So many anime programs air this season that audiences will easily find shows resembling fraternal twins. J-List Blog has already covered the crazy girlfriends in the fall anime season. But two specific anime series have nearly the same premise: a loner main character plays a popular Virtual Reality Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game (VRMMORPG) in unorthodox ways, gathering attention and friends along the way. Shangri-La Frontier follows a teenager whose gaming hobby is beating broken games. The clerk at his game store convinces him to try a triple-A game for a different challenge. A Playthrough of a Certain Dude’s VRMMO Life shows us a middle-aged man trying to play a popular virtual reality game as a solo player. One gives us heart-pounding action with the requisite animation quality. The other offers a slice-of-life atmosphere with muted production values. Let’s find out more about them!
Non-Life Threatening VRMMO Plots
Shangri-La Frontier and A Certain Dude’s VRMMO Life avoid being clones of Sword Art Online or Log Horizon. No one is trapped inside the game. We don’t have to worry about alien servers on the moon or homicidal game creators. Both currently airing shows combine elements of the recent game-centered comedies BOFURI and Full Dive RPG. In BOFURI, Maple maxes out her defense stats so she won’t feel pain, which breaks the VRMMO game in funny and unexpected ways. For Full Dive RPG, we have a gag comedy about a VRMMO game that its creators made so realistic that players considered it a “trash game,” and nobody wanted to play it. A busty game store clerk fools Full Dive RPG’s main character into playing it, so now he wants to beat the game out of spite.
Scramble those plot elements and premises around, and you’ll end up with Shangri-La Frontier and A Certain Dude’s VRMMO Life. Turn BOFURI into an action-oriented playthrough. Then stick a guy who would have wanted to conquer Full Dive RPG into the main character’s role. That’s Shangri-La Frontier! Find a middle-aged man who can only play three hours a night and put him into BOFURI’s relaxing VRMMO world, but his play style fits Full Dive RPG better. Now you’re watching A Certain Dude’s VRMMO Life. Fans of gaming culture who enjoy watching video game streamers will feel at home in both shows, but they occupy entirely different anime genres. Which do you prefer: shounen action or chill slice-of-life?
Shangri-La Frontier — A Big Budget Action Adventure
Studio C2C has carved out a recent niche of animating stories in fantasy settings. It made isekai anime, like Benriya Saitou-san Isekai ni Iku, Tensei Shitara Ken Deshita, and Tsuki ga Michibiku Isekai Douchuu. But C2C’s cute-girls-do-cute-things portfolio, like Edomae Elf, Majo no Tabitabi, and Harukana Receive, also fit into the fantasy genre. However, the volleyball anime is not in the fantasy genre, per se, but those jiggly girls occupied many a fantasy! The art styles of all these shows are so different, so it’s hard to believe the same studio produced them. But we saw flashes of sakuga in Benriya Saitou-san Isekai ni Iku. Translate that effort to Shangri-La Frontier, and you’ll recognize the look of the fight scenes in the VRMMO setting.
Rakurou, the lead character in Shangri-La Frontier, has a unique gaming hobby: he conquers “trash games.” Those are games with reputations for being unfinished, having unbalanced fight mechanics, and elements that make players quit because they’re so broken. The first episode introduces us to Rakurou’s latest conquest: a game that saddles you with unspeakable requirements to meet the final boss. It also gives you an NPC companion that makes you thread a needle’s eye of relationship events. It’s no wonder he wanted to kick that b…, er, horrible person in the face. Now. Imagine approaching a polished, successful game with a “trash game” mentality. What happens next? Fun times!
The Buddy Bunny System
I had already enjoyed watching teenager Rakurou treat an established VRMMO game like a trash game. He figured out how things break and where the seams of viability are, but the story came alive when he found a partner. The cutest bunny ever, desu wa! Emul and the Vorpal Bunny Kingdom are the heart of Shangri-La Frontier. Emul’s introduction paid homage to Alice in Wonderland, which primed the audience for an upside-down adventure. How she helped Sunraku (Rakurou’s game name) defeat a boss monster was unexpected and hilarious. Emul also accidentally made Sunraku famous, and now players and monsters are out to get him. We have yet to meet all the well-drawn girls set to follow him, but they started coming when Sunraku followed the White Rabbit. I wait impatiently for each episode!
A Chill Stream Playthrough of A Certain Dude’s VRMMO Life
Many people watch Twitch to see their favorite players stream a session of the current popular game. But did you know you can also watch streamers work on art projects, paint tabletop game figures, or prepare a meal on YouTube and other video streaming platforms? If you watched Earth, the middle-aged worker’s screen name, play through a three-hour session of his VRMMORPG, it would look like those arts and crafts streaming channels. Earth makes food to sell, crafts weapons and armor, and slowly sneaks his way to monster kills. Relaxing.
Unfortunately, for that “certain” old dude, his solo-playing style started making him famous. He chose to play solo to be less of a burden on party members who usually play longer than three hours a night. But his tactics and strategies made him a perfect PvP killer. And he won an event and gained a Fairy Queen wife! There went Earth’s chillaxing days of unwinding after work. The few scenes of drama and action in A Certain Dude’s VRMMO Life feel like watching golf or baseball: nothing happens most of the time, but then excitement sparks up, and you root for your guy. I can’t wait to chillax with Earth every week and see him bicker with a wolf queen waifu.
Shangri-La Frontier streams on Crunchyroll in multiple languages for audio and subtitles.
A Playthrough of a Certain Dude’s VRMMO Life streams on Crunchyroll in Japanese audio and subtitles in multiple languages.
Are you enjoying these VRMMO anime shows? Do you prefer Shangri-La Frontier and its half-naked bird-headed hero fighting boss monsters with a white bunny, desu wa? Or do you like A Certain Dude’s VRMMO slice-of-life gaming atmosphere better? Let us know in the comments below or online on Facebook, Twitter, or Discord.
Did you like how much Maple confounded the Game Masters in BOFURI? She didn’t even know how much she broke her VRMMORPG. Here’s an adorable figure of Maple’s sheepish grin up for preorder in the J-List store. Her best friend Sally is available too. Lock in your order before Thanksgiving to ensure a Merry Christmas!
