As ever I find it fascinating reading
@Rui 's first episode reviews in this thread, especially as someone who very very rarely gets around to watching any modern anime and has never seen an actual episode of an isekai show before. Most of the isekai shows sound so shockingly, bizarrely crumby that it just seems deranged that they still apparently dominate the modern anime landscape. It's like, how is this possible? How has this low effort gruel struck such a chord with the anime viewing public that well over a decade later it's still this popular? Are there any signs of its demise on the horizon? Don't people want something better? I know I've asked all these questions before and there's probably no clear answer to them, but as a relative outsider it's really a curious phenomenon. I think I suggested this before, but I can help but feel that isekai's popularity must point to something going terribly wrong in society. Probably an unconscious reaction to the declining Japanese economy as capitalism in its death throes stage is warping society and eating up the space for genuinely thoughtful creativity and feeding people this slop to numb themselves with. Maybe I'm being harsh though, I don't know.
I cannot imagine most of these ever make their money back at this point, but every now and then there's a legitimate mega-hit (you can usually see those coming a mile away) and production committees freak out and throw money at more derivative remixes in the hope of cashing in. I am leery of anything with 'isekai', 'light novel' or 'fantasy' in the description these days because so much of it is low-effort trash, but the reason I keep on persevering is that there are - very occasionally - gems which manage to inject some genuine imagination into the tired premise. I loved Grimgar. I didn't hate The Faraway Paladin. The first season of The Devil is a Part-Timer was good (shame about the rest). More recently, I found No Longer Allowed in Another World perfectly watchable. My partner is shamelessly addicted to That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime. Even the awful villainess subgenre, which I generally hate with a blazing passion, can sometimes turn in silly stuff like I'm in Love with the Villainess. But oh my goodness, there's still so much being made which does absolutely nothing to stand out.
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Even Given the Worthless “Appraiser” Class, I’m Actually the Strongest ep1: This show is so generic that even my isekai apologist friend was sure that he'd already watched it several times before from the title. The key art showing a standard-issue hero with a glowing eye and a bevy of copy-paste cutesy, blushing elf girls around him didn't help. Weirdly, it wasn't actually that bad in spite of everything; it uses the formula where the lead is downtrodden since birth because of the stupid magic/job system in his world. He sets out to be an adventurer anyway (I genuinely cannot see why) and teams up with a pair of jerks who abuse him physically and verbally with no remorse - nothing new there, then, but when he's ditched mid-dungeon he ends up suffering through a series of events which result in his fortunes training dramatically (and his lousy 'appraise' skill to summon pop-up tooltips gets a power-up). So there's nothing original to be found, but the production values seem quite good. It feels as though the staff behind the anime are at least trying to present the material in an engaging way, so it comes across as one of the better examples of this cursed subgenre. I'm still not going to bother continuing because the first episode did nothing to convince me that there's anything more to be mined from this overused formula, but if you like violent shows about a bullied adventurer getting tougher then at least this one is relatively well-presented.
Welcome to Japan, Ms. Elf! ep1: Am I the only one who thinks it always sounds stilted in English when shows translate 'san' as a formal title like this? Anyway, I was moderately impressed by this show because I thought that it was going to be much worse than it was. The isekai elements are handled by having the hero (an adult office worker) secretly slip into the other world whenever he's asleep, so he's leading a double life but not at all weird about it. There are unfortunate allusions to a game-like menu system because the lead spelled his character name wrong (which means that people refer to him by a cuter version of his name for no reason), but aside from that weird quirk those elements aren't important and could have been cut out entirely without affecting anything. On top of that, his friendship with the local elf girl in the other world is genuinely healthy and normal, which is almost unprecedented in this genre! The lead has the basic social skills to get on well with most of the denizens of his dream life, in fact, and barely annoyed me at all until he stupidly crossed paths with a dragon and didn't seem to care that the elf girl by his side probably wasn't going to respawn the next day like he would. (Why doesn't anyone ever care about anything in this kind of show?)
Anyway, as a result of this misadventure she ends up in modern day Japan with the hero, so the pair make the best of it and hang out to enjoy the local attractions. There's still plenty of contrived lameness to be found when the focus shifts back to the real world: why did he go out blindly bra shopping for her (how would that even work?) while she sat around at home naked, and why was the only outfit he could find for her to wear a sexy, cropped sailor suit? Did nobody consider that she could simply wear some of his clothes? She looked so much like a cosplayer at that point that they may as well not have bothered to hide her ears. But this is ultimately all just an excuse to show off Japanese culture, food and locations to a local audience through the foreign perspective of a cute elf girl, so it's kind of funny that it still navigates the fantasy/isekai elements better than a lot of more serious series.
Babanba Banban Vampire ep1: A sitcom about a vampire who is watching over a teenaged boy with eager anticipation, awaiting the day he turns eighteen so that he can finally consume him. Unfortunately, the boy is just starting high school, and as the vampire has a strong preference for his meals to be virgins, it falls to him to watch over his future dinner to make sure that he doesn't make impure life choices. It's obviously problematic but also pretty funny, with unsexy male nudity at every opportunity and a refreshing disrespect for stereotypical gender roles. Everyone other than the vampire is drawn to be relatively plain-looking which makes his ethereal prettiness stand out. Weirdly, the vampire is actually Mori Ranmaru, Oda Nobunaga's famously loyal retainer, which adds extra layers of complexity to all of the nonsense. I'll give it a second episode.
R
I get what you mean about these titles, but tbf I'm usually not the first to watch any new anime that comes out as I will typically wait for an entire season to air and then look at critics' and audiences' overall opinion of the series before deciding whether to watch or not. I have questions about the sheer volume of these types of shows that we're getting, but feel as though I often don't get around to watching even non-isekai modern anime that I'd probably love, like I haven't become a grumpy curmudgeon that wants the new shows to get off my lawn, I just am trying to work through a backlog of older things that I didn't get around to yet, my point being that I feel a bit of a hypocrite wagging my finger at modern isekai if I'm not really watching a lot of just released anything isekai or no? I guess this stuff has taken the place of some of the less inspired shonen action and harem romcom titles we used to be inundated with?
