Review of Recovery of an MMO Junkie
After many years of stressful and unfulfilling work, Moriko decided to quit her job and is now a NEET playing a MMO game, what awaits her (and us, the viewers) is a fantastic experience totally worth watching. Net-juu no Susume is in my opinion one of the most solid executions of the romance genre and a very interesting take of the game one. The ingame world is well developed and has a good number of scenes that really showed the feelings that provide playing this type of games, like trying out clothes and how they looked depending on the character, the “wtf dude” moment when someonequits during a raid boss without warning, or just the endless talks with the other people in the anonymity that the Internet provides, and even more in this case since our protagonist is using a male character and interacts with the others from that point of view. These scenes are also very funny since the reactions of the characters to what happens ingame are quite priceless.
While quitting her job gave her a breath of fresh air, that still affected Moriko, who is quite self-depreciating and feels disappointed for things like how she doesn't take as much care of herself as before or just going to a shop to buy random things to eat while passing the day playing the game. While the series doesn't make it overly dramatic, one can see that even if she has a lot of fun playing, that lifestyle still affects her. Thankfully, things start to change once she bumps into an employee from a trading company.
The mix of the gaming parts with the in real life scenes also includes the romance element of the series, that is well executed and smoothly paced thanks to Sakurai, our male protagonist, and his friend and co-worker Koiwai, these two characters soon enter Moriko's life and their interactions both between them and with her are fantastic.
Sakurai needs a special mention for how much he deserves a medal for his awareness of the situation. If you have been watching anime for a while, I'm sure that you have experienced the frustration of a character being overly dense, which can be pretty funny in comedic settings depending on the viewer but very infuriating in some other cases, don't worry for that in this anime because he will not disappoint you.
This anime does a good job in the artistic and musical parts without standing out, the reactions of the characters are well done and funny, while the music sets well the tone of each scene, including the always necessary fantasy tone for the ingame scenes in that type of setting. The opening, Saturday Night Question, provides a nice song with visuals that show pretty well the difference in feelings between the ingame and real life parts of our protagonist, while the ending theme, Hikari, Hikari, shows us various reactions of the characters from the other side of the screen they are interacting to, very neat idea.
In conclusion, Net-juu no Susume gave us a nice story, creating an interesting ingame world that interacts with the reality of our lovable cast and how they develop over the course of the story. I really recommend to give it a try!