While not everyone counts it as a member of the isekai genre, you can’t deny that when a character gets stuck in their virtual MMO game and that becomes their new reality, it certainly feels like they are living in another world.
As a fantasy plot, the virtual reality MMO has gotten quite popular because of how close we are dancing to it in reality. While the real tech isn’t quite there yet, let these VRMMO isekai anime recommendations serve as enticement and warning to your potential future.
Best VRMMO Anime
A Playthrough of a Certain Dude’s VRMMO Life
VRMMO-type isekai anime is slowly growing genre as VR in reality becomes more viable. However, usually VRMMO anime does manifest more of a plot than just a person playing a VRMMO as a hobby and having a good time.
So, by having a player simply doing just that in A Playthrough of a Certain Dude’s VRMMO Life, it certainly subverts expectations.
No one is trapped in this VRMMO. There isn’t something sinister happening behind the scenes. The main character isn’t escaping trauma by gaming. It is just about a salayman playing a game after work and his quirky play style kind of working to his advantage.
Good Night World
VRMMO anime tends to be just isekai escapism in a more realistic, often less “permanently in another world” package. Regardless, VRMMO anime still focus on people having a good time so you can watch them and forget your own troubles.
Good Night World asserts that maybe using games and other media as escapism is not the best thing in the world by following a whole dysfunctional family that does it in the same VRMMO.
While an interesting take, eventually the series moves onto something terrible happening in the VRMMO and the effects bleeding out into reality in a more psychological experience than you are used to seeing in anime about VRMMO gaming.
Shangri-La Frontier
Shangri-La Frontier is like if Let Me Solo Her got an anime. The series follows a VR gamer whose unique hobby was to exclusively play buggy, difficult, poorly designed trash games until he ran out of them so he decided to try a super popular mainstream VRMMO.
Having honed his gaming skills in the crucible of trash games, he thrives with a unique solo play style and eventually getting a curse that makes it so he can’t equip armor.
Sword Art Online
While Sword Art Online’s big heyday is over now, it still remains the series that you think of when people bring up VRMMO anime, for better or for worse.
Unfortunately, the whole plot of being trapped in a VRMMO game continues to kind of dwindle away as the series goes on. So while you may start the series excited by the concept of being trapping in a VRMMO game where you can die in real life if you die in the game, you stay because you become invested in the characters and their story.
Log Horizon
Log Horizon is like the first part of the first season of Sword Art Online, but done with a lot more detailed attention to the game itself.
Like Sword Art Online, Log Horizon focuses on a group of VRMMO players that become trapped in the game. While they aren’t in life-or-death peril, they still have to learn to live there.
The game feels more fleshed out and because the main character is a strategist, you get a fair bit of exposition about planning when it comes to battle or commerce. Unfortunately, Log Horizon does seem to get a little lost in the sauce when it comes to the details of it all.
Political strategizing is all good, but when your VRMMO anime has become all exposition and no sizzle, fans tend to fall off like they did in the second season.
Overlord
Overlord doesn’t really focus on the main character being in a game. He was playing the game, and then suddenly he was actually in the game as his character.
You get touches of him realizing he is becoming more “undead-like” as things go on, but mostly the show treats the game world like the only world. Forgetting that the main character was a real person once upon a time.
That allows Overlord to become more and more like a grand fantasy anime, and you get all the action and world building that comes with that.
Death March to the Parallel World Rhapsody
Adding a bit of twist to the recipe, Death March to the Parallel World Rhapsody focuses on a developer of the game getting stuck in that game. This isn’t a VRMMO, but rather more of a “probably died at his keyboard and is now in his MMO for some reason” sort of affair, though.
While him being a programmer gives him a unique perspective (and advantage) in his new world, that’s about the only unique thing it does. His immense power gathers him a harem and they just have rather same-y fantasy adventures. Nothing innovative, but it’s comfortable.
Demon Lord Retry
Like Death March to the Parallel World Rhapsody, Demon Lord Retry also follows a main character that was a developer of the game. As he decided to shut down his game, he suddenly finds himself transported in it as the demon lord.
