And you thought there is never a girl online?

Episodes 1-2

Note: Because I gave a full write-up for the first episode in the Spring 2016 Preview Guide, this review will focus primarily on episode 2.

Episode 1 of No Girls Online (or Netoge as it's been fan-named) clearly established part of the series' basic premise: that a male high school student discovers, to his surprise, that all of his guild mates in one popular MMO are actually girls from his school. Episode 2 brings in the other main part of the premise: one of the girls, Ako, has difficulty separating game life and reality. This is not meant literally, in the sense that she cannot tell when she is and is not in the game, but in a social sense. As she glaringly shows at school the day after the guild's in-person meeting, she does not seem to appreciate that in-game social relationships and real-life social relationships are not necessarily one and the same, because treating them the same can be problematic for everyone – especially when it comes to (unintentionally?) spouting off about being Hideki's wife in front of his class or potentially busting Akane's carefully-crafted public image as someone who detests games.

While this may seem gimmicky, it is a phenomenon which has existed in some form or another in the real world for decades. It popped up from time to time concerning fantasy RPGs back in the '80s (who's old enough to remember the associations people used to try to make between Dungeons and Dragons and devil worship?), and later concerning LARPs; the 2002 movie Vampire Clan documented one real-life instance from 1996 connected to the game Vampire: The Masquerade, for instance. In Japan and the anime realm the concept has become connected to the chuunibyou phenomenon (or perhaps the chuunibyou phenomenon can be seen as an outgrowth of those things). That does not appear to be the angle that this series is taking though, as Ako never insists that she can cast spells in the real world or anything like that. Instead, she merely carries out major breaches of etiquette by referring to people in-person by their in-game monikers and fails to comprehend that some of her guild mates may want to keep their in-game and real-world interactions separate; to her, they are one and the same. In fact, the hints given between episodes 1 and 2 suggest that she doesn't have any real-life social connections and may also have some abandonment issues, so she's desperately reaching out to the game for those kinds of connections.

How good this series ends up being is going to depend heavily on how seriously that story thread is explored. The series is at least off to a proper start by showing Ako's case as a definite contrast to the other two girls, who despite also professing some social isolation (by choice in the case of Akane and due to her strict parents in the case of Kyo) seem relatively well-adjusted. While Kyo finds the situation amusing, Akane agrees with Hideki that things can't keep going on as is, so Kyo comes up with forming a game club at school and playing together in person, to help Ako learn to separate the people she knows in-game from their real-life selves. Yes, all of this can absolutely be looked at in normal anime terms; this set-up is a convenient excuse to get a busty girl hanging on Hideki while other pretty girls hang out with him, and despite the other two girls seemingly having no romantic interest in Hideki at this point, a harem angle can't be discounted. But the story is at least giving itself room to develop a deeper story while spinning its romantic comedy antics, perhaps in the same way that Love, Chunibyo & Other Delusions! did. I ranked that one among the best series of 2012, so the potential to achieve more is there.

Of course, the production effort on this series by project No.9 is nowhere near on the same level as Kyoto Animation's production work, and the humor isn't in the same league so far, either. Also, it's rather hard to take the series too seriously when the camera is relentlessly emphasizing the ample bouncing bosoms of both Ako and Kyo. Granted, the only other real fanservice in these first two episodes is one rather funny sequence where Hideki imagines the avatars of Kyo and Akane being replaced by their real-life selves (with sexy results in Kyo's case, since her male avatar is mostly bare-chested), but it looks like the breast emphasis is going to be an ongoing feature. In fact, I don't intend to comment on that in future reviews unless the fanservice starts escalating or the series starts doing something different with it.

Hence my impression from the first episode lingers: cautious optimism about what the series could accomplish, tempered by the acknowledgement that it has yet to stray much from a massive bundle of common light novel tropes and clichés.

Rating: B-

And you thought there is never a girl online? is currently streaming on Funimation.