The Fall 2023 Anime Preview Guide

A Playthrough of a Certain Dude's VRMMO Life

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A new type of VRMMO called "One More Free Life Online" is out. 38-year-old Taichi Tanaka logs in as a young boy avatar called "Earth." In a world where the player is free to do as they wish, he decides to master a skill that's been deemed to be useless. He makes potions that are too much of a hassle to make, cooks food that is excessively too good and uses bizarre original weapons to hunt monsters... An adventure manga about an ordinary middle-aged man leisurely enjoying his VRMMO sandbox game.

A Playthrough of a Certain Dude's VRMMO Life is based on the light novel of the same name by Howahowa Shiina. The anime series is streaming on Crunchyroll on Mondays.

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James Beckett
Rating: Is it possible for an anime to be hatefully boring? Like, I knew that A Playthrough of a Certain Dude's VRMMO Life was going to be a bland piece of crap from the moment I read that Hall-of-Shame-worthy title, but I wasn't ready to confront the abyssal depths its uninterestingness. There has to be a line being crossed here, some kind of threshold of malicious, targeted mediocrity that can qualify for a show to be accepted as evidence in a criminal suit. I'm going to have to make a mental reminder to consult my lawyers after this preview is done to see if we have a case…

Oh, right, the preview. Well, if I'm being honest, I suspect that this show might not be very good. You see, from the outset, A Playthrough of a Certain Dude's VRMMO Life Preview makes it very clear that it is intentionally telling a story that features nothing in the way of meaningful stakes, compelling worldbuilding, or even the most basic evidence that anyone involved in making this thing is even a real human person, rather than a sentient AI that has decided to turn our love for Japanese cartoons into a weapon of punishment against the foolish meatbags that would dare tempt fate by playing God with technology. For anyone curious as to how an anime could fill a twenty-three-minute episode of television despite the creators' borderline fanatical refusal to tell a goddamned story, here's what we've got to work with: Main Character Guy learns to shoot a bow. The Main Character Guy cooks a steak. Then, Main Character Guy brews some potions for some folks. Finally, in the closest thing, this episode has to a recognizable conflict, Some Random Asshole fights Main Character Guy for, like, ten seconds, and for no meaningful reason whatsoever. Main Character Guy wins without even trying, naturally, and then he takes off his VR helmet and goes to sleep.

Take that exact block of summation that I just provided, and then imagine it being read out loud by Ben Stein's character from Ferris Bueller's Day Off, except it's playing at .005 speed, and someone is slapping you in the face with a rigid plank of splintered wood the entire time it's going. That experience would, by definition, be more worthwhile than actually watching A Playthrough of a Certain Dude's VRMMO Life, because the pain of getting whacked in the face with a thick slab of wood for hours on end will, if nothing else, remind you of the fact that you are alive. Either that or the concussive blows will eventually send you into the blissful void of unconsciousness, where these terrible cartoons won't be able to hurt you for at least a little while.

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Richard Eisenbeis
Rating:

At one point during this first episode of A Playthrough of a Certain Dude's VRMMO Life, I became so bored that I started brainstorming other titles for the show. After much deliberation, here's the one I came up with: “I was a loser in an MMORPG until they turned on the economy (and I was way overpowered in battle all along).”

As you may have guessed, I was not impressed by this anime in the slightest. From the start, the very concept rubbed me the wrong way. It feels like this show about MMORPGOPG was written by a person who never played an MMORPG. I mean the start of the episode is Earth making his character to be as bad as he can so that other players won't bug him. Now, not only do they bug him anyway from the moment he logs in but the whole situation implies that blocking people—something doable in pretty much every modern MMO—isn't possible. Moreover, the idea of an entire class being useless to the point of unplayability at launch is crazy as well. And what's up with fully-geared bully characters? How did they get so powerful on day one? So much about this game makes no sense.

But what's really important here is why I got caught up in such mundane details in the first place—i.e., that the anime is staggeringly boring. Nothing exciting is happening and there are no stakes—not even personally imposed ones. He's just… starting a new game and leveling skills. Sometimes, people notice and he makes some money but that's all there is to it.

