Review of Recovery of an MMO Junkie

The first half of Net-Juu no Susume, otherwise known as Recommendation of The Wonderful Virtual Life (Not Recovery of an MMO Junkie), was actually quite a joyous watch. Typically romance is a genre that lacks variety and intrigue. NJnS takes the additive route of just applying an MMO on top of the bland cliche scenarios you'd normally find and, surprisingly, it creates some level of appeal. Gloriously followed up by the characters, Morioka or "MoriMori", is a shut-in who quit her job to play MMOs all day everyday. Well, really it is to escape the real world that is filled with anxiety and depressionbut... y'know how it goes. Inside this MMO, she eventually meets the pink barfbag that is Lily and since Mori created a male character; the obvious conclusion is that Lily is also a man.

But keep in mind, predictability isn't always a bad thing. If anything, trying to work around keeping Lily's identity a secret for a given period of time likely would've complicated things and that is a common problem many other anime make. Anyways, Sakurai, who we can already guess is Lily, comes to an understanding that the situations happening with MoriMori in real life is awfully similar to the situations described by Hayashi, Mori's avatar in the MMO. In this scenario, anime has portrayed male characters very stupidly by just having them chalk it all up to sheer coincidence. Not Sakurai, he mans up and investigates what is going on, uncovering the identity behind Hayashi actually being Morioka! And that's really cool! I, very much, appreciated how intelligent and proactive Sakurai's character has been... Up until this point.

But post episode 4 it really falls downhill. A lot of slow dialogues of that do nothing for the show and even though Kowai seems to have read "The Bro Code" front and back, his attempts to set up Sakurai and Morioka together fails time and time again simply because Sakurai lost his pair and decides that he isn't going to go after Morioka because fuck logic. After all this, it is just a slow decline of pointless dialogue to pad the show's run time. Oh and the other characters really don't matter. It is mainly a story between Morioka and Sakurai with actual assistance by Kowai.

I personally wouldn't recommend a virtual life. MMOs are a pain and gets boring very quickly with the repetitive gameplay and pointless dialogue; much like this anime.