Isekai was a thing before the word was popularized and normalized in the west to describe the subgenre of fantasy. I’d argue The Neverending Story is clearly an isekai, for example. And there’s been great conventional anime isekais in the past, such as Vision of Escaflowne.
What I’m sick of is the “oh this is like a video game and the NPCs can be manipulated because they’re just programs susceptible to cheat codes” gimmick. It’s gross and I find it intolerable to follow any “hero” that dehumanizes other characters under any excuse to build a virtual capitalist empire with an infinite harem. It’s :epstein: tier :brainworms: to me.
I don’t want to automatically reject something I hear about because I hear it’s an “isekai” but all too often it means “another video game world with NPCs to exploit!” :capitalist-laugh:
What an empty sort of metagamey victory to fantasize about. How alienating and sad for such “heroes,” even if they still deserve :gulag: in general.
LitRPG can be good but them merging with Isekai really fucking brought out the worst in both genres — if the story isn’t about ‘oooh wow this is like that one video game i played…i know how to powergame this civilization into basically becoming my sex slaves’ it is always something equivalent to ‘i was put in this world and i’m the only one who actually knows how to use these spells/skills/game mechanics that this civilization i was dropped into has been apparently living with for centuries!’
Like fine, you wanna throw a goddamn Status screen at me out of the blue with numbers, skill descriptions, and damage equations - fine. I will happily flip past that because god knows it’ll be mentioned again when its actually needed. Just actually make the story about something other than ‘wow this is a world with skills and stats exactly like an RPG!’
The only isekai/LitRPG stories I’ve read/watched in the last five/six years that have been actually decent are: The Salamanders (this one’s just pure litrpg and honestly more about trauma, friendship, etc with a ‘teenagers at a school to learn how to be dungeon explorers & live in a fantasy world where you can ‘level up’’ setting), Wandering Inn (more isekai than litrpg but actually well written for being a web-serial. still suffers from the cliche ‘wow people from earth are so much stronger than literal world-powers’ and ‘we still have phones/technology and can repair/charge them with magic’ but thankfully the author has avoided the worst of it), and The Gods Are Bastards (which gets way more praise than it should, but was genuinely super well written with an interesting cast of characters and worldbuilding…up until the author decided that they were gonna have the kitsune and dryads both be the races created by…drumroll the people from earth who created the whole world and essentially became the first gods :very-intelligent: there’s even a light-sabre that gets used!! wow!! thankfully the author put it on a never-ending hiatus pretty soon after that.)
All that to say, isekai/litrpg sucks and I read a ton of them :ursus-hexagonia:
I wrote a third of a story about a :freeze-gamer: who was at the launch of the world’s most anticipated VRMMO 100 years in the future. I put numbers on the power levels, the movement speed, and the in-game currency. I think going full LitRPG is boring and it takes away from a character’s ability to be creative. The narrative is in first person and it’s portrayed like, “I know about all the spell descriptions, damage calculations, and optimizations, but I’m not going to bore you with it. What I want to talk about is the interpersonal drama in my hardcore guild and the streamers that associate with us.”
It is a weird evolution. People noticed plot holes and wrote fanfiction where they munchkined the powers stem and that was more fun to than the original work. So instead of writing better worlds they just got in on the fun of making fun of their own terrible worlds.
How long will it be before one of those euphoric “why don’t Trek captains just weaponize the transporters all the time?” types makes an isekai where the genius ego-insert uses transporter technology to dominate the universe and make infinite clones of himself? :warf-wtf:
I am pretty sure I already read one of those.
The aliens that did that just got weird with it though. They realized it was all pointless and watching them be silly little dudes made the humans get depressed and give up. The other races just got silly with it for fun as well and made fun of us for being all serious. It did explain how everything in star trek ToS was so dumb though. Most the aliens we met were larping, and we were good npcs for their games
I feel like this particular problem is Konosuba’s fault. It just got really popular as a video game isekai and any anime that becomes popular defines its genre for the next decade or so.
Nah it was definitely Sword Art Online.
I guess that doesn’t count for me because that’s a literal video game and not even technically an isekai. Video games should have video game mechanics lol
