Forum - View topicEP. REVIEW: Recovery of an MMO Junkie
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bemused Bohemian
Posts: 404 Location: central Mizzou (Moral Oralville) |
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Finally, a show about a game protagonist whose years, finally, are beyond middle school, high school, junior college, tentative college underclassmen years. Yea, it's about goddamn time someone took a risk and created an almost believable series about someone over the age of 22 who just happens to reside on present day planet Earth without superpowers. I'm going to pretend she is the embodiment of Watamote's Tomoko Kuroki enjoying that rite of passage from young adulthood to, dread of dreads, the realization that thirty-something is fraught with peril also.
OMG, the I'm in my thirties internal dialogue....lol. I'll be 70 soon. I did find this frame funny and do hope this series continues to be as enjoyable as these first two episodes were. |
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yuna49
 Posts: 3804 |
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That was my assumption as well. Given how she lives, she probably didn't spend very much when she had a job, and now she's using those savings to "decompress." I doesn't appear that she's living off her parents like Satou-san in NHK. I liked Hiroko in Hataraki Man, too, but I don't see her as a role model. She spent way too much time at work which was one of the main points of the story. Her boyfriend was even worse. Healthy people maintain a boundary between work and their private lives, though that boundary seems way too thin in Japan, and with the rise of cell phones and the Internet it's moving in the wrong direction here in the West as well. |
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Peebs
Posts: 419 |
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I was going to skip this one altogether, but the last line in the review was used in the blurb on the home page. That hooked me. The animation itself is nothing to write home about, but the story has promise. And the main characters are adults! That's the second selling point for me. I'm looking forward to more.
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mandisaw
 Posts: 140 |
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A real hidden gem of the season. Came across this as an also-on in a seasonal round-up review, and the premise / poster gave me a strong sense of "Shop around the Corner" (or the Ryan-Hanks remake, "You've got Mail"). So far it's been a soothing balm of comedy, and I'm looking forward to where it goes.
Re Moriko - I had one good MMO experience in my life, and that was while I was long-time unemployed. Having that always-on social connection, and an environment where you easily gain a sense of control can be really therapeutic - or it can be an escapist trap. I 100% get where this show is coming from, and I think all Moriko's talk of "choice" is probably mostly the BS she tells herself to get by. She's "elite" in the sense of having had a good job (and probably a good education), but still in the same mental hole as any "no-job, no-degree, no-prospects" conventional NEET. My guess is, she had some kind of epiphany that the life of a corporate quisling wasn't for her, but she needed some time to come up with a new direction. Thank the anime gods for a show about adulting. |
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Gina Szanboti
Posts: 11415 |
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Well both Recovery of an MMO Junkie and Recommendation of the Wonderful Virtual Life appear in English in the OP, along with the Japanese title, so this time "they" are the Japanese creators. Re meiam's sitting in a tree gripe, I take that to be a visual representation of people IMing out of character while logged into the game. It wouldn't be very interesting if they just put up a This Week in Anime style convo for these off-quest chats. Role immersion is also another reason people would eschew mics. If you're playing a Gandalf type character and you sound like a boy just hitting puberty, it's kinda hard to sell that character with a live mic. |
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Yazu13
 Posts: 129 |
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This is quite a unique story for such a well-worn anime trope. It's much more mature than other MMO anime stories, and by that I mean the characters are very human and the production doesn't rely on bombastic action and sweeping orchestral background music. In fact, there is near silence in every scene except for the voice acting. It all feels very different in a good way, and thankfully, the story being told is also compelling and grounded to fit with this unique tone. What an amazing season for anime.
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Blood-
 Bargain Hunter Posts: 23854 |
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Yeah, I saw your whining about this aspect in the Fall Preview thread and meant to comment on it there, but got sidetracked. Your viewpoint is freakish, but now that you've mentioned your own bouts of involuntary unemployment, at least I know where your bizarre contention (in the Preview thread) that she must be a "terrible" person comes from. I interpreted her comment that she was an "elite NEET" as a compensatory mental tactic to come to terms with her decision to retire that we the audience are meant to recognize as such and find funny. I by no means think for a second that she really believes she in any kind of elite category of anything. I am curious as to how she will support herself. While its true that a NEET doesn't necessarily have huge expenses, she still has to pay rent and buy food. Plus that computer upgrade must have cost something. She has no dependents, so any adverse results of her retirement will affect only her. I think we will get much more insight into why she has chosen this path but zomg! that will actually require patience and watching multiple episodes instead of making weird snap judgments. |
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CCTakato
Posts: 514 |
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I think it's pretty obvious from Moriko's nightmare that she had some sort of traumatic experience in the work force that pushed her to becoming a NEET and describing herself as an elite NEET is clearly a lie to comfort her.
