YMMV / Recovery of an MMO Junkie

• Adorkable: Moriko is adorably awkward almost any time she socializes, usually fretting over what she's saying and how it may be interpreted by others.
• Arc Fatigue: Of course, the Will They or Won't They? between the two leads counts as this, although it's Played With a bit as Sakurai does figure out that Morioka is Hayashi and that she likes him, but he incorrectly thinks Koiwai likes her and attempts to step aside to let them be together, even though Koiwai is trying to set the two of them up instead. Morioka plays it straight, though, as she is completely clueless about her own feelings and his feelings toward her and about his being Lily, until he outright tells her. Not surprisingly, many fans are less than pleased that the obvious outcome is taking so long to get to, as many believe if both of them just actually bothered to tell the other how they feel, the plot would be over.
• Base-Breaking Character:
  • Sakurai's garnered a bit of this; due to his passive personality and gentle nature, one camp loves this aspect of him and find it adds to his character, but another camp finds it irritating along with his indecisiveness. This doesn't apply to Lily, however, despite them sharing the same personality.
  • Koiwai is the most polarizing character judging from various forums and social media sites. For some, he's a likeable Troll who despite seeming like a jerk, really does care for the two leads, and is enjoyable for how snarky he is towards Sakurai. For others however he's an unlikable and annoying gadfly who distracts from the leads developing a relationship naturally, and view his teasing of Sakurai as offensive.
• Broken Base: The series' reliance on Contrived Coincidence to move the plot forward. Many don't mind, and feel that it's not an egregious sin since it helps develop the main characters' relationships and kickstart the main plot when it becomes stagnant (which, as explained above, is often). Others, however, just see it as lazy writing, Narmy, and blatantly breaking the Willing Suspension of Disbelief, especially since the series is a slice of life with no fantastical elements to justify such a series of coincidences.
• Harsher in Hindsight: The characters excitedly discussing Fruits de Mer's loot boxes and admitting to spending a lot of money to get a single complete costume is likely intended to be an MMO-themed slice-of-life segment where we see them engaging with each other in the game outside of quests and battles. Thanks to the Star Wars Battlefront II (2017) debacle (which unfolded during the anime's run) and other sour feelings the gaming community adopted towards loot boxes in late 2017, viewers are more likely to see a bunch of unwitting players being manipulated into spending an egregious amount of money on a glorified gambling scheme.
• Ho Yay: Koiwai enjoys teasing Sakurai and his nickname for him is "Princess Sakurai". In the OVA episode, he even takes the role of the demon king who kidnaps Princess Sakurai to for him to marry him.
• Memetic Mutation: The various faces Moriko makes in front of her computer were a goldmine for reaction images thanks to her over-the-top expressiveness. It was part of the reason why the series became a Sleeper Hit - everyone wanted to know the source of "those NEET chick gifs".
• Overshadowed by Controversy: In early February of 2018, Twitter users in western countries uncovered the Twitter page for the anime adaptation's director, Kazuyoshi Yaginuma, and discovered from it that he's a virulent Neo-Nazi: since joining Twitter in 2011, Yaginuma has liked and posted a distressingly large amount of tweets openly espousing antisemitism, Holocaust denial, Judeo-Bolshevik conspiracy theories, and the downplaying of atrocities that Japan committed during World War II. Needless to say, this discovery eclipsed discussion of the MMO Junkie anime's merits in a heartbeat, with one of the biggest talking points in relation to the anime being whether or not it's still ethical to support the show in light of Yaginuma's beliefs.^note One factor that complicates this issue is that while Yaginuma is the director, he wasn't the original creator of the story, nor is he the only one to work on it
• Tear Jerker: Both main characters' backstories.
  • Morioka suffered so much stress at her old job, despite being fairly good at it, that she ended up having to quit. Despite claiming that she became a NEET by choice, it's clear that the process ruined her self-esteem.
  • Sakurai lost his parents at a young age and was taken in by his relatives, only to lose them, too. He also ended up suffering bullying due to being half-foreign and adopted.
• Woolseyism: The Latin American Spanish dub adapts the term NEET with its Spanish equivalent NiNi.^note Translated as Ni Estudia, Ni Trabaja (Neither (s)he studies, nor (s)he works).

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