Hashimoto isn’t crazy about his job, or his boss Shirase who always seems to have high standards for all his work, but it pays the bills and he can vent all about it to his online friends in the mobile game “Lia Fáil Online”. One day his online friend proposes going to a meet-up, although not a big one, just meeting up with each other (since they’ve become such close friends online), and after an initial mix-up or two, Hashimoto and Shirase discover that they’re in-game buddies, real-life coworkers!
As someone who plays Genshin Impact on an iPad, I have no idea how these characters are supposed to be playing a mobile game with what looks like a complicated fighting system, much less texting at the same time (I certainly can’t manage doing both at once, thank goodness for stickers in Genshin’s in-game chat). On the one hand, I can accept this bit of fiction as a necessary way to move the story forward (since all of the characters tend to play the game both in the evenings and in short, spontaneous spurts during work breaks throughout the day a.k.a it has to be a mobile phone game) but at the time same, given just how much interaction and relationship growth happens over these chats, I’m a bit hung up on the mechanics of how it manages to work and it kept knocking me out of the story!
Frankly speaking there isn’t a lot to this story anyway so there wasn’t another story element that was able to pick up the slack and keep my attention instead. All three of the main characters are fairly flat and it’s obvious from the get-go (i.e, the title) that Hashimoto and Shirase are going to become not just real-world friends but romantic partners as well and I felt as if a lot of time in this volume was spent twiddling thumbs until the promised inevitabilities happened.
Overall Turns Out My Online Friend is My Real-Life Boss! was just a bit dull. I can and have enjoyed slow burn romances before but only when I’m really invested in the characters (which is the crucial part of all enjoyable romances frankly). The art is also pretty flat and unremarkable, I could buy into the game having a fairly boring avatar system (with how much of the phone’s processing power it must already be using for those fights, clearly the developers had to cut back on something!) but even in the real-life segments nothing ever quite grabbed my eye, I tended to laugh more at the text or context of gags than at anything visual on the page. It’s not a terrible BL read for this Pride season but there are simply many more engaging series out there to pick up instead.