Plot: Moriko Morioka is a single, 30-year-old, self-decided NEET (Not in Education, Employment, or Training). Despite being very good at her job, she couldn’t deal with the everyday, same thing day in and day out, corporate life-style. She felt no happiness or meaning in her life. So, she turned to MMO RPGs to try and find the happiness she was missing in her life. Finding that the game she used to play had been shut down, she started a new game, Fruits de Mer.
However, for reasons I’m honestly not really sure of, she made her character a male and called herself “Hayashi.” Shortly after starting, she met and befriended a female character named Lily, who introduced Moriko to her guild. Even after making a friend and joining the guild, she still hasn’t told anyone she’s actually a woman. Things get even more complicated when she meets an attractive guy, Yuta Sakurai, in real life…and there’s something oddly familiar about him.
Recovery of an MMO Junkie finished with 10 episodes and it simply wasn’t enough for me. Despite being a show about MMOs, it’s actual premise has almost nothing to do with the action aspect of an MMO, but rather the social. Online you can be anyone. And a 30-year-old woman who is utterly disappointed with her life can pretend to be a lively, male college student with an exciting one. The show goes in depth about how MMOs and video games make us feel and the escape they give us from our everyday lives.
Sometimes reality sucks and you need a break. This is what makes this anime stand out from shows like .hack//Sign, Sword Art Online, and Log Horizon. That and plot develops outside of the game in Moriko’s real life. Despite her wanting to be a recluse, the game and her new guild member friends end up helping Moriko to interact with people in the real world. She even runs in to a Homare Koiwai, a guy who she used to help over the phone at her old job. Sidenote: Koiwai is just the best person ever.
The online world is vast, but can also be very small. Sometimes you meet someone online and it turns out they live in the same town as you or maybe you’ve even met before. Granted, it isn’t as common as the show makes it out to be, but it does happen (it’s happened to me). Online and in the real world, Moriko and Yuta’s lives seem to be tied together.
We watch as their characters, unknowingly to them, bond and are the best of friends, but when it comes to their real life encounters they are both incredibly awkward and terrible with social situations. I feel like that’s something a lot of us can relate to. Even though there’s no action, we wait anxiously for the next episode as characters’ real life personas are revealed and as the in game vs real life relationships develop and how they affect each other.
That being said, Moriko is the main character focus so the others don’t get as much detail. We get some background on Yuta, but I wish we’d gotten more. The ending credits also show us Lilac’s true self outside of someone’s door and nothing ever comes of that. I kept hoping she and Kanbe would also collide in reality but it never happened. We didn’t get to see everyone in the guild as they are in reality either. Which seems like kind of a strange thing to do. Why see Lilac and Kanbe and no one else? Again, I assumed it’s because they would meet, but since they didn’t, it just seemed irrelevant.
OVERALL SCORE: 8.5 / 10
I really enjoyed this show. I was excited every Friday to get home and watch it. While I highly recommend it, the ending made everything feel…unfulfilled. There is no word on there being a Season 2, but I really hope there is. A second season would actually improve this one because it would mean that we will get the answers we didn’t in season 1. The final episode was very cute, but it didn’t give us enough. It was a good episode, don’t get me wrong, but the fact that it was the last one was what made it seem lacking. Even so, it’s a show worth watching in its entirety. Plus now that it’s finished you can binge the whole thing instead of having to wait a week between each episode!
