In the VRMMORPG game Planet, a group of powerful players known as the Akabane family are feared by everyone. While these players enjoy their escape from reality and their ties as a found family in-game, in reality and unbeknownst to each other, each member is a different member of the irreparably broken Arima family.
Like so many other players, the members of the Akabane family escape reality in the game, but soon, the manifestation of the Black Bird of Happiness, a rare end-game entity of Planet, manifests and causes the game world to seemingly bleed into reality.
For as many VRMMO anime as there are, it is nice for one to at least acknowledge that escaping reality obsessively isn’t actually a good thing. If you are looking for more anime recommendations like Good Night World, head on down below.
Anime Like Good Night World
For Fans of Escapism As a Bad Thing
Paranoia Agent
There is an urban legend going around in Musashino City about Shounen Bat, a boy that rolls around on roller blades and beats people with his bent golden baseball bat.
Numerous reports of his attacks have turned up, but the police have been unable to catch him.
As the investigation continues and more people fall victim, paranoia begins to set in.
Paranoia Agent hides it under a big, sometimes confusing blanket of initial symbolism and metaphor, but – like Good Night World – Paranoia Agent is also about the problematic nature of escapism.
Unlike Good Night World that tells a single linear tale, Paranoia Agent is explored through a series of often episodic stories about the delusions people accept in order to not confront their unhappy reality.
Both series have their moments of mindfuckery, but Paranoia Agent is more dedicated to being a sort of vague psychological anime whose message and concepts require a bit more thought to grasp.
.hack//Sign
In the MMORPG game simply called The World, a wavemaster by the alias of Tsukasa awakens with slight amnesia and cannot log out of the game.
Believed to be a hacker with the Crimson Knights guild, Tsukasa wanders the game looking for answers and avoiding other players that seek to do him harm. A
After reuniting with the Crimson Knights, the players that became acquainted with Tsukasa also seek a reason as to why he cannot log out before the problem becomes worse.
Both Good Night World and .hack//Sign are essentially the antithesis to the huge growing trend of isekai/VRMMO anime about players escaping reality into somewhere fictional and happy.
Instead of having a never-ending happy adventure, both series focus on wildly depressed main characters who either can’t find the fulfillment they want or have it completely twisted inside the game.
Both Good Night World and .hack//Sign manifest intricate psychological plots that essentially force the main character to make genuine connections to others and face reality if they wish to escape their miserable situations in either world.
Welcome to the NHK
College dropout Tatsuhiro Satou has been living as a hikikomori for four years, and in his isolation, he has come to believe in a number of conspiracy theories. Primary among them is that a conspirator is behind his NEET nature.
Although he tries to overcome it, his NEET nature is a deep hole to crawl out of.
Both Good Night World and Welcome to the NHK follow young men who are shut-ins and explore a series of ways to escape reality. However, while Good Night World becomes about rampant AIs having an effect on VRMMO players, Welcome to the NHK is more about being a shut-in, and escapism through online gaming is only one (somewhat small) part of that.
Regardless, both Good Night World and Welcome to the NHK are stark looks as escapism that portray being a shut-in as the problem that it is for everyone involved. Ultimately, both series are about forcing those shut-ins to face and accept reality as well.
For Fans of Problems in Virtual Reality
Denno Coil
Yuuko Okonogi and her family move to Daikoku City, the technological center for the new augmented reality technology.
There, she joins an investigation agency with other children equipped with powerful virtual tools. She encounters a hacker named Yuuko Amasawa that seeks to unlock the mystery behind a computer virus that has cut off a portion of the virtual world.
At first, both Denno Coil and Good Night World start off pretty light. You think it will be a typical VRMMO anime or a youthful slightly sci-fi slice of life anime, but then things get progressively more dire as they go on. Good Night World always had a sense of darkness about it while Denno Coil has a distinct shift from childish antics to darker implications as their adventures in augmented reality manifest problems.
What Good Night World does with VR technology, Denno Coil does with augmented reality. Both series are about dark breakdowns in these systems that almost everyone uses. However, Denno Coil really doesn’t get particularly dark until its third act.
Real Drive
It wasn’t long after mankind created the Network society that linked people on a conscious level before people started linking data and manipulating information.
To combat this, people called divers were enlisted to dive into the Network and investigate these incidents.
While about different systems, both Good Night World and Real Drive are about people who can live or become trapped in a virtual data space. As Real Drive was a (less popular) creation of Ghost in the Shell’s Masamune Shirow, it enjoys going into similar depth in the technological and psychological aspects of the world like Good Night World.
