Someone told me that 70% of animes released last year were Isekais. I’m not sure that’s exactly right but it’s a justifiable number. It’s still a good concept but dramatically over saturated, stick to the top picks and things that have made it to season 2/3/etc to start.

It’s not like isekai stories are inherently bad or anything, it’s just that there have been a few very very successful ones and so a lot of substandard stories get greenlit for animation in this genre because executives are desperate to recapture that lightning in a bottle. There were 59 stories released last year alone with the isekai tag on anilist. Most of them are slop that can barely be distinguished from one another.

One of the big problems that the genre has is that most of them take place in the same western RPG fantasy world. As Geoff from Mother’s Basement pointed out in his recent video, a lot of Japanese people were introduced to western fantasy through games like Wizardry rather than through books like The Fellowship of the Ring or The Wizard of Earthsea. As a result, the worlds of these isekai anime (almost) all feel very same-ish the way the worlds of those RPGs often feel very same-ish. When you watch an isekai anime, you’re not watching someone get sent to a mysterious world full of strange magical creatures and dangerous roads. You’re watching them get sent to go play Dragon Quest some more but in-person this time. There are exceptions of course; I’m quite fond of the world of Vision of Escaflowne for example, but the majority of these shows just feel exactly the same as all the other isekai slop out there because they can’t be bothered to do anything at all to even try to feel different.