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

Obligatory reminder that SAO is VRMMO, not isekai, and anyone who believes otherwise will be first against the wall when the revolution comes.

Obligatory reminder that SAO is VRMMO, not isekai, and anyone who believes otherwise will be first against the wall when the revolution comes.

Minos_Kurumada wrote:

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. .

So where does SAO fall under this definition? It's a power fantasy but people are also trapped in the game and some even commit suicide out of despair.

I would also argue against some you listed. Main (from Ascendance of bookworm) is constantly pleased with her situation. There are threats and hardships but I bet if she was asked she'd say her new life is both better and worse in some regards. Meanwhile, what about Naofumi (Shield hero)? Is his life better or worse off, since being transported?

Personally, your definition reminds me of when people argue: "This character isn't OP because he struggled that one time!" or "he struggled two times!" Struggles, hardship and consequences are kind of subjective.

Milos:


I'll go instead with the broader (and self-evident) "finding yourself in another world" trope. Certainly being fundamentally a power fantasy is true of a lot of them, but not so much that I'd say offering a non-insert premise like Overlord or Tanya or Re:Zero or Mushoku Tensei marks them as a rejection of isekai's central trope. John Carter falls into the power fantasy thing, but I'm not sure Wizard of Oz or Alice in Wonderland does, and those are just as much isekais as Carter's adventures are.

One guy drinks a horse's brain to make it run faster

...
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?

Isekai and all the various circumstances that have led to its proliferation in the past decade feel like a pig being repeatedly fed its poop, struggling to wring nutrients from its increasingly recycled list of tropes until it starves to death.

Quote:

One guy drinks a horse's brain to make it run faster

Run faster?! Wouldn't that make it, you know, dead?

This got me thinking of what I believe was the first big genre trend to take over the anime industry -- giant robot anime in the '70s. Mazinger Z starts airing in 1972 (very nearly 40 years before SAO S1), it's a smash hit, and within a year and a half the first of its imitators appears. And the peak of this phenomenon? During the second half of 1976, there were… drumroll, please… a whopping eight mecha anime on the air.

Yeah. Eight. And two years later, it was down to three. (Hell, before that, in May 1978, Toushou Daimos was the only one airing.) Gundam 0079 was only the 25th giant robot anime ever. That's what passed for a major phenomenon in the anime industry of the 1970s.

And today, my Narou anime spreadsheet -- tracking a trend that started with Log Horizon in 2013 -- is up to over 100 anime that have been released over the past decade...

A really great isekai would involve ordinary people transported into a fantasy world where they would participate in an epic quest or similar extended plot line - oh wait, I just described Fushigi Yûgi which is the high point of isekai as far as I am concerned.

People want Rudy's life? That's a new one on me. Because a lot of his dual lives, even the second one, sucks. And the idea that Rudy suffers no consequences from his actions is patently ridiculous. The whole story revolves around a character spending an entire second lifetime learning from mistakes and overcoming personal trauma to become a better person. I'd say most of the critics you cite are just people who don't like the show but feel the need to justify it instead of saying, "Yeah, it's not my bag." Sadly, that's a pretty regular thing.

"Isekai" just means "Summoned hero"