Forum - View topicI kind of wish anime inside a video game world weren't lumped together with isekai
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P€|\||§_|\/|ast@
 Posts: 3498 Location: IN your nightmares |
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I realize I really can't do anything about the meaning of the Japanese word isekai, I'm just voicing my opinion that isekai should only refer to anime about characters being teleported to an alternate world. Primary settings within a (VR)MMO game world is really popular in manga and anime, and it's one of my favorite genres or themes. But it seems like the term isekai is vague enough and the MMO genre is specific enough that it really needs its own genre classifier.
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Alan45
 Village Elder Posts: 10013 Location: Virginia |
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People here do try to separate them. Just look at any review where the reviewer makes a mistake in identifying the type show it is.
 The problem is that they can be so similar, using the same tropes that it can be difficult to tell them apart.
So I'm a Spider, So What? is isekai, but it uses leveling up and game mechanics complete with a voice of god giving regular status updates. How not to Summon a Demon Lord states up front that he is in the world of his chosen game, but then works as a isekai from that point on. It could very easily revert to a caught in a game story at some later point. And then you have something like Is it Wrong to try to Pick Up Girls in a Dungeon? that is simple fantasy but could easily be mistaken for a caught in a game show. It doesn't help that so many of the isekai stories don't use the the MC's origin much after the initial explanations. On the extremes, there is some clarity. Sword Art Online is clearly caught in a game and Isekai Izakaya is clearly isekai, but for a lot of the shows there is a lot of overlap. If you want to make distinctions, isekai can be separated into categories depending on their being teleported or transported in their current body or being reincarnated via a traumatic encounter with truck-kun. I'm not sure what such a distinction would accomplish and then there is Konosuba which falls in both categories. Really, with the current glut of such shows, there is so much variation in quality that making such distinctions is counter productive. You said you prefer the caught in a game shows, however, a well written isekai with game mechanics would probably be a more satisfying watch than a poorly done pure game show. If you read the reviews and follow the discussions about the shows even a bit, it is not that hard to tell them apart. |
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Blood-
Bargain Hunter Posts: 24131 |
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I definitely consider "trapped in a game" shows to be a subgenre of isekai. Somebody should come up with a snappy term for them... comkai?
As a non-gamer, I have to admit I prefer my isekai straight up without any game elements. |
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P€|\||§_|\/|ast@
Posts: 3498 Location: IN your nightmares |
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To me trapped (or not necessarily trapped - just the primary setting is the game world) in a game is kind of like an evolved subgenre that owes its popularity to the way we think of video games and simply because traditional isekai is has been done and redone so many times.
To clarify what I mean by the way we think of video games; rather than simply being a form of entertainment, their degree of realism is indicative of a desire by gamers to use video games as an escape from our boring familiar world and enter a world of danger, adventure, fantasy and really percieve your game avatar as another you not tied down by reality. I think this development I mentioned lends to many opportunities for interesting content in fiction and popular media, especially anime. This is why I feel isekai is not a satisfactory classifier of something in popular culture which, based on my observations above, didn't really grow out of isekai but a bit more independently. |
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Beltane70
 Posts: 3970 |
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I think that was one of the best points in Aura Battler Dunbine, was the fact that the MC and a few other characters' origin play an important part of the story. It's also one of the few Isekai that I can think of where characters from the other world also come into our own. |
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Top Gun
 Posts: 4788 |
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This is admittedly a genre I try to avoid in general, but looking in from the outside, I think it's difficult to make a distinction because many of the actual alternate-world settings tend to use Generic RPG Game Mechanics as their foundation, with leveling and dungeon-crawling and all that jazz. On the flipside, most of the trapped-in-a-game series use a pretty bog-standard Generic Swords-and-Sorcery Fantasy setting, so the two tend to unavoidably blend together. While I'm far from a fan of SAO, I do give the Gun Gale Online arc a lot of credit for going with a different game genre (though admittedly it was the one part of the series where no one was actually trapped in said game). One thing a lot of the more classic to-another-world series--your Escaflownes and Dunbines and Twelve Kingdoms and such--had in common is that they treated their settings as fully-realized worlds without falling back on something more gamey in nature.
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Beltane70
Posts: 3970 |
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If it’s a case of the characters being trapped inside the game world and can’t get out if it, like Log Horizon, I consider it an isekai.
I certainly wouldn’t call Bofuri an isekai since the characters are merely playing the game and are seen outside of it in their normal lives. |
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