Overgeared ‒ Episodes 1-4
A lot of that humor comes down to our “hero,” Grid, who is simultaneously one of the show's biggest strengths or greatest deterrents depending on your point of view. Compared to a lot of other protagonists from this genre who tend to be either milquetoast nice guys or the coolest person in the room, Grid just kinda sucks. He leeches off his family, frequently spends all his money on in-game expenses, and is only really playing the show's central MMO, Satisfy, in the hopes of striking it rich. All this combined with an ocean's worth of narcissism makes him pretty unlikeable on the whole, but it's also those same traits that make him a lot more fun to watch than a standard self-insert. He's so utterly shameless in his desires that all his antics circle around to being hilarious, and this is aided in no small part by Ricco Fajardo's delivery in the dub. He genuinely sounds like he's having the time of his life, and his punched-up dialogue adds a lot to the overall charm of his performance. I tend not to be big on dubs going in too hard with extra humor, but it all meshes pretty well with the show's existing tone, and it complements it more than it detracts.
The other secret spice to this show's humor is that despite the implications of its premise, it's not too heavy of a power fantasy (or at least not nearly as much of one as Grid would like it to be). Sure, Grid might have stumbled upon a legendary blacksmithing class within a couple of minutes of his introduction, but he's far from the only powerful individual within the space of this game, and his encounters with any higher-level opponents almost always go poorly. Even the act of acquiring his new class is followed up by him dying and dropping his character level into the negatives, which basically sets the mood for this show's comedy. No matter how many new exploits and sets of gear Grid's skills may offer him, he's never too far from having a run of bad luck or bad decisions lead him right back to square one. It's all pretty hilarious, and having so much constant pushback against him allows Grid to work as a solid heel, rather than coming off as insufferable.
This is best exemplified in the most recent arc where Grid finds himself in the middle of a dispute between some NPC blacksmiths and a greedy businessman looking to take their forges for himself. Despite Grid managing to beat a top-level player in a crafting contest and clearing a new hidden quest set up by the developers, he winds up with little to show for his efforts. The contest ends up being cut short well before he has any chance to wow a crowd with his skills, and any riches he might have gained for clearing the quest vanish when the guy who promised them gets arrested for aiding in this whole conspiracy. It's a pretty great punchline to this whole affair, and if we're going to get any similarly lengthy subplots in the future, I can only hope that the outcomes are just as funny
All that humor could risk getting stale if Grid was the only point in this show's favor, but thankfully it does have a little more going for it. The whole angle of Satisfy being popular enough for success in the game to lead to success in real life doesn't seem the most well thought out, but it does at least flesh out the world a little bit, and does add to Grid's obsession with wanting to rise to the top. It's also interesting to see how the game's developers monitor pretty much every player's actions. While this aspect of the show is played largely straight, it does some unintentionally disturbing implications about the extent to which they end up being used as guinea pigs for testing dangerous new features (having a guy subject himself to 72 hours of mental torture to get a second job class seems like a design choice that should have gotten them all arrested), so I hope the show gets as much use out of it as possible. I also hope that the show grows a bit more of a supporting cast, as the only other players we've so far spent a lot of time with are a guy named Huroi who can manipulate NPCs through dialog choices, and a girl named Euphemina who mainly specializes in stealing other people's skills. Only the latter has really added much to the show's comedy, but the fact that Euphemina is just as crass and self-serving as Grid gives them some solid comedy chemistry that I'd like to see more of. So far, all these elements have come together to make Overgeared a surprisingly solid action comedy. While not every joke lands (the gay-panic jokes with the blacksmiths), it nails them well enough to make this show more than the sum of its parts.
Rating:
Overgeared is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.
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