Recovery of an MMO Junkie: Recommendation of the Wonderful Virtual Life
Premiering in October 2017, Recovery of an MMO Junkie is still in the midst of its first season, but that doesn’t mean you should sit on this anime. This is especially true if you’re someone who plays video games, as the show’s themes of finding purpose, companionship, and acceptance in a world of pixels is something that any gamer can understand, regardless of whether they play MMOs or not.
The show follows the life of Moriko Morioka, a 30-year-old woman who’s become disillusioned with her taxing corporate job. She decides to quit and become an elite NEET (a Japanese term for someone who’s Not in Education, Employment, or Training). She sits in her apartment all day and plays an MMORPG called Fruits de Mer, only leaving to buy beer or food. Rather than create a woman avatar, she decides to create a male character named Hayashi. In-game, Hayashi meets another character named Lilly, a high level player who helps Morioka learn how to play the game.
Recovery of an MMO Junkie acknowledges a rather fascinating aspect of the gamer culture. Within a video game, players can reinvent themselves with a new gender, sex, race, height, weight, or personality. It’s a bit difficult to explain why someone might want to do this (and how it works) to a person who doesn’t play games, but we gamers know that video games are a welcome means of escapism.
Often, a gamer’s willingness to become someone they’re not is frowned upon. From an outsider’s perspective, it might seem like gamers are running from their problems. And maybe they are, but Recovery of an MMO Junkie suggests that maybe that’s not so bad. Morioka forms some genuine connections as she’s gaming, and the show goes out of its way to make sure that the audience understands that not all of these relationships are as she thinks.
It’s more than a little unbelievable that Morioka would meet some of the real players behind the avatars she plays with. Happening to meet at least one player might be possible, but the show doesn’t stop at one. And if the source material is any indication, she’s going to randomly run into a few more. However, such a random development doesn’t negatively impact the show. At its core, Recovery of an MMO Junkie is about the connections that gamers form as they play online, and how these connections, even though they aren’t with real people, are real enough.
Gamers!
Gamers will love the show Gamers! because… well, the anime is about gamers. Although the anime focuses on five different characters pretty equally, the show is primarily from the perspective of Keita Amano, a high school boy who enjoys playing video games by himself.
One day, Karen Tendō, the most beautiful girl in school and head of the school’s Gaming Club, approaches him to ask if he’d like to join. Ultimately, Keita declines, because he’s not into competitive gaming. To say that this decision causes a chain reaction of misunderstandings would be an understatement.
The entirety of this anime is about a group of gamers who are in some bizarre love pentagon, and each of them being too self-absorbed to notice the others’ obvious hints. By episode four, things are already absurd. Normally, it would be rather easy to write off such a ridiculous show, but Gamers! keeps the audience engaged, and gamers will love all of the random video game Easter eggs in this anime.
If anything, Gamers! does a good job of showcasing how self-centered a gamer can be. When you’re focused on something, whether it’s a video game or a crush, it’s difficult to notice the obvious signs around you. Gamers! may not have been my favorite anime of 2017, but it has helped me to stop and self-reflect on my behavior. I think it will do the same for other gamers.
New Game!
New Game! may appear to be just another run of the mill cutesy anime that stars an entirely girl and women cast, but the show is surprisingly both informative and emotional. The show is endearing, and features heavy yuri (young lesbian love) themes, but never in a way that detracts from the overall narrative.
The first season premiered last year, and introduced audiences to 18 year-old Aoba, a high school graduate who gets a job in the design department of her favorite video game development studio. Although mostly a setup for the much more dramatic second season, season one of New Game! does a decent job capturing what it’s like to start working for a small game developer. My first job after college was at Kabam, a mobile game studio in San Francisco, and most of the issues and problems that Aoba has to work through mirrored my own experiences. I never caught my boss staying at work late to parade in her underwear though.
