Forum - View topicThis Week in Anime - What's the Recipe for a Good Isekai?
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Minos_Kurumada
Posts: 1190 |
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"Isekai" it's just a setting, a way to place MC into an unfamiliar scenario to trigger the the plot, a plot its made of 3 parts: Goal, Urgency and Stakes.
Example: Hero must save the princess (Goal) before the the Demon Lord (Urgency) eats her (Stakes). A setting its just that, you can do something with it or not, an example of a plot that does nothing with its setting would be The Faraway Paladin, Will is yet to do something with the fact that he was isekaied. Bookworm its an example of an isekai enterally dependant of the fact that Main has all that knowledge of the modern world and without it there would be no plot, since Main's Goal it's recreating a process from said world. Thus, a good isekai needs a good Goal, a good Urgency, good Stakes and interesting characters that make sense to navigate them, just like any other history out there. Konosuba and Harem in the Labirint both have the most by-the-numbers "This is totally an JRPG world" setting, jet, everybody loves Konosuba because people loves the characters and plot, the world its secondary (its nice to have a cool world though). |
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MarshalBanana
 Posts: 5522 |
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Well, the best Isekai, is Magical Shopping Arcade Abenobashi. So just take elements from that show and rework them, and you should get a good Isekai.
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non8noninfinite
Posts: 26 |
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The Weakest Tamer, unfortunately, cannot remove the "Ivy being a reincarnated person from the other world" aspect, as the intrigue of the main plot is related to spoiler[people like Ivy with "other world memories or other world skills".]
Ivy being a person with memories of past life is the MacGuffin no.1 of this series. MacGuffin no.2 is "the mystery of Sora being a very special slime". I'm a reader of the original WN, and can confirm that this series is a heart-warming adventure of a girl growing up while also being a MacGuffin chase story (the author drops hints in every volume!). My only concern is that this is planned to be a 1-cour anime and the really interesting events start from volume 3 of the LN. LN volume 1 and especially 2 are plot-heavy enough to make a full cour. |
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garfield15
 Posts: 1535 |
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Wrong Way to Use Healing Magic surprised me too at how actually fun it was. I didn't even think about the fact that "main character actually freaking training" was part of the enjoyment factor until reading this
It's all Bakarina's fault. Though to be accurate, they were already common in the LN space for a while. They're just starting to infest the anime space now and yeah, we have absolutely reached saturation on it
The web/light novel market has become particularly incestuous when it comes to concepts over the past decade |
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Andrew Cunningham
 Posts: 527 Location: Seattle |
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Ishura's whole gimmick is that everyone's a protagonist; Soujiro is but the first, and probably not even all that high up in the rankings. Only a few of the characters are from off world. The novels are primarily preoccupied with the politics of having characters so powerful they represent a constant threat to civilization; the massive scale of the action only serves to sell how scary they all are.
Naturally, the anime is conveying none of that...wish they could have found a better team for it, because I feel like even a low end production could still have turned out better than this one. |
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Spastic Minnow
 Bargain HunterExempt from Grammar Rules  Posts: 4634 Location: Gainesville, FL |
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Watching 6 ( though they could dwindle)
Ashura... Not even the concept intrigued me. Didn't even bother with the first episode Instant Death... icky, got a little over halfway Wedding Rings... should be my thing, I like Isekai and Harem shows... just horrible execution. I just feel bad for all the cast and the staff. I did get through 2 episodes. The rest are fine to good so far. Tsukimichi is new to me too (watched the first episode in the dead zone week), so the extra season makes that the best of this season's airing Isekai. |
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rudhy
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I remember when the Pokemon anime producers acknowledged that they "reset" the series every few years - as opposed to character growth or narrative progression - in order to regularly onboard new kids getting old enough to play the games, watch the TV show and buy the merchandise. By the time one batch of kids figured out that the status quo was never going to change, they would age out of the target demo of the TV series and get replaced with new ones.
