General Isekai Thread

that might be because of both the format (Manga is a different beast from prose, as SAO can attest) and the passion of the authors (wriing just for a paycheck is not really the kind of thing that would incite the kind of passion needed to make a quality work. That said I will admit that passion alone is not a substitution for talent.)

I'll never understand why authors do that. If you want your character to make friends, there are so many other ways. I'd much rather the old " carriage getting attacked by monsters" trope than slavery.

Also, dunno why Goblin Slayer is being put into the same category as Mushoku, Redo, Shield Hero or Re:Monster. He's the only one there who isn't a rapist or a slaver.

Either they have no idea how to make actual friends or they make their protagonists such losers that they have no idea how to actually talk to other people. Or the work is vaguely misanthropic and everyone else just sucks.

Because Goblin Slayer's writing is bad.

just as likely, they are incels and therefore write their protagonists and setting with that mindset.

Or they are pandering to incels, but that is basically the Nazi Table argument

It's likely because while the protagonist of Goblin Slayer isn't a rapist or a slaver, the goblins themselves are very much rapists, and the way they are handled in the story has rubbed some people the wrong way.

Rape is not a trope that one should use lightly, and my impression after reading a bit of Goblin Slayer is that the writer is not mature enough to properly handle it just yet.

Edited by dragonfire5000 on Apr 22nd 2024 at 3:19:11 AM

I don't know the others, but Life Reset had its own game logic problems. They got the game culture down okay, but the whole "first person to invent a spell is the only one who owns it and can license it to others" thing is laughable from a game balance perspective. For the most part, we let bad game balance slide because a lot of these are power fantasies, but it can be annoying when a LitRPG touts its game as "perfectly balanced and fair!" when it blatantly isn't.

I think The Ripple System got closest. Yes it's more than a little unbalanced, but that's part of the point, the designers screwed a few things up and the playerbase is at the endgame content in the first week, so a lot of the game is falling apart. It also gets every other aspect of MMO life absolutely perfect, so I'll give "the unbalanced game is unbalanced in an unrealistic way" a bit of a pass.

Others just go with it. In Dungeon Crawler Carl, Carl is told flat-out that if he's popular enough the rules will change for him, and this is most obvious in the fact that classes which require high follower counts are explicitly overpowered. Of course the dungeon will kill you eventually, it just wants you to be strong enough to be entertaining in the meantime.

Yeah, that's part of why I fell off of Bofuri (for example). I understand the game in that series is meant to be broken and unbalanced, but the sheer nonsense of stuff like making a boss that any player can only try fighting once, in an MMO, is totally immersion-breaking.

You're not going to like shangri-la Frontier then...

In all honestly This does seem like the kind of thing I'd expect devs to attempt in the ear future with how big FOMO exploitation is.

Overlord once again stands out since its setting isn't the same as the VRMMO game from which the main character's player avatar and guild are from. The New World is a completely different fantasy world that somehow had the VRMMO's magic system imposed on it. This still gives the protagonist a huge advantage since he was transported as his fully leveled player avatar along with all of the resources a guild full of fully leveled players collected throughout their time playing the game and the various powerful npc's they created who are all now sentient beings. But he doesn't get any of the game QOL interface stuff like status screens, he knows nothing about the New World...he's very much a fish out of water. A very powerful fish out of water, but still.

Edited by M84 on Apr 23rd 2024 at 4:48:04 PM

honesty the ability for players to create NP Cs to that extent (I think FF XIV had a more limited version of it and those aren't for the guilds/free companies) is prolly something you'd expect to see in this thread rather than an actual video game.

Edited by MorningStar1337 on Apr 22nd 2024 at 7:35:13 AM

What little we hear of the Yggdrasil game suggests it wasn't a particularly balanced game. Probably for the best it's not the actual setting.

Doing like, a limited-time boss with cool drops is one thing. I think plenty of games already do that. Encourages players to log in for one week or whatever and run a specific boss over and over until they're gone. But what I think RedSavant is talking about (I haven't watched Bofuri, but I read something else that sounds similar), is where each player only gets one chance/one kill of a boss with a random loot table. So one person gets the awesome unique drop, and everyone else just gets screwed by the dice rolls and can never try again. That's the sort of thing that doesn't drive the engagement devs want.

I'm reading something right now like that, sort of in reverse. A new cool game came out, and the world only discovered that it was real when someone fought the final boss, failed, and the boss proceeded to break out of the game and bring all the game rules with it to the real world. Turns out the "game" was real the entire time, and now that it's infected Earth they have to deal with sudden magic bullshit. Oh, and since this series is based on Dark Souls, the very first magic bullshit that happens is every single human who has ever died rises as a monster that is immune to all non-magical attacks. To an Earth that has literally just discovered magic is real. And the only thing that didn't cross over was the Healing Checkpoints, so no more respawns or level-ups.

Edited by Discar on Apr 22nd 2024 at 7:42:30 AM

The setting of Overlord makes no sense from a game perspective because it's far too complicated. Ainz has like 700 spells? Cmon man, players were getting too swamped down in WoW with like twenty and just ended up ignoring most of them.

I thought Death is the Only Ending for the Villainess did a fairly good job of portraying a (blatantly unfair) Visual Novel but the gimmick mostly got dropped except for the main character obsessing over it when she really shouldn't.

^ Every single human ever? I can only imagine flying pieces of fossilized jawbone and individual finger bones flying around attacking terrified archaeologists.

