Reasons to watch Isekai!

This one has been floating around in my “to post” folder for a few months now…  Let’s just say it helps to actually take a peek in that folder every now and again!

Either way, it’s funny as h*ll.  And it’s not wrong  And I’m looking forward to the second seasons of both OP Slime Genocider and Literal Vending Machine.

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In other news, Summer 2024 is winding down (just watched my first finale), so look for my anticipation post next week.  (It ain’t long, it’s a very slender looking season.)

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So, what are you thoughts on Isekai!

21 thoughts on “Reasons to watch Isekai!”

    1. The Vending Machine show is one of the better Isekai’s actually. It’s light watching, doesn’t always make sense if you think too much (which you shouldn’t anyway), but it’s charming and fun. The vending machine can only communicate with his pre-programmed phrases; I expected them to shirk that somewhere down the road, but they never did. This show must have been written by a vending machine otaku. Watch if you want light entertainment. If you don’t like the first episode, you won’t like the show. What you get is what you see, here.

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  2. I’ve said it before, that should be “OP Bookworm”. I’m looking forward to new seasons of both it and OP Loli.

    As far as I can tell, the only other one of these that I’ve seen is the OP Macca’s Employee and it was, you know, all right.

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    1. Well, the first season of OP Macca’s Employee was pretty good. I noped out in the middle of the second season when it became more about the politics of the Angelic and Demonic realms.

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  3. I know most of them, though for some I’m not sure.

    For Loli-Harem I could only think of Black Bullet (which is not an isekai in the portal-fantasy sense); googling tells me it’s Deathmarch, a show so boring I dropped it before I could realise it was going to be a loli harem.

    I have no idea who the second gigachad is: looks too familiar and registers just as a type for me (example: Drifters?).

    The baby is unfamiliar, too: googling tells me it’s something called “The Beginning after the End”, which I’ve never heard of. It’s a manga, apparently; no idea if there’s an anime (I’m not aware of one). I’ve seen a couple of babies recently, so I wasn’t sure if I’d seen this one in particular.

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    1. Have to say, there’s a number I don’t know either. (Who the heck is OP Sword Daddy?) But it’s spot on/funny for the ones I do know.

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      1. OP Sword Daddy comes from an anime that’s literally called something like “reincarnated as a Sword”. He basically adopts a cat girl (who wields him and is actually the real protagonist story-wise; he’s more the mentor). I suppose the might have made the list before the anime came out? (I remember the sword looking quite differently). I enjoyed the show more than I expected, but not enough to really mention it.

        Here’s the anime from left to right, as far as I know (some I had to refresh via googling):

        So I’m a Spider, So what

        That Time I was Reincarnated as a Slime

        Overlord

        Saga of Tanya the Evil

        ?The World’s Finest Assassassin gets Reincarnated in Another World?

        ??????Drifters??????

        The Devil is A Parttimer

        I’ve been Killing Slimes….

        Deathmarch in another World Rhapsody

        The Rising of the Shield Hero

        How Not to Summon a Demon Lord

        The Hero is Overpowered but Overly Cautious

        Re-incarnated as a Sword

        Ascendence of a Bookworm

        ?The Beginning After the End (If I can trust my google-fu; I can find no anime to this manga)?

        Re:Zero

        Konosuba

        The Eminence in Shadow

        Reborn as a Vending Machine, I Now Wander the Dungeon

        Questionmarks show the degree of uncertainty.

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  4. Ah Isekai. I’ve watched at one time or another most of those ones in the meme. Only two or three of them would I continue to watch now. That Time etc being the primary one. The Saga of Tanya the Evil being another. I jumped off Konosuba after a couple of episodes of the current series. It just wasn’t funny.

    Another series I would always watch is Mushoku Tensei. Rudeus is one of my favorite flawed and very human anime protagonists. Tsuki ga Michibiku Isekai Douchuu (Moonlit Fantasy) is another regular watch for me.

    One show that I really liked in spite of a few flaws is Shokei Shoujo no Virgin Road (The Executioner and Her Way of Life). Some of the observations the show advanced stay with me whenever I watch an isekai now.