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Galap
Moderator
 Posts: 2354 |
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I found myself laughing at this quite a lot; it's really relatable to have a character in a similar age group to me, especially since in anime we rarely get main characters past 20.
It seems completely reasonable to me that she could spend significant time not working if the job she had was high paying and her current expenses are low (both of which could easily be true). I look forward to seeing what happened at her job to make her quit. Since I work in a 'harsh' field, I suspect I could relate to her problems very well. I loved the dream sequence, which reminded me a lot of the Moloch sequence from Metropolis (not the anime, the live action movie from the 20s). Enough that I think it might be a direct reference. Moloch, the ancient Canaanite demon has on several occasions been used as a personification of the horrors that civilization inflicts despite its members not wanting any of it. I expect this will all come a bit more into the foreground later, but I doubt it will overtake everything else. I actually kind of like the fact that these issues are kind of looming in the background, casting their shadows on what everyone in the show does, without really being explicitly and directly addressed. It makes a lot of sense with the premise, that in online games real life is kind of pushed into the background, but it leaks in indirectly. That's actually a good metaphor in another way, that these issues tend to be things that don't get openly and directly discussed in the light, a fact which is caused by the nature of the issues themselves, that's another one of Moloch's fingers tapping into you, part of the Sphinx of Cement and Aluminum. |
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SleepySkull
Posts: 36 |
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I found it a bit jarring as well, especially as there were birds flying correctly at ~3:40 when they showed sundown outside Moriko's apartment. But then I realized it was likely a way to show that when Hayashi and Lily are beach walking in Fruits de Mer, they're in a world where the laws of physics or normality are suspended for things that will look cool. So we have a quite realistic beach, occasionally realistic avatars, and dungeon bosses whose eyes turn into swirls when they're defeated. BTW, regarding details, thanks for your notes on possible character correspondences. You noticed a lot of things I hadn't.
Yeah, part of the Moriko's story is her not wanting to confront the unpleasant prospects for her life. Hence, she's not someone who became a NEET because she was unemployable like younger people, or even that she became a NEET because she just couldn't take her work environment anymore. No, she chose to quit and hence isn't, well, a loser. And she's also mentally squirming over the prospect of spending the rest of her life alone, without friends or a relationship. In the west the idiom is one of turning into an old woman with cats; in Moriko's case, she's sliding into her thirties with only her cat clock and cat hug pillow as companions. Friends from work? Nope, those flowers get dumped as soon as she got home. Online friends? Nope, it's been six months since she last logged into an online game. So she gets home from her last day at work and announces "I'm home" to an empty efficiency apartment. Hell, yeah, Fruits de Mer seems more appealing than reality. |
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#844391
Posts: 517 |
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wasn't sure what to expect but i'm really enjoying this show, the reactions of the MC are pretty funny, like when she was crying while spamming the cry emote, I'm really having fun watching how adorably awkward she is.
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meiam
Posts: 3442 |
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So now they both worked at the same company... what's next? They both live in the same apartment? There parent will set them up for an arranged marriage?
The gift giving conversation didn't really work for me. In my experience most player understand that what's an amazing gift for them is often just vendor scrap for a high level player, and that there's very sever money inflation as you go up in level (the amount of money a low level player make in a day is less than a high level player make by killing one enemy). Also due to the nature of long running game, low level item often become worth more than high level item. Most player play in high level area, so they naturally collect stuff of high level, this means the value of those item goes down. On the other side low level area are barren and empty, so player aren't collecting anything from them and as such the item found in those area have a high value. So it's often pretty easy for low level player to gift something of equivalent value to a high level player. |
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lebrel
Posts: 374 |
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The two of them are soooo adorable.
 When are we getting the manga? 
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Morry
Posts: 756 |
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This series has been super cute but it is playing heavily on the red string of fate. Happen to be game buddies in their youth, happen to share a company/industry, happen to be game buddies now, happen to bump into each other. It keeps taking me out of the series. Hopefully this'll be the last one.
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Grendel8
 Subscriber Posts: 59 Location: 41°51'0.11" N -87°39'0.18" W |
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This show has earned one of the top spots of the season for me. I wish the animation was better, but the story is progressing nicely so far. As others have said, finally characters that are older and more established in life, but still struggling with their issues. It adds more realism to this scenario instead of the typical super (fill in blank) middle or high schooler. Hopefully the show keeps going in the right direction.
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