The same thing is going on with isekai's delivering power fantasies, pretty girls, self-inserts and "life just isn't fair" year after year. The primary market is Japanese preteen and young teen boys. When they turn 12 and graduate from Doraemon and the other kodomo stuff, it is "new to them" and they can't get enough of it. By the time they get tired of it, they've aged out of the demo. So the real issue isn't isekai. It is what the target market likes and wants. So whatever else becomes popular, the same things that you don't like about isekai are just going to get transported to that new genre. I guess the upshot is that the shonen anime industry isn't built for adults - and especially western adults - to watch year after year for 25 years. It is for Japanese juveniles to enjoy during a specific time in their lives and then move on. So using the standards that we use to evaluate western entertainment for adults like the Phoebe Waller-Bridge and Emerald Fennell stuff that wins awards isn't going to work because 13 year olds aren't looking for that type of originality, complexity or subversiveness. So yes, western adult anime viewers love Bocchi the Rock, Banana Fish, Lycoris Recoil and The Executioner and Her Way of Life. And here is an example of what we think of something that is massive with the primary demo like My Hero Academia: https://www.animefeminist.com/feature-gender-inequity-hero-academia/ which is fine. But how long is an industry that needs to appeal to an ongoing cohort of preteen and young teen boys to survive going to last if it makes shows designed to appeal to adult westerners, or even to split the difference? |
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encrypted12345
Posts: 728 |
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While premises are definitely important, I'm a firm believer that you can make practically any premise work as long as the execution is solid. Premise is more important in attracting a specific audience than determining the quality of a story (though it's fair enough to say some premises are harder to execute well than others).
In any case, Villainess isekai are bizarre in that they are based on an otome game formula that doesn't really exist. There's some basis for the formula in shoujo manga, but it's still weird for those villainess stories to act like there's a popular subcategory of otome games that involves a heroine oppressed by a haughty female rival that manages to get her just deserts. That's not really the case. While the West doesn't get a lot of otome games, the ones that have been localized are pretty representative of the genre as a whole. |
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Joe Mello
 Posts: 2316 Location: Online Terminal |
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While I understand that any review has biases, I do think the combo of genre fatigue and the Damoclesic? sword of "Literally Too Much Anime" (both real and understandable) blurred the judgement of at least one of the series.
I'm not disagreeing with Fluffy Paradise not being a masterpiece and it would be much more interesting if it was actually an attempt to heal a generation of trauma caused by Shou Tucker, but as our heroine runs off to go pet a creature perceived as a monster to everyone else in the shot, the anime at least shows you how this child's task of judging humanity might play out. That's not nothing. Although if I want to see a story of a girl judging humanity in a high fantasy setting I should just pop in my Scrapped Princess Blu-Rays 
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murgleis1
Posts: 44 |
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Ishura's second episode was a big improvement on the first, showcasing the wider world and laying the foundation for the actual story being told I think it is going to be a blast, assuming it gets more than 12 or 13 episodes eventually to tell the story.
