Having finished Rent-A-Girlfriend I was back to trolling through the far end of my watch list looking for something with the same kind of vibe, and I spotted Recovery of an MMO Junkie. This is one I’d watched before, but it’s quite short so I decided why not treat myself to a re-watch.

I think this one might resonate well with some of my readers. While it is not an isekai (a show about someone transported or trapped in another world, frequently a gaming world) it is, I guess, isekai-adjacent. The story is about Morioka Moriko, a 30 year old office worker who decides to quit her job, become a NEET and focus on playing MMOs. In simpler terms, she just stays in and games. She has fond memories of the last MMO she played, which she could only play on weekends, but it has shut down so she starts a new one, and decides to play as a guy named Hayashi.

She quickly meets Lily, a more advanced player who takes Hayashi under her wing, and from there winds up making a group of friends. She is very content with her online life (it is never really explained how she supports herself) but her IRL life mostly consists of putting on sweats and heading to the convenience store for food. The show bounces back and forth between in-game life and out-of-game life.

As things progress she and Lily grow closer and closer and Moriko struggles with this since Lily doesn’t know her real gender. Then one day she (literally) runs into a guy on the street and is impressed with how kind he is. This begins her slow journey back into the real world.

You can probably guess where this is going, but I don’t want to spoil anything. I will say events will really strain your sense of credulity.

In spite of that, I love this show. There’re no bad guys and nothing terrible happens. It’s just a real feel good show; very cozy. No screaming, no explosions. Even the enemies in-game are kind of cute. And if you’ve ever playing an MMO in a guild that grows into a kind of family, lots of what happens in the in-game scenes will feel pleasantly familiar.

It’s also fairly short (11 or 12 episodes) and the manga it is based on was put on hiatus when the creator got ill. As far as I know it never came back, and Recovery is from 2017 so I think it’s safe to say this is a 1 season and done show. If you’ve been away from anime for a while, this might be a good way to dip your toes back in.