(12 episodes)
What’s it about ?
Adaptation of a light novel series about… well, it’s one of those where the whole premise is spelled out in the title.
Characters
Nishimura, our male lead, is one of those open nerds who has no issue with spending most of his free time on MMORPGs, and in particular Legendary Age, a med-fan dungeon crawler where he plays a tank knight under the alias of “Rusian”. After getting badly burned a year ago, he’s convinced himself there’s no real girls online.
Ako is the incompetent healer of his regular party, and after insisting for months she finally got him to marry her in-game. The joke is that she is an actual girl (that’s even her real name) ; that weird shy girl in his class who’s basically Watamote‘s Tomoko if she played MMORPG, complete with the utter lack of social skills, and the simmering hatred for “normies” lurking under the surface.
“Apricot”, the party’s black mage leader, is one of those players who spends tons of cash at the in-game store to buy tons of showy stuff. You know the type. Anyway, they suggest an offline meet… and she’s also a high school girl ; most specifically, the student council president.
As for “Schwein”, the party’s other fighter, they turn out to be Segawa, Nishimura’s twin-tailed tsundere classmate (he’s never seen the “dere” part), and doing up to now a great job of passing as a normie. Also, she didn’t know her handle meant “Pig” in German.
Production Values
Perfectly okay, if a bit fanservice-y in some character designs (I hope Ako invested in a strong enough bra).
What did I think of it ?
On the one hand, the joke is nearly perfectly executed. Clearly the writers get the kind of hardcore MMORPG it’s portraying, and it show in all the little cute details. It’s got good comedic timing, the characters have decent chemistry together, and overall it’s a fun joke.
But… laying out the central gag took the whole episode, and there’s little sense of where it can go after that. How do you proceed from there ?
Oh, well, this first episode was good enough that I’m willing to try out a few others to see what’s next. So, mission accomplished !