Frankly, there is nothing that sets this anime apart from any of the similar VRMMO, fantasy, or isekai stories out there—of which there are tons. All the tropes are here from overpowered skills cookie-cutterter friend characters to lucking your way into success. If there is a single piece of news anywhere in these first 22 minutes, I'd love to see it. This show is simply a waste of time so don't waste yours.

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Nicholas Dupree
Rating: Bland as bread

Usually, when I watch something as boring and underwhelming as this show, I get annoyed. Now, I'm just insulted. I mean, look at that title! It's like they know they're making something soulless and devoid of even the tiniest sliver of creative drive, and they're mocking us. It's the anime equivalent of buying a billboard that says, “I have enough money to buy a billboard,” but you have to stare at that big sign for 20 minutes without falling asleep. How dare they?

Seriously, the premise of this show is that some dude is just playing an MMO during his free time after work. Not even in a chill, hanging out with friends in WoW kind of way. His entire goal is to make his character and build as uninteresting as possible so nobody will notice him while he grinds away about killing mob monsters and crafting potions. That might make it sound like he enjoys those things, but such a level of personality is beyond our unsalted potato of a protag. I honestly couldn't tell you why he wants to play this way; other than that, he doesn't want to be dragged around by “hardcore” players. What is he getting out of being wholly unremarkable? Why would he do it in a video game rather than developing real-world hobbies or pastimes? Why play an MMO at all if you so adamantly do not want to be around people?

The answer, of course, is so that our hero can luck his way into making the secretly ideal character build and become super popular by accidenNobodyody else in this world has ever thought to play a stealthy archer or learn to craft healing items, which will make no sense to anyone who's ever played any video game. It's a conceit that's so paper thin, so obviously contrary to how people play MMOs of any kind, that you can't help but realize it's a contrived way to make Earth (yes, that's his name) an underdog without giving him any disadvantages. That way, when the game stops selling potions, he's the only one who can make them, and everyone loves him. Then, when the mean bully gamers who mocked him for being an archer shows up, he can defeat them with his nasty marksmanship, and everyone will clap.

It's such a naked, half-assed power fantasy that it would be funny if it weren't painfully dull to sit through. The animation is as bare as bones can be. The designs all look like background characters in other shows. The plot is like somebody half-remembering Log Horizon and then trying to write it out with their non-dominant hand. Watching a random Twitch streamer with 0 subscribers play Runescape would be an infinitely better use of your time.

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Rebecca Silverman
Rating:

Dull. Stultifying. Benumbing. Boring. I could keep going, but you get the idea – this episode is a snore. It also doesn't lie; it is, in fact, a faithful account of one dude's experience playing a VRMMO. Just…not a very interesting one. One More Free Life Online is one of those RPGs that functions more as an open-world sandbox game, as in you can do what you want where you want with few limitations to not drag down more hardcore gamers, thirty-eight-year-old Daichi gives his character Earth the most useless skills possible so that no one will pay him any attention. It's like a less interesting Hell Mode premise because then we see Earth grind his skills and accidentally get positive attention when the game's build shifts suddenly. Now, this salaryman-by-day has a bum-numbingly boring extra life as a potion-crafting-rabbit-steak-cooking game character by night! Be still my heart.

The thing about games is that it's often much more fun to play them than to watch someone else do so, and this episode fails to capture any exceptions to that rule. Daichi/Earth's most exciting moment is when in-game professional jerk Ward challenges him to a duel, but even that's not exactly a hotbed of excellent (or interesting) choreography; it's just a case of Ward making some foolish assumptions based on Earth's skills. Millie and Zwei, the two other players who defy Earth's hopes by befriending him, are a little more interesting than the rest, but it's not saying much to make that assertion. The most interesting thing is that Daichi regularly logs off at an appropriate hour because he's got work the next day and needs a good night's sleep.

This also doesn't do much visually, just to compound its sins. From the character creation screen to the in-game "action," nothing looks eye-catching, and while it may be more realistic, game avatars aren't all that fancy; it's also not fun to look at them. Action is truncated, creatures are bog-standard, and nothing here makes me want to recommend it. If you need a VRMMO anime this season, go for Shangri-La Frontier.