The Fall 2023 Anime Preview Guide

Good Night World

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The online game "Planet" has a powerful team of four players. This team goes by the name "The Akabane Family," and its members are a pseudo-family that only exists in the game. Although they aren't aware of it, these four players are actually a broken family in real life. A shut-in older brother. A high-achieving younger brother. A father whom his children do not respect. A mother who neglects her household. They do not know the warmth of family. They also don't know that the warmth of their online family is only a passing feeling. And most of all, they don't know they are a real family. Centered on the deeds of the Akabane Family in the online game "Planet," the story features battles against monsters, clashes with other guilds, and the machinations surrounding "Black Bird," the game's final objective. The tale takes a major turn as it entangles the real world and this real family.

Good Night World is based on Uru Okabe's manga of the same name. The anime series is streaming on Netflix.

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James Beckett
Rating:

I'll give Good Night World credit for having a hell of a premise. There is such a fundamental and tragic irony to the notion of a dysfunctional family somehow finding a way to love and support each other only when their relationships are filtered through the anonymity of the virtual world. Plus, for once, I didn't find myself totally rolling my eyes at the way an anime presented the VRMMO at the center of its premise! Sure, there's nothing about the game Planet that is especially original or interesting, but the sheer presence of any meaningful family dynamics that don't revolve around isekai protagonists and/or their wish-fulfillment slave-wives is enough to make me more amenable to a generic video game setting. It's all about the characters and the story, in the end.

Unfortunately, it's the execution of the reality-based parts of the story that Good Night World fumbles the most, which is a damned shame because that's what made me the most excited about the series in the first place. Simply put, the real-world versions of Taichiro and his family don't even seem like real people. They're the kind of flattened, exaggerated stereotypes of a dysfunctional family that feel more at home in a campy horror movie than a story we're meant to take even slightly seriously. Taichiro, especially, is just such an obnoxiously nihilistic brat that I could not stop rolling my eyes long enough during any of his scenes outside of Planet to even consider getting emotionally invested in his family's drama. Taichiro's father and brother come across as a bit more believable in their emotional stuntedness and whatnot, but the core issue remains that I don't think I buy them as anything but a family of caricatures. It ruins the impact of juxtaposing the family's home life with their VR facsimile.

Still, I'm giving this a cautiously intriguing positive preview because there is a lot of potential with this idea. I think I'd love it a lot more if it didn't care so much about being a grim lord action-drama-fantasy mashup and was more concerned about telling stories that didn't feel ripped from a middle-schooler creative writing notebook. That's not the show that Good Night World is going to be, I don't think, but hopefully, it can at least tone things down just a skosh and settle into its own groove before too long.

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Richard Eisenbeis
Rating:

Good Night World seems to be two stories in one. The first is rather boring. It's about a guild of super overpowered gamers in a VRMMO and the events surrounding them. It has all the things you'd expect: flashy magic, mysterious quests, and rival guilds (with a potential guild war in the near future). This is all tied together with lighthearted scenes of the guild members acting as a found family and, for all rights and purposes, playing house.

Then we get the second story—the tragic tale of a shut-in teen who spends all his days in the aforementioned VRMMO. His mother is absent, his brother is the golden child, and his father is focused more on his job than on family. He hates the real world and everything in it. He spends every waking (and sometimes sleeping) moment in-game—to the point where he is basically an emaciated husk.

Of course, the twist is that both of these stories are about the same group of people—though unbeknownst to them. Taichiro, our protagonist, is suffering from a massive inferiority complex when it comes to his brother. Meanwhile, his brother, Asuna, is suffering from a lack of affection regardless of his merits; no matter how good he does in school or life, no one seems to care. Lastly, their father is seemingly a workaholic—one who knows he's messed up his children's lives and feels guilty for it but can't seem to get out of his own way and make things right.

All of them are suffering but instead of working on improving their family life, they all escape to a new, idealistic one inside a game. They would rather have a superficial family relationship where they are safe from getting hurt than put in the hard work needed to build a strong one in the real world.

It's a decent hook for a series—especially with the real-world portions of the show and how they directly contrast with similar scenes in the VRMMO. The real issue with the show is that all the stuff outside of the family that has to do with the VRMMO—the guilds, the quests, the politics—is universally boring. This is a show that could very much go either way depending on what it chooses to focus on. But as for this first episode alone, it's safe to say it's a rather solid one.