    Every season I do a deep dive into the lower ranked isekai shows just in case there is a hidden gem to be unearthed. Most of the time I come up with dross but every now and then a more interesting show emerges. Three I would recommend from recent times are “Reborn to Master The Blade” (Inglis is fun and the underlying national liberation subtext is interesting), “She Professed Herself The Pupil of the Wiseman” (Dont trip over the plot holes though), and “The Strongest Sage With The Weakest Crest” (Nothing special but I like the cheerful way Matty dispatches those dumbass demons).

    Then there are reverse isekai. Favorites would be Re:Creators, Dead Mount Death Play and maybe one or two others. The recent comedy “A Salad Bowl of Eccentrics” was also worth a watch.

    Where do we draw the line with Isekai? Is Sword Art Online an isekai? I would say Seasons 1 and 2 are not, but season 3 certainly is.

    The list of isekai to avoid is pretty long too. Some high on my avoid list are “In Another World With My Smartphone”, The above mentioned Death March, and “Demon Lord Retry” (Which somehow got a second series this season), and “In The Land of Leadale”.

    One thing is certain, is that this very flexible plot device is not going away anytime soon.

    PS: And a special shout-out to Truck-Kun. His stirling service as a pivotal protagonist is often ignored. When will he get his own series?

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    1. Given that this list is specifically about the isekai boom from the narou site, mostly inspired by Sword Art Online, I’d definitely say Sword Art Online is an isekai.

      I mean, there’s no Inuyasha, Escaflown, 12 Kingdoms, Now and then/Here and There, El Hazard, Those Who Hunt Elves, Jurassic Tripper… The genre is way older than this list suggests.

      Our taste tends to converge on the good shows, but deverge on the not-so-good shows. I didn’t have much fun with Reborn to Master the Blade or Pupil of the Wiseman, though I made it through both. On the other hand, I quite enjoyed In Another World with My Smart Phone (it’s the quivalent of the first drawing of your three-year-old, which you pin to the fridge, for the sheer naive enthusiasm – which wears off…).

      I don’t mind isekais, actually. There are quite a few mid-tier shows I enjoy but not enough to talk about them or even bring them up outside a context like this. An example would be [i]By the Grace of the Gods[/i], where a guy gets reborn as a kid, tames slimes, and uses them… to open a laundrette of all things. (There’s [i]some[/i] fighting, but it’s really not the focus.)

      I’m glad to see Tsuki ga Michibiku mentioned. Love this show.

      Shows to stay away from? On this list, it’s Death March (boring). Other than Master of Ragnarok (the building of a fascist nation, with a willingly submitting harem – ugh). I don’t like to think of those shows, so I normally don’t.

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        1. Heh, well, I was talking about a bias present in the meme (all post-SAO shows); it’s because of this bias that picking out the main character works so well. (I mean you couldn’t pick out a main character as easily in Escaflown and describe the show just as well. The show’s centered around the Hitomi/Van/Alen triangle.)

          I’m aware of Conneticut Yankee. It’s interesting to ponder how you could expand the isekai genre to literature, mainly because the farther back we go, the genre tends to be merged with exploration stories. Or stories where people happen on hidden places (from the classical utopias to the Lost World and She…). I mean, intuitively, I’d say that Gulliver’s Travels feels like an isekai, while Robinson Crusoe does not – but what’s the difference I sense in terms of genre. Sorry for geeking out here. She is more isekai-like than The Lost World. And so on. But how do I pin down my intuition and how do I describe the genre. What about the Odyssey, where Odysseus passes through wondrous places on his way home?

          There are elements that seem important to isekais, like being trapped, or the world being rather alien…

          None of this really is important for enjoying a show. I’m really just geeking out.

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          1. The older isekai are interesting. I’m currently working my way through Magic Knight Rayearth, and of course I love Escaflowne. Is Inuyasha an isekai? I’d say yes. Is Urusei Yatsura a “reverse isekai”? I think that’s a good indication of why that’s kind of a dumb category, actually. Speaking of Rayearth and CLAMP, is Tsubasa RESERVoir CHRoNiCLE an isekai? I mean, sort of? Is it still isekai when it’s a whole series of different worlds? In that case, Zelazny’s Chronicles of Amber is sort of the ultimate isekai, right? And if Tsubasa, what about ×××HOLiC?

