“We were friends for a long time … and then we fell in love.” -Sally, "When Harry Met Sally"

"To the world you may be one person; but to one person you may be the world." -Dr. Seuss

For those that were bold enough to try other lives in the MMO craze, most of us left with several memories of the people we ran across.  There is likely a few times that you accidentally ran across the same person in multiple games.  With the common practice of people playing under different names, its not someone you might recognize so easily, even from just a gaming perspective.

This Anime asks two questions using the fact that we might meet the same people in different worlds and under different names.  One, what if this is where you actually met your best friend?  Second, what if this best friend turns out to be the love of your life?

Recovery of an MMO Junkie (Japanese: ネト充のススメ, Hepburn: Neto-juu no Susume, subtitled "Recommendation of the Wonderful Virtual Life") is a story about someone used and abused in the Japanese Corporate environment.   It has become commonplace for the Japanese to work long hours and not really be paid for the effort.  Even beyond that, there is also the wide spread issue of Japanese Black Companies.  

As Westerners won't always know what this is, I will include the bullet points from wiki.   This is a major point that can get lost in translation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_company

A black company (ブラック企業, burakku kigyō), also referred to in English as a black corporation or black business, is a Japanese term for an exploitative, sweatshop-type employment system.

While the term "sweatshop" is associated with manufacturing, and the garment trade in particular, in Japan black companies are not necessarily associated with the clothing industry, but more often with office work.

Etymology

The term "black company" was coined in the early 2000s by young IT workers but has since come to be applied to various industries.^[1]

Conditions

While specifics may vary from workplace to workplace and company to company, a typical practice at a black company is to hire a large number of young employees and then force them to work large amounts of overtime without overtime pay. Conditions are poor, and workers are subjected to verbal abuse and "power harassment" (bullying) by their superiors.^[1] In order to make the employees stay, superiors of black companies would often threaten young employees with disrepute if they chose to quit.

Noteworthy cases

Mina Mori, a 26-year-old employee of the restaurant chain Watami, committed suicide^[2] two months after joining the company in 2008. Her family lodged a complaint with the Yokosuka Labor Standards Office to seek recognition of the suicide as work-related. When their claim was denied, they appealed it to the Kanagawa Prefectural Labor Bureau, which recognized work-related stress as the cause of the decline of her mental health.^[3][4] In December 2015, Watami reached an out-of-court settlement of 130 million yen with the family, and Watami founder Miki Watanabe apologized.^[5]

This is the story of a woman broken by this system.  Moriko Morioka quit her job and retreated to the safety of MMOs as an elite NEET.   She is attempting to survive her retreat from society on the savings she scrapped together from a decade of working extreme overtime.  She is not someone living off of a social safety net, as in Japan those benefits end in 6 months.  This is also a major point that can get lost in translation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NEET

NEET, an acronym for "Not in Education, Employment, or Training", refers to a person who is unemployed and not receiving an education or vocational training. The classification originated in the United Kingdom in the late 1990s, and its use has spread, in varying degrees, to other countries, including Japan, South Korea, China, Taiwan, Canada, and the United States. The NEET category includes the unemployed (individuals without a job and seeking one), as well as individuals outside the labour force (without a job and not seeking one). It is usually age-bounded to exclude people in old-age retirement.

Japan

NEET is a distinct social policy category from that of freeter, the classification for those working low-wage part-time jobs, although in practice thousands of young people move between these categories (i.e., from the status of non-employed young person to that of a part-time worker and back) each year.

The demographic prevalence of NEETs has been indicated in employment statistics. Japanese politicians expressed concern about the impact on the economy of the growth in the NEET population. The estimated size rose from 480,000 in September 2002 to 520,000 in September 2003, according to the Japanese Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare. Other surveys by the Japanese government in 2002 presented a much larger figure of 850,000 people who can be classified as NEET, of which 60% were people aged 25 to 34.^[25] It is therefore clear that the statistical number of NEETs depends greatly on the specific definition adopted, so all figures should be treated with caution.

When the NEET issue erupted in the Japanese media in 2004 and 2005, non-employed young people falling into this category were framed as lazy, work-shy, and voluntarily out of employment. This media portrayal was effective in arousing the concern of Japan's (conservative) middle aged population, but it led only to moderate support for new youth policies. Indeed, as argued by Toivonen in an empirical monograph that juxtaposes media and policy discourses with youth support practices, the most promising solutions to the NEET conundrum have been created by social entrepreneurs such as Kudo Kei and Iwamoto Mami rather than by MHLW policy-makers or even scholars.^[26]

Unlike most Western European countries, Japan's unemployment benefit terminates automatically after three to six months and there is a limited range of support for those with special needs. Many NEETs in Japan are thus inevitably supported by their parents or relatives, though some find their way to Youth Support Stations and other services designed and/or enacted by social enterprises, including many NPOs.

It is during her retreat, she once again runs into her actual best friend, without knowing it.   She does so, not only in the game she has retreated into after losing any time off to play before quitting.  She runs into him quite literally in the streets of Tokyo.

This is a story of guilds.  This is a story of Gamers.  This is a story of true love finding its way to those of us that have hit our lowest point.

It's worth your time.   It's 10 episodes and one OVA.  It is on Crunchyroll in Sub or Dub.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recovery_of_an_MMO_Junkie

Moriko Morioka is a 30-year-old successful career woman who decides to quit her taxing corporate job and become an elite NEET and find a more fulfilling life. She joins an online MMORPG Fruits de Mer and creates a male character named Hayashi as her avatar. In the game, Hayashi meets another character Lily, a high-level player who helps him learn the game. Hayashi and Lily become close friends and he joins her guild, @HomeParty. Meanwhile, in the real world, Moriko has a chance encounter with a handsome elite company employee, Yuta Sakurai, who may have ties with her online life.