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Rebecca Silverman
Rating:

Good Night World gives the impression of wanting to be more than it is, at least in the moment of the first episode. There are plenty of hints at the darkness of at least one of the players' lives – that opening shot of a bloody cardboard box surrounded by crows is anything but reassuring, and the sheer horror of Taichiro/Ichi's room smacks of both neglect and despair on a couple of levels. Combined with the too-cheery happy families vibe of the Akabane Family's interactions, it comes perilously close to being too on the nose with its themes and symbolism. It works, sure, but is it interesting?

I'm not entirely sure that it is. The idea of combining a standard VRMMO storyline with a dysfunctional family that, unbeknownst to them, is also a highly functional guild/family isn't a bad one, and it certainly does the job of showing how it can be easier to interact with semi-faceless strangers online than with the people right in front of us. There are also enough none-to-subtle hints throughout the episode that let us know the true identities of the players, from the sound of footsteps leaving Asuna's bedroom after AAAAA logs off to the information that Shiro is going to be hospitalized shortly before Asuna tells Taichiro the same thing. And the fact that Asuna can't reach the mom? Putting that one together is a little more difficult, but the end reveal is still hardly astounding.

If the story is told well enough, that might not matter. Every family is different, so nothing says this modern version of the "family camping trip that turns into a survival narrative" couldn't work. But something about this episode doesn't quite work, for me at least, and I think it's the attempts to create a dual narrative where both the real world and the world of the game PLANET are equally important. Who are the guild called The Pirates? Why should we care that they're gunning for the Akabane Family? And is the whole myth of the Black Bird, an endgame item, going to pull everything together? The VRMMO parts are trying, but they're such a trope in and of themselves that it's hard to get a good sense of how this will play out.

That could be a draw – certainly, enough questions have been raised that it would make watching episode two feel much more urgent. But the way the plot unfolds feels like it's trying too hard for me, although I could see this being one of those premiers that I think about and go pick back up later.

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Nicholas Dupree
Rating:

I wasn't really sure what to make of this show up to the last minute or so of the premiere. Until then, it felt like two very different shows stapled together. One, the story of a miserable shut-in trying to escape his deteriorating home life through a simulated one in an MMO. The other, a multi-front war in that MMO involving dozens of characters scheming for some big grand prize promised to whoever beats the game's final raid boss. Both were compelling in their own right but felt pretty incongruous, right until the last-minute twist squared the circle.

Even before that twist, there is something to Ichi's drama, even as it creeps toward the melodramatic. We don't know the exact situation of his family, but you get the sense that things have been terrible for a very long time. Ichi's been a shut-in for six years and physically recoils whenever he has to see his father or brother. His dad tries to bridge their divide through small talk and even gets a bit of reciprocation before an angry outburst leaves them more miserable. There's a lived-in tension between them that tells you all you need to know about Ichi's edgelord gamer persona and highlights his far warmer relationship with the "Akabane" family. Solid character writing does a lot to back up the premise.

On the other side of things, the VRMMO plot is a lot less emotionally compelling but has some fun ideas and characters. There's a lot of humor to these large factions of Organized Gamers taking their MMO stuff way too seriously and declaring war on this unassuming quartet of weirdos who are more content playing house than planning raids. Introducing all these characters takes up too much time, but I can't deny that it scratched the itch left by Log Horizon in my brain. The biggest issue, however, was how disconnected it felt from Ichi's personal drama and the Akabane family.

Thankfully, the final reveal quells that issue pretty succinctly. I won't spoil it here – though it's not hard to predict if you're looking for it – but it's the right kind of twist that makes the preceding episode more engaging and interesting in hindsight. It immediately gives more gravitas to our established characters, brings up a lot of interesting questions for the show to dig into, and brings the disparate elements of this episode together in a surprisingly elegant way. It's the perfect hook to get you into a series, and since Netflix has dropped the whole thing at once, it might make for a good binge-watch before the rest of the season gets underway.

My one major misgiving is that it's being produced by NAZ, a studio that has... let's say, a suboptimal track record. While this first episode looked pretty good – involving some nice cuts and carefully considered direction – I have 0 faith that it'll remain that way. I've yet to see a show from this studio that didn't start melting by episode four, and I don't expect that trend to stop once we get into any MMO battles. Still, what's here in this first episode is really good, and it's enough for me to keep going to see if it can keep this up.