General Isekai Thread

So I learned how Gate ends a while ago and wow the fucking Cultural Posturing is so hard that I'm glad I never tried to read it.

How it end?

Edited by slimcoder on Feb 20th 2020 at 1:02:58 AM

Apparently Japan just goes straight-up imperial and fully conquers the fantasy world, while the rest of those poor, foolish, non-Japanese nations try and do the same and end up opening a portal to somewhere that apparently destroys the Earth?

I mean, without the first part, it is kind of a nice message to avoid conquering people just because.

Yeah. Going by that logic Japan is the only one allowed to conquer people.

Man even Germany’s over what happened in WW 2 by this point.

Gate is the one anime I have in the dropped tab on Taiga.

To be honest a lot of it was probably because of what I heard about it hear and other places, but IIRC I dropped it then because of the massacre scene.

I get that it was made to make sense in universe but that doesn't change the fact the triumphant framing made me fairly uncomfortable.

Bit of a lost and found question for y'all. Anyone run across an Isekai where the protagonist, with a full grocery cart, gets transported into a huge wasteland? There's an attractive wind spirit lady who explains he's an Isekai protagonist, that the wasteland is the result of warring nations, and that he's supposed to fight his way out of it to start hero-ing among the kingdoms.

The protagonist nopes out of that and decides he'd rather stay where he is and start a reclamation project to bring life back to the wasteland. It has very little combat and becomes almost a minecraft / slice of life story with him, the bickering between the Wind and a more endowed Water spirit, and where he "contracts" with childlike weak wind and water and later earth spirits to start terraforming, essentially.

Only thing I know like that is that one isekai where the protagonist is a professional wrestler and when told to "Go fight the Demon King" he decides "Nope", suplexes the princess, and starts an animal sanctuary.

I immediately thought of Seirei-tachi no Rakuen to Risou no Isekai Seikatsu. (Luckily I remembered part of the description—why the protagonist had just been shopping— to search for.) I didn't see anything about him being expected to fight in the war, at least not in the first chapter.

Edited by Vehek on Feb 24th 2020 at 12:54:41 PM

That just sounds adorable!

Yes, thank you so much! That's the one I was looking for. I may be misremembering, but the Wind spirit either tells him that fighting in the war is what most other Isekai travelers end up doing, or maybe just simply suggest he go that way because there was literally no life in the desert but deadly monsters.

@Earnest

I can understand why he wouldn't want to get into this mess and instead foster peace.

That's chiefly because Germany went through some serious denazification after WW2 - and had to confront what they did wrong. Japan (and the American South, for a comparable example) never went through a similar process of re-education after their respective fascistic and race supremacist states were defeated.

It always make me roll my eyes when an Isekai use game mechanism without understand the implication. In Isekai about trapping in a video game world, the game mechanism usually so complicate compare to real MMORPG while having some of the most unbalance stuff, a large amount of bugs that no AAA company gonna release. While in Fantasy Isekai the author just use video game terms as shortcut to explain stuff for the audiences ( which is really bad since it really take you out of the story and the world).

That defense max one was really, really bad about that.

It really was. Here, let's have a skill that you get by being in combat for an hour and not taking or dealing damage.

I'm also very over "MMO" isekais that have "first clear bonuses" or anything like that, or worse (like, again, Boufuri), first-clear-perfect bonuses. No one does that. MMO battles are a learning process, especially first-clears! If you're already giving your characters cheat powers to explain why they can get more stupidly unbalanced cheat items by the end of episode 1, just give them all those powers at the start, or better yet, skip writing the isekai novel entirely.

What really bugged me were the POV sections from the game designers who were like "Wow I didn't know we had skills like that/the mechanics would interact like that" and whatnot. No, it's a game, the things in the game are programmed to behave in a certain way and things you didn't put in won't be there. Yeah, there might be bugs or stuff like damage formulas might put out wonky results if you didn't balance them right, but you cannot eat a hydra if the game didn't expect you to do that and you certainly won't immediately get a reward for doing something the designers never considered.

Usually tank characters does have damage skills, that how they level up. It's just that those skill isn't as strong against bosses. Tank cahracter also usually have taunt mechanism. Also tank actually have a very diverse play style that can be write in interesting way if the authors actually reasearch: Evasive tank is all about taunt and avoiding damage; Reduction tank is your standard one, taunting and reduce damage taken; debuff tank is like reduction tank but more about debuff than buff; life steal tank and recover tank also similar to each other, mainly taking damage and heal it away; lock down tank is all about disable: counter/reflect tank is actually pretty fun when use right.

Most writers really don't understand how MMO work. No, there never will be just one guy who is way stronger than anyone else, and there sure as hell won't be any super special awesome skills or weapons that only one person can use. That's just not how MMO work!

Most MMO writers don't know how MMO works, most otome writers don't know how otome work. Why do your research on the game your writing about when you can just regurgitate probably incorrect info you read a year ago that got popular?/s

While it is realistic to have a combination of skills that's way overpowered because the devs didn't think things through, that won't result in one person being unstoppable. News about broken tactics in video games travels fast, after all.

MMO Isekai writers just never heard about emergency patch note, hot fix, balance patch and game forum. Heck even real life Yu-gi-oh have emergency banlist to deal with OP tactics.

Imagine a main character in an MMO isekai who suddenly becomes much weaker because Devs nerfed whatever unintended exploit made the overpowered.

I don't think writers need to research or even play actual MMO game to know about as the point of modern Isekai nowadays is power fantasy, so MC need to be overpowered, so that countless otakus and nerds could enjoy the stories of "themselves" dominating everything with ease and being the best.

I'm sure I'd like Bofuri if I gave it a chance (from my understanding the appeal is more CGDCT in a MMO setting), but hearing about the wonky game design secondhand makes it sound very irritating.

Speaking of Power Fantasy, it's probably because a lot of series wouldn't last long enough otherwise.

But I think a lot of series miss the point that to be properly satisfying you need build up time to properly establish everything.