Furthermore, he finds a character that he did not put in his game who is attacked by a creature he didn’t put in either. From there, the series actually does really well at having the character unravel these mysteries with array of interesting game characters.
Do You Love Your Mom and Her Two-Hit Multi-Target Attacks?
Do you want to be trapped inside an MMO with your mom who also massively dwarfs you in power?
No?
Too bad! Because that’s exactly what this is. It is some pretty solid comedy, and that is really all you should expect from this.
How Not To Summon a Demon Lord
For all intents and purposes, the main character’s virtual life in the game was his only life since he lived as a shut-in. However, he suddenly finds himself summoned to a fantasy world by elf girls who heard of his character’s prowess and tried to enslave him.
Now in the body of his character with all his powers, he remains unfettered and enslaves them instead in a bit of an accidental spell reflect situation.
That’s just the beginning of their adventures, and if you think it sounded a little lewd, rest assured that it is. This is probably the most ecchi-oriented VRMMO anime on this list.
Bofuri: I Don’t Want to Get Hurt, So I’ll Max Out My Defense
While Cute Girls Doing Cute Things is not a genre for everyone, Bofuri not only features CGDCT in all its moe glory, but manages to make a legitimately great VRMMO anime story as well.
Bofuri follows a girl who decides to play a VRMMO whit her friend. Being an inexperienced gamer, she puts all her stats into defense. This makes her take no damage, but she can’t really fight anything either. Luckily, she manages to find armor and equipment that turns the power of her enemies against them.
Enjoy watching a cute anime girl stomp MMO tryhards with a smile on her face.
Infinite Dendrogram
I like to think of Infinite Dendrogram as a lower stakes first season of Sword Art Online. No one is really trapped in the game, but rather they treat the game as a way to have adventures that they can’t pursue in reality.
It’s more wholesome and fantasy adventure-oriented with less drama, but also less plot.
Kuma Kuma Kuma Bear
Kuma Kuma Kuma Bear has the female main character trapped in her MMO game, but with the twist of her having to wear silly-looking bear armor that she found in order to survive.
It works off the premise that sometimes you have to wear silly-looking armor in your RPG game because it is strong, and gets its comedy from that. It is low on plot, but big on comedy and rather wholesome moments.
Full Dive – The Ultimate Next-Gen Full Dive RPG Is Even Shittier Than Real Life
It was really only a matter of time before VRMMO iskeai anime went full Dark Souls, and Full Dive is it.
The entire premise is the main character being given a special VRMMO game that is ultra hard and actually hurts him in real life, and then being told to beat it.
While he is not trapped in the game, he has bested every other game which gives him the tenacity to go in there and get good instead of being like, “Ouchie! F*ck this shit, I’m out.”
She Professed Herself Pupil of the Wise Man
She Professed Herself Pupil of the Wise Man is about a legendarily powerful VRMMO mage who, with his friend, helped found a kingdom in-game for mages.
However, one day while testing out what his character would look like as a cute girl, he fell asleep and got stuck that way. Now he’s role-playing as if this cute girl is his apprentice since it appears that he is now also stuck inside the game and 30 years have passed.
That’s pretty intriguing, but unfortunately it doesn’t really focus on intrigue so much as it focuses on making you notice how cute the characters are.
In the Land of Leadale
Adding on a dash of melancholy, the main character in In the Land of Leadale took up playing a VRMMO when she was bed-ridden in the hospital. When she passed away due to power loss at the hospital, she ended up in the game for real, but the world had progressed several hundred years since she last played.
So really, there is no “getting out of the game” for her, and this series instead chooses to pursue unraveling what happened to the game world.
.Hack//Sign
I know there is some perfectly valid resistance to watching older anime these days since modern animation has utterly spoiled our eyeballs, but if you are a fan of this genre, it is still worth knowing the progenitor of it.
Back when “isekai” wasn’t big enough to even be a sub-genre, .Hack had the original VRMMO plot of …some characters mysteriously unable to log out of their VRMMO game. What was particularly nice is that it really leaned into the mystery of that whereas other series played their hand pretty early as to the “what” and the “why” of it all.
Do you have more VRMMO anime that you believe should be on this list? Let fans know in the comments section below.
