Full Dive

Episodes 1-3

The opening minutes of Full Dive lay out a pretty solid case for the show's position in its own genre: it's unrealistic for ‘realistic’ VRMMO games as depicted in light novels, manga, and anime to be as popular. That level of depth and immersion is not and would not be fun. Just making a video game world too large and barren to navigate with normal controls can be a death sentence for exploration. Now imagine if you had to physically feel like you were walking everywhere? It's a sharp, keen observation put forth in a field that's pointedly overcrowded in the medium, and immediately gets your attention.

And then, despite making that point perfectly clear in those first few minutes, Full Dive just continues to trudge along, laying out in slow, steady, excruciating detail just how and why this kind of VRMMO would really suck, actually.

I guess that pacing is as good a place as any to start assessing the issues of Full Dive. The first episode alone spends a solid half of its runtime showing our hero Yuki trudge through his shitty real life just to set him up for his experiences in the shitty game life. The thing is, for as generic as the kind of ennui that gets depicted in Yuki's experiences, we still come off knowing rather little about him. We get the faintest implications that he was part of the track team but left it for some reason, that he now prefers whiling away his days with VR games, and that he's enough of a mark to be easily swayed into spending his hard-earned cash on a ten-year-old game nobody likes through the sheer moxie of a single hot sales clerk at a back-alley game store. Speaking of her, we don't really have any insight into Reona's motivations as of the three-episode mark of this show either, both our main characters just kind of having the plot happen to them with no question of their own agency in interacting with it.

It's that lack of genuine engagement with the actions of the story so far that exacerbates the aimless feeling of the way Full Dive has listed through its plot. Yuki spends basically the second half of the first episode in a single room, being repetitiously shocked at how much he has no idea what's going on. The events here end up setting up and propelling wholly the third episode's storyline, and in that time it almost never feels like Yuki genuinely taking action himself or making his own distinctive choices. For one thing that's because he very obviously has no desire to actually be here, his attempts to speedrun through that opening tutorial section of Kiwame Quest being responsible for the disaster of his new virtual life that follows, only for him to continue suffering through the consequences anyway because...reasons?

I understand that the answer to the question of why any character in any story takes any action is ultimately “Because it is a story”, but there still has to be some underlying characterization informing that decision. You have to wonder why Yuki doesn't peace out of the unrelenting misery the game heaps on him sooner, save for the apparent sunk-cost fallacy he feels towards the game he can't get his money back for. The barest gesture is made at it potentially relating back to his troubles with the track team in the real world, but that's not expanded on before we're back on to cyberspace finding new ways to humiliate him. At the absolute least, after hitting a new low by the end of the third episode, Yuki is able to bring himself to finally quit, but given the structure of the show, we know he'll be back in before long, and I can only hope by then they've figured out a better way to articulate why.

So if the lead character is but a poorly-defined doofus devoid of agency nought for anything but taking us on a tour of this virtual-world caricature, you'd think that world itself would provide some entertaining antics. As outlined at the beginning, there is something to the concept of a VRMMO so overly-optimized for realism that it rounds back to not actually being a very fun game as a result. But the story seems to not understand the difference between ‘outlandish’ and ‘mean-spirited’ in its overt cruel-real-world design: The death of Yuki's in-game best friend Martin at least feels like it's meant more as a shock-humor moment (his ghost appearing for ‘Martin Time’ in the third episode reinforcing the absurdity of the situation) but still also comes off too strongly like it should have been the immediate moment for him to nope out of there (I say this as the kind of guy who will restart a game if I accidentally pick a mean dialogue option in a game).

It all sets the stage for the kinds of unfair cruelty that define the ‘joke’ about just how un-fun a game like this could get, from Yuki getting arrested and publicly stoned, finally climaxing with him peeing himself while being tortured in custody (Can you believe he wouldn't want to have his arms and legs chopped off by the hot, sharp-toothed inquisitor lady? What a wimp!). The problem is that so little of these occurrences are presented as ridiculous jokes so much as matter-of-fact experiences that suck, which made them vaguely miserable for us to watch as well. I have too little investment in Yuki's decision-making authority (or lack thereof) over his experiences to feel anything about him simply reacting to each new misfortune that befalls him; It's just a procession of shitty events that feel progressively less like an actual game being played. Worst of all, it makes a hypocrite out of me, as here I am spending most of this premiere complaining about how I'm not having any fun either!

We're still at the beginning, so I don't think Full Dive is at all a lost cause yet. The fact that we haven't gotten any inklings of motivation from Yuki or Reona or their backstories just means I'm compelled to keep following for when we will find out what's going on. And there are a few actual jokes that land, such as Alicia's rapid breakdown, if only because I find the idea of "What if the childhood friend tutorial NPC accidentally became your arch-nemesis" to be a decently funny setup. But the show has to find somewhere to go with all this sooner rather than later, and not just because broadening the use of its setting could lead to more varied and interesting humor. The show needs to quickly figure out that repeatedly demonstrating how non-entertaining its base concept is, itself, not very entertaining.

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Full Dive is currently streaming on Funimation.

Chris is a freelance writer who appreciates anime, action figures, and additional ancillary artistry. He can be found staying up way too late posting screencaps on his Twitter.