Recovery of an MMO Junkie

Episode 8

If you've been wondering why both Moriko and Yuta seem to be hung up on an old MMO while playing Fruits de Mer, this episode has some answers. Yuta is the first to take a trip down memory lane as he reflects on how playing NanterSG helped him get through a difficult period in his life. When he recreates his old character, Harth, as a new player in Fruits de Mer, Moriko starts to connect the dots through a flashback of her own. A dropped call delays Yuta's plan to finally tell Moriko everything, but he eventually gets the chance to confess in person.

The backstories of Harth and Yuki (Yuta and Moriko's characters from NanterSG) bring back a theme that Recovery of an MMO Junkie has touched on several times this season: why people from different walks of life are drawn to online gaming. The flashbacks present a flipped version of the current situation, with Moriko working full time while Yuta tries to shut himself off from the real world. As the two of them look back at these past interactions, we get a clearer sense of why they both have a strong lingering emotional attachment to the old game. It offered Yuta a way to overcome his sense of loneliness, while Moriko used it to escape from a hostile work environment. This backstory is especially valuable for Yuta, as it helps to explain why he's so determined to find out if Moriko really was Yuki without coming right out and asking her. The personal significance of the situation balances his eagerness with an understandable fear of messing the whole thing up.

Even with this added context, however, Yuta's decision to resurrect Harth in Fruits de Mer still feels like a questionable move. Considering how much time the series spent building up the chemistry between Hayashi and Lily, it's disappointing to see so much important information being relayed through Molly and Harth 2.0 instead. I almost feel silly making this complaint, since both pairs of avatars are just online extensions of the show's real-world protagonists. It shouldn't matter which digital identities they ultimately connect through, and yet it absolutely does matter. Sure, Hayashi and Lily are fictional creations inside an already fictional universe, but screen time still matters. We've seen enough of their adventures that they're essentially characters in their own right, while Molly and Harth are little more than plot devices. Sidelining the former pair in favor of the latter makes Moriko's long-overdue epiphany less emotionally compelling than it could have been.

When Moriko's phone battery conveniently dies right before Yuta makes his first “I'm Lily” confession, it briefly looks like the episode is going to kick that can down the road yet again. Thankfully, the series makes a quick course correction and forces its main characters to sit down on a park bench and talk things out. This gives Yuta a chance to make his confession in person instead of over the phone, thus clearing away the final piece of misinformation separating our central duo. Now Moriko and Yuta both know about their past connection in NanterSG, along with their current identities in Fruits de Mer. It's perhaps appropriate that this episode ends on that final revelation, since it closes the book on a significant part of the story. It took quite a bit of narrative hand waving, but the tangled web of online identities has been unraveled.

The question now is how Moriko will react to this information. Assuming she isn't put off by Yuta's reluctance to fess up, it's likely that their relationship will take another step forward. As obvious as this narrative path may seem, it does have the potential to introduce some new conflicts. Moriko and Yuta will have to decide how much they want to tell their fellow players, and all this personal drama could upend the social balance of their guild. There's also the real-life end of things to consider, since neither Yuta nor Moriko seem prepared for a romantic relationship. Koiwai also remains a potential wild card in all this, especially now that he's started to integrate himself into the guild. As much as I continue to be frustrated by Recovery of an MMO Junkie's sloppy plotting, this show is still doing more than enough things right to hold my interest.

Rating: B

Recovery of an MMO Junkie is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.