has coincidentally turned into a raid zone and with the alien, genius-level monsters involved it’s easily one of the toughest fights anyone has had so far.
If this plot sounds familiar then yes, this is where the anime wrapped up its second season so we still haven’t reached any truly new material in the story yet. As for when we might get to that, well, it could be a bit. This volume, volume 10, was first published in Japan on September 30, 2015 (after the second season of the anime finished airing) but volume 11 was only published just last month. Touno is the type of author who releases his works in chunks as web novels (which are later edited for the official, print editions) so it’s clear that he’s been working all this time but none of the other volumes have had such large gaps between them.
This is another reason why I’m worried that he’s floundering and honestly it makes me nervous for future installments. So far Log Horizon has been a pretty neat “trapped in a video game” story that really examines how the video game logic would translate and people really need to survive (which is basically society, I think they were even discussing a universal basic income in this volume!). It would be a shame if such a solid story falters in its later acts but now I’m worried. Hopefully we won’t have nearly as long to wait for volume 11 as the Japanese readers did and I’ll be keeping my fingers crossed that Log Horizon continues to take a unique, but logical, look at how the world and people work.