New Game! truly comes into its own in its second season that aired this year. Noted as New Game!! (the show choosing to not go as New Game+ baffles me to this day), the second season spends its first few episodes reacquainting the audience with the dynamics of the varied cast. It’s not necessary to watch New Game! to understand New Game!!, although you’ll miss out on some of the better inside jokes if you do.
What I love about New Game!!, and what I think other gamers will latch onto, is how it acknowledges the skill gaps within the gaming industry. As more and more tools for creating video games becomes available, more and more gamers are trying their hand at making their own games. Even for those that aren’t, they look at video games more critically as they grow older, and do their best to understand how a developer might have come to design a certain character or implement a specific mechanic. But for gamers just starting out, whether it’s making a game or trying to analyze one, a sense of accomplishment is almost immediately associated with a sense of discouragement. Beginners can just never make something that rivals that of a pro.
Aoba’s struggle to draw as well as her supervisor, who she looks up to, always ends with her coming up short. Not in the “haha, let’s all have a laugh and try again later” way either. There are moments where Aoba genuinely seems to give in to the hopelessness of her situation, making even the most stone-hearted gamer tear up a little bit.
If New Game! is a love letter to developers who have already begun their journey into game design, then New Game!! is for the gamers who are wondering if they should even try. It speaks to all of us, telling us that this passion of ours can become a career if we want it to be. But we have to want it, and we have to know that, even if we try our whole lives, we may never reach the level of skill that we aspire to be. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try though.
KonoSuba: God’s Blessing on this Wonderful World!
KonoSuba’s second season aired this year, and it’s somehow more ridiculous than the first. Kazuma, a high school NEET who died and was reborn in a world that resembles a MMORPG, returns with his teammates Aqua, the goddess who sent him to this world, Megumin, a wizard with a knack for explosion magic, and Darkness, a masochistic crusader.
Unlike the other anime on this list, KonoSuba is not going to teach a gamer anything about themselves or explore any aspect of the gaming industry. Good thing the show doesn’t have to. KonoSuba is a ridiculous romp of a good time that creatively plays with the notion of game mechanics. Other anime have done this before, like Sword Art Online or Log Horizon, but KonoSuba takes gaming tropes to their most ridiculous extremes.
KonoSuba may be the funniest piece of entertainment (anime or otherwise) I have ever consumed. Most of the laughs play off the audience having prior knowledge of how MMORPGs and certain anime tropes are supposed to work, but even if you’ve never watched an anime in your life, you’ll love KonoSuba. You don’t even have to watch season one (though you should). The show is just funny for the sake of being funny. I guarantee you’ll laugh, and if you’re a gamer, many of those laughs will be from the show’s presentation of common video game situations in their most illogical extremes.
King’s Game The Animation
Like Recovery of an MMO Junkie, King’s Game’s first season is still going. Based on a cellphone novel, King’s Game is about a class of 32 students each receiving a text message from some mysterious entity known as “King.” All the students are told that they must obey the King’s orders. Those that don’t will be punished with death. It quickly becomes apparent that this King isn’t joking around, but as his orders become more elaborate and morally ambiguous, it becomes harder for the students to participate. Nobuaki Kanazawa, one of the main characters, is determined to discover the King’s identity and end the game for good.
King’s Game speaks to a gamer’s deductive reasoning. I know when I start a new game, whether it’s tabletop, card, board, or video, I immediately want to know how I might bend the rules to my favor. That’s the entirety of King’s Game. It’s one dude trying to figure out how he can work within the rules that the King has given. He can’t break them because the King will kill him. It’s pretty fun to watch the students try to outthink a criminal mastermind, but it’s even more fun to try and discern how the students will survive and figure out who the King might be.
Gamers, people who have spent years of their life playing games, are ideally suited for the task. During a year where players have had the option to “bend the rules” and use their creativity to solve problems in games like Breath of the Wild or Super Mario Odyssey, it’s refreshing to put those skills to use in solving an animated mystery.
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