            To me, once they started putting video games into isekai, it all got much less interesting. I tend to prefer ones like Yōjo Senki or Ascendance of a Bookworm. I’m not really a fan of LitRPG, though I did find some interest in Banished from the Hero’s Party, I Decided to Live a Quiet Life in the Countryside, so it’s not a rigid rule.

            Anyway, just musing.

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    2. I generally judge shows individually rather than genre (unless it’s a genre I’ll have nothing to do with, like vampires or zombies). But isekai has so many ways it can go wrong… And so many nowadays are paint-by-tropes (paint by numbers) with all the originality of fast food burger.

      So, when looking at a new isekai, it generally starts off with an already negative score.

      I have seen it proposed that Truk-kun gets his *own* show. I’m not at all sure how that would work… But it might be interesting. (And I loved how Oresuki played with the trope by introducing Bench-kun.)

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      1. It’s always amused me that, although made famous, or infamous perhaps, in isekai-land, Truck-kun was invented in a show that is most definitely not an isekai.

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          1. So, when Magical Princess Minky Momo was first showing, the main advertiser, a toy company called Popy, decided to pull out in the middle of the first season. The show’s studio got word of this and decided to end it with a bang, and the main character first loses her magic powers, then in the next episode (I think) is standing by when a truck transporting toys swerves to miss a boy riding in a toy car and hits her. So, there’s a scene with all of Popy’s products littering the street. I believe those are episodes 45 and 46. Right after they committed to doing this, though, the company was persuaded to continue to fund the show so they ended up resurrecting the character, reincarnating her as the actual child of the couple she’d been magically pretending to be the child of, and the show continued to reach a final episode count of 63, followed nearly a decade later by a second series, with a different Momo, subtitled “Hold Onto Your Dreams”, and then some chapters of a manga of a third Momo, but the third anime was cut short by the creator’s death in 2010. In addition, there were several movies/OVAs, in a couple of which the first two Momos meet up. I recommend the final OVA, “Station of Your Memories” (“Tabidachi no Eki”), especially. The Momo on the train at the beginning is the second Momo, returning (as I understand it) from the funeral of her parents, who died of AIDS-related complications. Such a fun, lighthearted series!

            The first Momo comes from Fenarinarsa, the Land of Dreams in the Sky, the second from Marinarsa, the Land of Dreams Under the Sea, and the third Momo comes from another land, Refinarsa, but I don’t know what that was otherwise going to be called. The first Momo is sometimes called Sky Momo, the second is Sea Momo, and the third was to be called Land Momo. There was also a fourth Momo, the protagonist of the stage musical, who came from Mirrornarsa, the Land of Dreams Beyond the Mirror.

            There’s more to the story, with several earthquakes and other disasters connected by fans to the airing of certain episodes of the series, especially the final, 63rd, episode of the original series. The idea is that Momo, as the Peach Girl (“momo” meaning “peach”), is mystically connected to Momotarō the Peach Boy, the great Japanese hero, resulting in her manifesting great mystical power, and her death on-screen being quite untimely the earthquakes and so forth are a consequence of her anger. This is called “the Curse of Minky Momo“.

            Ugh, sorry for the infodump. I think that Minky Momo is one of the great overlooked anime series, though it is very much of its time in many ways.

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          2. Quick correction, that’s Sky Momo on the train. Not sure why she’s saying that she has to get used to being alone. I’m sure it’s something from the series that I’ve forgotten. The Momo with the star is Sea Momo, and I know that she’s there because she’s returning from her parents’ funeral.

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          3. And a correction to the correction: the Momo on the train is, after all, Sea Momo. She has a heart decoration on her head ribbon. Sky Momo has a star decoration. So, I was right in the first place, and what I’m not sure of is what Sky Momo is doing in the train station, or how Sea Momo lost her magical powers. Of course, I haven’t had the opportunity to watch Sea Momo’s series, Hold on to Your Dreams, only the OVAs.

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