Unlike Good Night World, Real Drive is framed, at first, as a sort of investigation into aberrations in the virtual space, but like Good Night World, everything wildly unravels into something deeper and more sinister.
Sword Art Online
With the aid of NerveGear technology, video game players can now experience their playable worlds like never before – in virtual reality. For Kazuto Kirigaya, his game of choice is Sword Art Online.
After beta testing the game, he logs into the launch and finds himself, as well as ten thousand other players, trapped in the game world.
It was right up until they destroyed an AI that was so sure she was real and had a guy bleeding from the black holes where his eyes should be that I thought Good Night World was going to be a sort of Sword Art Online affair where they all got trapped in a game.
Obviously Good Night World wasn’t that. In fact, after that tipping point, it became less and less about the game. That said, if you did like that VRMMO aspect of Good Night World, and wanted an anime that focused more on the game than rampant AI and had a little less family drama, Sword Art Online was essentially the vibe they were playing off of in Good Night World.
Full Dive – This Ultimate Next-Gen Full Dive RPG is Even Shittier Than Real Life
Average high school student Hiro Yuuki obtains a copy of the full dive RPG game called Kiwame Quest. This game is uses the pinnacle of gaming technology to create an experience as close to real life as possible.
Unfortunately, while the sights, smells, and sensations are very realistic, it does make it a difficult game to beat. For players, their real life abilities are reflected in game and being hit also leaves serious wounds on your character that hurt and heal slowly.
It is not a game for casuals, but with a supreme sense of accomplishment on the line for beating it, who could say no?
Both Good Night World and Full Dive are about VRMMO with an extra helping of danger. However, while Good Night World followed a psychological plot that made it a distinctly darker VRMMO experience, Full Dive – despite the danger – is much more of a comedy. It enjoys a certain dark sense of humor, but it is still a comedy compared to the incredibly serious affair that Good Night World is.
For Fans of Family Dramas
Kotaro Lives Alone
Unsuccessful manga artist Shin Karino has his daily routine interrupted one day with the introduction to his new neighbor – a four-year-old boy who moved in next door, lives by himself, and talks like a samurai.
While this boy is more put together than most of his neighbors, living alone has its difficulties at any age.
Through its VRMMO escapism elements, Good Night World adopts a certain sense of found family that people do enjoy when they play MMOs – even if that found family was Taichirou’s actual family. Kotaro Lives Alone, while not being about MMOs or even technology, is a found family anime with a distinct dark side.
At first, similar to how you think Good Night World is about playing an MMO, you think Kotaro Lives Alone is a cute anime about a four-year-old living alone because of typical non-realistic anime reasons. However, it goes on to explore a lot of darker adult problems, including the darker side of why this little kid lives alone.
Japan Sinks 2020
On a day just like any other in Tokyo, a devastating earthquake rocks Japan. Separated by the activities of their daily lives, the Mutoh family struggles to find each other in the chaos.
However, as they are brought together, they soon find that the news is so much worse. With Mount Fuji threatening to erupt and Japan gradually sinking, the Mutoh must face their difficult reality.
While Good Night World is about a disaster in its own right, Japan Sinks is about a natural disaster. However, what these two series most have in common is their large focus on family drama.
Good Night World focuses on an extremely broken family while Japan Sinks focuses on a rather normal family with normal family issues. However, being in an extreme disaster situation quickly introduces everyone to a huge dose of trauma and, like Good Night World, it becomes about the family addressing it.
As everyone in Good Night World was kind of terrible in their own right, it wasn’t particularly emotional watching them work out their issues, but Japan Sinks 2020 tries harder to illicit an more emotional response from the family drama.
Kyousougiga
In ancient Tokyo, there was a priest named Myoue who could bring anything he drew to life. He drew a black rabbit who also fell in love with him. Borrowing a body of a goddess to be with him, they started a family with three children.
However, it was decided that the family was causing too many problems, so they fled into the Mirror World full of the priest’s drawn creations. While everything was peaceful in this world where no one dies and no one is born, the parents of the family had to leave.
Awaiting their return, the three children are shocked when a girl arrives from another land in the Mirror World sharing the name of their mother and looking for both of their parents.
While Good Night World enjoys somewhat complex sci-fi concept, it is an easy story of family drama to grasp. Kyousougiga, by comparison, enjoys surrealism so much that it is a bit of a more difficult story to grasp at first, but like Good Night World, it is just a tale of another dysfunctional family.
Both series start about a family with distant and/or absent parents, and their effect on the children. Their children are not doing so well, and essentially the actual plot of each anime is meant to be a device for the family to reconcile.
Do you have more anime recommendations like Good Night World? Let fans know in the comments section below.
