Nazo no Kanojo X

A coming of age tale of two souls sharing an intimate emotional bond without the use of words. Akira Tsubaki went into a journey of discovery and change when a mysterious girl transfers into their school. Mikoto Urabe is a silent, unsociable, introverted girl of few words. Their bond started when Akira partook some of Mikoto's drool and ended up with a case of love sickness. Their relationship develops into a mature love as they went through a journey of discovering about each other. Mikoto begins to open up and be more sociable, while Akira became more sure of his feelings towards this mysterious girl that gave warmth to his life.

Although the series has a good standing as a romance-comedy, there are a few underlying elements that I think is kinda a bit...odd... or off.  First of all, there are all this talk about "real love" and "emotional bond", when the love sickness rooted from tasting...saliva? You might get this impresion at first, but their feelings for one another did blossom within the course of their relationship. Second, Mikoto wanted Akira to be faithful to her, while she goes out sampling out guys to share this bond with. This also goes far as insisting her feelings and thoughts should trump over her partner's. It took the insight of the girlfriend of Akira's best friend to make Mikoto think about Akira's feelings and thoughts. But things do get better farther along the story when Mikoto starts to take into consideration what Akira feels about the whole thing.

Oddly one-sided relationship tropes aside, I do get a bit queasy on the sharing saliva everyday as a prevention for fever induced love sickness thing. Throughout viewing this series, I got to think that this might be an ideal love-comedy thing to get into for those with light "bodily fluid" fetishes.

Log Horizon

As a "summoned to another world" subset series of the fantasy genre, its about a large population of players who found themselves suddenly living the MMORPG game...just like "Sword Art Online". But that's where the comparisons end.

Story wise, Log Horizon offers a more tactical approach in living in this fantasy game world, maybe because of the fact that the main protagonist of the series is a master tactician. The things and events around you are explained directly, instead of assuming the viewer already knows everything about the MMORPG world. This saves time in the development of the story or the character as there are many things to cover.

You also get involved in the machinations of political maneuvering and backdoor diplomacy without getting too much into the details of things that could end up as a boring scene. Its an action adventure with a greater scope in terms of the effects on their lives and on the new world that they are in, rather than a focusing on a cog that is moving along in the grand scheme of things. This, in my opinion, makes the story more appealing than the other "summoned to another world" series that I've seen so far. Along with the development of each character, the relations that they create along the way, elements come together that makes you want to see the story till the end.

The series scores average in terms of production and animation, so is the character design which is not that elaborate. But it does make it easier on the eyes when you watch the action scenes.