Anime: Netojuu no Susume

Review
The past few years saw a growing trend of shows about MMOs. We had some over-hyped pieces of trash, some decent surprises, and a lot of barely passable adventures. None truly made a glorious work using its premise, especially because they basically lost to an attempt to inflate terms and references for the sake of just pleasing the majority of the audience instead of making something truly spectacular.

Netojuu no Susume (Recovery of an MMO Junkie, Netojuu for short) is at long last a different approach to that premise. Instead of making our protagonist be sucked by the game, reincarnating inside it, or doing anything that somehow got his otaku-ass inside a virtual world, Netojuu is a tale about MMOs. Yeah. It is not about people living it, but people playing it, like we do ourselves.

This is the tale of Morioka Moriko, a thirty years old woman fed up with society. Her life is a mess, her job is oppressive, and she simply lacks the will to endure all of that. Well, she decides to quit her job and simply waste away her spare time, which she ends up wasting by playing an MMO by impersonating a male character named Hayashi.

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1. It's a lot more relatable
   Moriko suffers from what it seems to be the norm in the busy and demanding adult life in Japan. She is not a person, but a slave to her work and freeing herself from it is quickly seen as the best course of action. There is no debate in that. As a person trying to escape a harsh reality by playing something, it becomes much easier to understand her trail of thought. She is not uber-powerful teenager banging every girl he meets, she is no insanely-smart guy capable of leading guilds and save the world. She is just a worker tired of her shitty life and giving a shot at some kind of entertainment to relief some stress. Easy and direct.
   
   And it's a romance with a ton of coincidences
   Morioka creates a male character named Hayashi and ends up becoming virtual best friends with Lily, which happens to be played by a guy named Sakurai Yuta. Until then it is quite normal and a funny starting point for a romantic comedy of a woman removed from society and a normal guy who plays a lot. Sadly though, the way the story finds to bring these two together is filled with a pile of insane coincidences.
   
   It starts with the fact everyone lives surprisingly close to each other and meet by sheer luck. I would understand if the guild was targeting people from a specific city or region, but no, it's simple luck. It gets even more absurd when they meet each other in real life and then meet other players from the same guild as well. Remember, no one was talking about private life or trying to make real-life friends in the beginning, they just happen to pick the most popular game, play it in a random server and magically join a guild where most people are living just around the corner.
   
   The coincidences are brought a step further when former co-workers end up meeting each other through virtual friends and it finally reach sky-high levels when Moriko and Yuta have in fact played another MMO together in the past, where they were also best friends but never traded any real life info besides some regular complaining. Yeah. Oh, that's no spoiler though, it becomes immediately evident from the opening scenes and it only takes a while to be approached within the tale.
   
   It's funny though
   The coincidences certainly pull the romantic element down, but the comical parts at least do a great job. Netojuu's approach make for some clever situations that may certainly occur to anyone playing a MMO for social reasons and Moriko makes a decent job as a protagonist, much better than Kirito mind you. She is a bit too clumsy and shy, but that is never said to be her mission (remember, she had a job) and even when approached by others she offers a solid and convincing social barrier to be broken, which is a major asset in a time where any non-social male protagonist becomes the major social beacon of a group in a matter of seconds.
   
   And it's about MMOs
   Well, you know that. Netojuu, however, happens to be the very first show about MMOs where the game actually had a music score that reminded me of a fuckn MMO. The opening also offers an interesting introduction to the theme and the only downside of the show in this department is the fact that real life and MMO have basically the same graphics, meaning there is no artistic effort to make these two separate environments look even slightly different from each other. The studio Signal MD could've done a much better job, especially because Moriko's previously played game does offer a different artistic choice from the real life presentation.
   

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Comments
Finally a show that is about MMOs and not simply a nerdgasm about living inside one. Netojuu is far from being capable of fully exploring the idea though, especially because it resorts to some cheap coincidences to move the plot instead of dabbling with the minutia detail and possibilities that com from forging friendships through an MMO.

It also doesn't help that Japan seems a bit in another level in terms of social media, where people playing an MMO can spend months becoming best friends while not ever finding each other through social networks, phone exchanges, and so on, which takes me back to the early years of the century where photos were a rarity and cellphones were just used by some executive workers and enthusiasts. Although this can be seen as a local behavior, it falls short of giving a full repertoire of situations coming from a virtual life in many other countries.