I keep seeing this anime advertised everywhere and it actually looks kinda interesting from the promos. I don’t watch a whole lot of anime but I am thinking about checking this one out. Anyone here seen it? If so, any thoughts so far?
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Isekei stuff is getting a bit stale. At first some of the more wonky iterations of the genre were refreshing, but even now those are starting to just be too similar to one another.
Just at a glance, looks like That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime.
Its not bad, but its not unique either. Every season, there’s at least 3 series in which someone, typically a pathetic office worker or NEET, from modern day Japan dies and is brought back in a typical fantasy world where they’re either a human, character from their game, slime, spider, maou, whatever, and becomes ridiculously super powerful. I’d say of those, this one is a little more entertaining than some others.
Oh, and they usually end up with some sort of harem…
If there were a progenitor for the Isekai genre, that would definitely be Sword Art Online. And most anime critics agree that it is not a good anime.
And there are SO MANY rip-offs from it. It is awful.
Nonetheless, there are still some in this genre that are great to watch.
My favorite is Overlord. Even if it has most of the tropes from the genre - like pathetic office worker turned in a super powerful “maou” with a “harem” in a game setting -, the best trait of the series is investing in the secondary characters. They are all unique and, over the course of the story, they all have a chance in the spotlight; even the female characters aren’t there just for the sake of eye candy.
More Penny Parker fanservices?
It would be sad if the community did see SAO as the progenitor of Isekai. My first exposure to the genre was the dot-hack series.
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I know what you mean. There are series far older in the Isekai genre than SAO, such as .Hack, Inu-yasha, Digimon (people often forget that) and Shurato.
Still, most critics agree that SAO launched the recent Isekai trend.
And, as i said, there ar many bad rip-offs. But there are also some good Isekai titles that have little in common with SAO or even subvert its tropes - which reminded me of Konosuba, one of the funniest anime i’ve seen.
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Isekai goes way back. There’s a few big isekai titles from the 90s like El Hazard, Rayearth, and Fushigi Yuugi. Even Inu Yasha is an isekai and Im sure there’s a lot more from the 80s/90s.
I think that because the term isekai wasn’t popularized until recently, a lot of people don’t realize that many classics had the same/similar patterns
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