Edited by Arha on Apr 22nd 2024 at 9:47:37 AM

I'd assume it would be limited to say, the last millennia tops specifically to avoid cases where the deceased is too decomposed for a discernible unfosselized body to exist (considering it seem to be going for System Zombie Apocalypse here)

BTW, does anyone know how many volumes of Slime isekai are adapted per season? I'm noticed that the series is set to end at 22 volumes and am wondering how many season it would take to adapt everything?

Edited by MorningStar1337 on Apr 22nd 2024 at 7:57:14 AM

What series are you talking about Discar? It seems interesting.

@Discar: Yeah, I think the item that makes the main character of Bofuri go from "already absurdly tanky" to "broken to the point that the game devs introduce mechanics specifically around her" only drops from the boss she got it from if you defeat it without ever taking or dealing a single point of damage to it, or something silly like that.

It's a combination of "how did you never playtest this nonsense" and "you HAD to have been building the game with this build IN MIND."

Pyresouls Apocalypse. I haven't made a page for it yet, because I'm lazy. Also, no one else ever updates the LitRPG pages I make.

Oh, the "unique rewards for achievements" thing. That's something that definitely makes it obvious that the writers designed this as a single-player game, then called it an MMO. Non-unique rewards for achievements (experience rewards, etc) can sometimes work, especially if the achievements can be shared with other people. I've seen a few systems where the nobility keeps the best achievements secret because they lead to good classes or whatever. Of course, those can also be stupid if the achievements seem actually pretty easy, making it improbable that the nobles manages to hide them. "What do you mean you're supposed to fight ten monsters in a row without resting? That's dangerous, literally no one would ever do that unless they were specifically trying to get this achievement!"

In the defense of Bofuri's game mechanics, the quality of the drops is programmed to correspond to balance out with the stats of the players.

The higher the stats of the monster is compared to the stat of the player, the better the drop becomes.

A fairly reasonable game-mechanic, right?

Except Maple only have big fat zeroes in everything but VIT on the STAT-sheet.

So when she beats something, she gets the absolutely best drop possible, every time.

It does a so and so job but once she got the option to literally shut the dialogue options off I was just kind of whatever on the whole thing. It was mostly a means to an end writing wise so that she can make some mistakes for over relying on the game gimmicks which is fine but not what I wanted (also I'm tired of villainess stories).

"God is telling me to fall on love" isn't an isekai but rather a timeloop story where a girl's day to day life inexplicably turned to not!Tokimemo girl's side and she actually has to navigate the game system, down to actually contending with surprise bad ends.

Edited by Mami on Apr 23rd 2024 at 10:52:43 AM

Only one of my top four favorite isekai has the mc purchasing a slave so I guess that's good.

1. Knight's & Magic 2. Reincarnated as a Slime 3. Arifureta 4. Black Summoner

Though the slave thing doesn't really bug me that much because I honestly just shut my brain off when watching anime most of the time. I'm not much of a critic save for when it comes to series endings in which case I'm hyper critical and while absolute roast the shit out of an otherwise good series if it has an ending I don't like (Gurran Lagann is my least favorite anime of all time for that reason).

I'm sorry I can't take you seriously when you apparently shut your brain off for a story's handling of slavery

Edited by Mami on Apr 23rd 2024 at 12:37:36 PM

Villainess stories were fun for awhile but I feel like far too many of them don't really live up to their potential and the genre as a whole is extremely formulaic. I can only think of a handful where the villainess thing actually seems genuinely important to the plot both in terms of who the protagonist is and the overall structure of the plot. And they always lose a ton of points when the original main character turns out to be an evil bitch.

I do enjoy I'll Become A Villainess That Will Go Down In History for that. Or I did, anyway, before the plot seemingly just kind of came to a standstill. The main character doesn't like the game's protagonist because she's like a shoujo manga protagonist. Dunno if she's like an otome game protagonist since I don't play those, but the way she speaks and thinks is just badly out of sync with the setting even if she's a genuinely benevolent person. Generally speaking, when it comes to villainess stories it usually seems more like someone wanted to write a bog standard romantic fantasy, hopped onto the new fad because it conveniently made the protagonist feel like slightly more of an underdog and then promptly forgot all about it. I guess it's because I don't think a villainess story should really be a power fantasy, but power fantasy stories are almost always easy sells.

Edit: Also, there's no better way to make your protagonist seem likable than to take the choice of whether to hang out with them away from the supporting cast and magically bind them to him!

Edited by Arha on Apr 23rd 2024 at 6:51:47 AM

If I had to be hyper critical of every piece of media I watch/read that has some part of it I'd normally be morally against I'd turn into even more of a bitter, cynical asshole who doesn't enjoy a single piece of media ever. I also don't enjoy arguing with people online and people who critique things just invite that sort of negativity due to the echo-chamber nature of online forums.

Its just not worth it.

Edited by Silentedge89 on Apr 23rd 2024 at 6:55:31 AM

Villainess lives Again is a regression one instead of an isekai, but it avoids those pitfalls. The MC is a genuinely villainous manipulator and the character who fits the “heroine”mold is actually heroic.

A story which you have to shut your brain off to enjoy is not a good story. That isn’t a personal dig of course — I like plenty of trashy stories too. One just has to own that they are trashy stories.

Edited by M84 on Apr 23rd 2024 at 7:57:17 PM