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This Week in Anime - Are This Season's Isekai Anime Any Good?

Minos_Kurumada wrote:

Anyway, I am of the opinion that iseka its on its last legs and its going to be replaced with the "spelled from the hero's party" genera.

Even the "kicked out of the hero's party" stories are usually confused with isekai*. How often in the announcement articles for these are the second or third posts explaining that "this is not an isekai". Even here it's happening.
Currently the fantasy anime genre could be divided into: isekai vs. non-isekai, and even the non-isekai get confused for isekai. This stuff isn't going away anytime soon.

*Several actual isekai like Shield hero, Arifureta, Wordsmith, even Wrong way to use Healing magic, all have elements of "kicked out of the hero's party".

Like this article does, to go back to the granddaddy of isekai... well, not of all isekai, but a lot of the modern kind of fantasy video game isekai that people complain about, one of the big compliments I'll give Sword Art Online (season 1) in retrospect is that Kirito is OP, but it's not just because he's a gamer and knows gamer skillz, but that he's been beta testing SAO itself and knows a lot of how that particular game functions (and because the anime has some unfortunate time skips where he levels up a bunch off screen between episodes). Too many modern isekai just go the route of "well, you know video games, right? Well what if your stats were busted as hell from the minute you popped into your new world, wouldn't that be cool?"

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And the gag where he changes his character model to the fem settings is also playing around with video game mechanics and makes me hopeful that the harem elements of this isekai won't be as painfully vanilla and heteronormative as most of its contemporaries.

I've said it before in the preview thread, but Chillin' isn't a harem.

I always found hilarious how the best isekai are the ones that either parody the genera or reject every trope an isekai should have.

Why not just use the umbrella term "JRPG fantasy" instead of isekai. When people criticize your typical modern fantasy anime, its those that have stat screens, voice prompts, skills, levels, half-assed world building with typical monsters like slimes, goblin, orc, etc. All of those can be seen on your typical RPG game.

There is also GameLit, which is when they are in a game. For instance, Jumanji and Ready Player One are GameLit.

I remember you saying that before, and that's reassuring, but I think we can forgive people assuming otherwise based on the first two episodes not pointing in any other direction.

I was really praying for Black Butler to get the same day English dub treatment but I guess I'm just lucky that they are producing one at all

Minos_Kurumada did write:

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I always found hilarious how the best isekai are the ones that either parody the genera or reject every trope an isekai should have.

How so? You mention Konasuba, and that's one. I wouldn't say Re:Zero rejects every trope by any means, but enough, I guess, that it might fall into what you're talking about.

However, Mushoku Tensei is about as bog standard of an Isekai as there is (mostly because it's been ripped-off so much) and it's arguably the greatest isekai anime ever. There are many superior isekai that play around at the edges with standard plot devices, such as Slime (he's a monster!) or Overlord (he's the villain!) or Ascendance of a Bookworm, but I would hardly say any of those "reject every trope an isekai should have." Even The Eminence in Shadow, while partly a parody of isekai tropes (much moreso than Konasuba) is equally as much a celebration of those tropes as well. Do you have any other examples?

Any isekai that grants you a harder life than the one you had before or makes you tell yourself "I want a refund" then goes against the basic trope of the genre.
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