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a_Bear_in_Bearcave
Posts: 551 Location: Poland |
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Isekai aren't just for kids - the reason that overworked salaryman or office lady are such common protagonists, in fact more common than high school students as self-insert characters, and the reason why "kicked out of my party despite being its important member crucial to party's success" is so popular despite not being isekai is because it offers those tired, overworked office drones who barely have free time for themselves after overtime at abusive black company an escapist fantasy about ditching that shitty life and getting new, much better one. Or, in of "kicked out of party", it's basically fantasy of your abusive boss suffering horrible consequences for firing you, because you actually were important and valuable employee all the time, and now you have better life on your own - a fantasy, because Japan is pretty awful when it comes to job mobility, with still common view that workers who don't "tough it out" and jump jobs are disloyal. In other words, this isn't at all about preteens and young teen boys, it's about providing usually simplistic escapist fantasy for people of all ages who are unsatisfied with their lives, but are taught that trying to change your life for better is disloyal and sign of character weakness. It's not like lowest common denominator genres for adult are something new and exclusive to Japan - soap operas or Harlequin romances, or B-movies are adult oriented despite being usually low quality. |
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Sven Viking
Posts: 1043 |
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Although it was largely improved by immediately forgetting it had the isekai tag and just telling a general fantasy story imho. Agreed that Healing Magic is actually pretty good so far just by not being badly written. I actually like the genre overall, but unfortunately it’s largely made up of authors incestuously remixing elements of previous genre works without having enough outside knowledge or life experience to add much that’s meaningful, so like an AI training on its own output the quality degrades over time rather than building into something better. As an example, one of the better elements of Healing Magic — that multiple characters with actual personalities are isekaied together — is basically just a partial throwback to what used to be common in much earlier isekai like The Chronicles of Narnia. It also probably doesn’t help that it’s often inspired by the types of video games that don’t have much of a plot or characters with any complex purpose. Older fantasy anime were more often inspired by pen and paper RPGs or epic fantasy novels that provided more to work from. |
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Hal14
 Posts: 727 Location: Heart of africa |
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Older fantasy anime were absolutely inspired by vidoe games like Dragon quest/warrior, which were pretty loose on plot. And being inspired by pen and paper RPGs dosn't result in a better recieved work. For example, Goblin slayer is unambiguous about its DnD inspirations. It really just comes down to execution, not the premise or tropes. Danmachi stands out because it's a good execution of the video game/ adventurer guild tropes that are regularly derided in isekai. |
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oilers2007
Posts: 130 |
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I think this kind of thinking is a large fallacy because most adult westerners love the exact same thing as Japanese audiences do. I don't like the notion of east VS west because most anime loving adults like the same thing and most of the western naysayers are in their own little minority. When you adapt series to appeal to adult westerners you get The Rising of the Shield Hero, one of the shows that anti-isekai people seem to dislike the most. Sword Art Online and Mushoku Tensei are also some of the biggest franchises in the west as well as Japan. And despite not being an isekai, the linked My Hero Academia is also huge in the west with adult fans. I wouldn't say any one website is representative of what "we" think of shows. I'm not also sure why shows like Bocchi the Rock, Banana Fish, and Lycoris Recoil were brought up because those were huge in Japan as well. The recipe for a good isekai is relatively simple: it has stuff the viewers like in it. Not everyone will like everything, but the vast majority of fans who companies rightfully listen and should definitely cater to do so those are the ones that get big. That includes the power fantasies, pretty girls, and other content that that a small minority of people might object to but it's what the primary fanbase enjoys so it's what people ask for. |
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AsleepBySunset
Posts: 244 |
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I just don't think this is a valid comparison at all. I've only experience DQ through cultural osmosis, but my understanding is it uses a sort of stock "maou"/"hero's journey" type plot, and influenced anime are influenced by the PLOT of DQ. Whereas isekai anime tend to have pretty blatant diagetic references to everything from class systems, levelling, stat selection, overlevelling, end game and early game areas, npcs, and so on, in fact often these are the central gimmick of the entire story. This isn't comparable at all to a slightly cod anime with a demon king villain. Before isekai, most anime outside of trapped in video game stories and direct video game adaptions really didn't have these videogame-isms. And don't get me wrong here, these videogameisms in fantasy anime are bad. They take you out of the story and world building and instead you start to consider the world from a ... game design perspective and start to wonder if it would be fun to play (often the answers no). It's like if you're watching a cartoon and there are clear in text tieins to real world toylines based on the property. People, or at least, apparantly only me, watch fantasy anime in part because they want to experience a fantasy world and videogameisms immediately break that (forgive the cliche) suspension of disbelief. I also watch fantasy anime for the plot, and isekai anime tend to be crap in that department too. A character wandering through a dungeon he's overlevelled for in episode 10 or so is not a plot. (God I hate death march so much). The only forgivable isekai is Bookworm. |
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