Early Impressions: Net-juu no Susume

Three episodes in, it feels like I know everything that’s going to happen already.

A certain bug over on Twitter dot com made a plea for this series, stating that Shoujo Shuumatsu Ryokou was not the only thing worth watching this season. Desperate as I was to watch anything more, I took him up on his offer, and ended up disagreeing tremendously.

I will keep this post relatively short as I forgot to save screenshots don’t have that much to say about it. Net-juu no Susume is about a thirty-year-old NEET woman—because women can be NEETs, too, guys—who finds solace in the virtual world of online MMORPGs. Looking in from the outside, it’s a combination of industry selling points, a la virtual world and NEETs doing “incredible” things (incredible here being social, I guess?). However, taking a gander from the inside shows that Net-juu is more of a… “love” story between two people who meet and connect in an MMORPG. The main character being a NEET is more just an aspect to the show and not a driving point.

Expectations being slightly tweaked aside, there are two hugely noticeable flaws of Net-juu (thus far): narrative structure/execution and animation. I will compare this series to Sword Art Online, but not because of the MMORPG standard; rather, Sword Art Online had a tendency very early on to skip huge amounts of time to easily establish Kirito as an online veteran… which destroys a lot of chances for empathy and relatedness. Net-juu does this same thing, as the female lead makes an avatar on her netoge game, meets the affectionate Lily-chan, then time skips immediately to them being best friends and the female lead being level eighty-something. Great. All the intimate details and building of the relationship are basically moot. We’re now forced to simply take their relationship as great at face value. Only problem is that one doesn’t give a shit.

Not only this, but there are a ton of plot conveniences and a number of times when the anime tells you how the characters are feeling and thinking, instead of showing you. I’ve grown to be very critical of overexplanation from series, especially when it feels as though it believes I cannot figure out basic facial expressions. The female lead is gaga over Lily-chan. Lily-chan says something really sweet. Female lead then proceeds to guffaw and blush severely, prompting her to say, “My heart is beating really fast right now!” YEAH, NO SHIT. I won’t even get into how formulaic the entire series feels, with very little about the characters standing out as more than one-note minds. Everything is so lazily placed in its role that I can never expect anything to be thrown out of its shell.

And then animation. Incredibly uneven, with a large string of outright bad pieces of character movement. Really quick and not-so-subtly large chunks of movement in the span of seconds really takes me out of the experience. What’s almost funny is that the series leads one to believe that the female lead’s netoge character is incredibly “handsome.” He looks like a second-rate background character. Lily-chan is probably the only character in the show with some remarkable cuteness, and I won’t criticize the show for having no talented character design, as the female lead and Sakurai (a male; heavily hinted to be Lily-chan) both look splendidly the part of the roles they play. It’s only in terms of overall animation and sleekness that make the series almost laughable.

When I get in the groove of writing, it’s hard to stop. What was supposed to be a short post turned out somewhat long. I’ll compensate by making the final paragraph fairly short. I expected Net-juu to be absolute trash. It ended up being mostly trash, though not because of heavy fan service but by how standard it all feels. So, in essence, it isn’t what I expected it to be, though it still isn’t any good, despite some merit of heart. Its greatest asset is that I don’t feel dropping it is a necessity.