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The Mike Toole Show - Old School Isekai


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rinmackie



Joined: 05 Aug 2006
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Location: in a van! down by the river!
PostPosted: Mon Jan 21, 2019 4:52 pm Reply with quote
Another person who liked the old D&D cartoon from the 80's? Yaaay!
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Errinundra
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Joined: 14 Jun 2008
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PostPosted: Mon Jan 21, 2019 5:40 pm Reply with quote
Thanks for the article, Mike. I've added Open the Door to my list for the Beautiful Fighting Girls thread. I just hope I can track it down. Your articles have been a great resource.

Kimiko_0 wrote:
It's time for reverse isekai.


Aura Battler Dunbine has it both ways. (Though the battleflleets that arrive above Earth aren't exactly nobodies.)
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ultimatehaki



Joined: 27 Oct 2012
Posts: 1090
PostPosted: Mon Jan 21, 2019 5:42 pm Reply with quote
Great Rumbler wrote:
Kimiko_0 wrote:
It's time for reverse isekai. Where a nobody from a fantasy setting is dropped in this world and turns out to be the only one who can save it.


Isn't that pretty much what Re:CREATORS is?


And devil is a part timer.
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marshmallowpie



Joined: 22 Sep 2009
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PostPosted: Mon Jan 21, 2019 5:47 pm Reply with quote
I used to think modern isekai were a problem, until I realised that it's more the reincarnation aspect... the older isekai don't do reincarnation anywhere near as much. Not to mention any of the other things that show up over and over in today's isekai. That being said, I am very fond of Youjo Senki. It shouldn't be, but it's incredible how different it is compared to all the isekai that only seem to have one little gimmick. Even just the difference in setting is great.
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RegSuzaku



Joined: 08 Jul 2018
Posts: 267
Location: Ikebukuro
PostPosted: Mon Jan 21, 2019 6:21 pm Reply with quote
Kyo Kara Maou needs a remake. With better pacing than the first anime had.

Kimiko_0 wrote:
It's time for reverse isekai. Where a nobody from a fantasy setting is dropped in this world and turns out to be the only one who can save it.


Besides the previously mentioned Devil is a Part-Timer and Re-Creators, there's Birdy the Mighty, a lot of superhero/magical girl/etc. things (off the top of my head, I just thought of Pretear but like, that's where the powers come from in most of them...)


So yeah, the other world/planet might just exist on the periphary, but...

Oh, and there are also series where the characters go into multiple other worlds and have different world-traveling adventures in each installment... that's basically what the Tsukiuta stage plays are like. Since this all happened since the first season of the anime, I wonder if the second season will have any of that... all of Tsukipro's stage play series have a slice-of-life story for the first episode, then the second jumps into isekai stuff (and so far, there's always been an AU version of one of the idols who dies in the second one). So I wonder if the anime will follow that trend, too...
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ninjamitsuki



Joined: 15 Sep 2007
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Location: Anywhere (Thanks, technology)
PostPosted: Mon Jan 21, 2019 6:29 pm Reply with quote
I miss classic shojo isekai.
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crosswithyou



Joined: 15 Dec 2007
Posts: 2892
Location: California
PostPosted: Mon Jan 21, 2019 8:40 pm Reply with quote
Hi. I'm here because I saw Fushigi Yuugi as the featured image. Wink

FY will always have a special place in my heart as being my first "real" anime. That is, it was the first anime I watched that was not broadcast on TV. It's also what got me into seiyuu, a fandom that I've been a part of for over half my life.

I still go back and rewatch a few episodes of FY now and then. I wish the series got a remastered BD release or something. However, I do not wish for the series to receive a remake unless they kept the same main cast (and that would be impossible because Kawakami Tomoko... Crying or Very sad). I would have really mixed feelings if they ever decided to do a remake. Unlike FMA or Furuba where the original series deviated from the manga storyline, FY was fairly faithful so yeah...
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Sheleigha



Joined: 09 May 2008
Posts: 1671
PostPosted: Mon Jan 21, 2019 9:28 pm Reply with quote
zawa113 wrote:
Does anyone else consider Digimon to be an isekai? Not every season, but season 1 is a pretty strong contender for being considered one, I think. Group of 7 kids, go to a new world, get awesome monsters, are kind of stuck there? Of course, the series does eventually decide to shunt them back to the real world for the finale, but the first 2/3rds or so are pretty strongly isekai, in my opinion.

This is yet another time where only looking at the anime side of things gets a really good quality manga-only series overlooked with From Far Away (which Viz did put out in its entirety! But is now OOP Crying or Very sad ) The amount of time Noriko spends in the real world before going off to the fantasy world is approximately as long as we see Subaru spend in the real world before he gets moved to the fantasy world (it's like, 3 pages, maybe less). But From Far Away also addresses something that I feel like a lot of other isekai gloss over: Noriko, our magic heroine from our world, literally cannot speak the language. Viz's translation did a great job showing this as her speech gradually gets better over the course of the series, which I think is pretty awesome. Noriko also has zero super powers. She's prophesized to bring about the downfall of the entire world, but she doesn't want to and has no idea how to stop it either. What she DOES have is a genuinely nice attitude and personality that is infectious. She's a genuinely likable character that you want to root for, and damn, if that doesn't feel rare enough sometimes! And she has good chemistry with Izark, the main guy (who is also a sky demon, prophesized to end the entire world), who starts out cold (though not a jerk, a distinction that I feel like a lot of series fail at), but you know they're going to be the main couple in the end anyway. But fortunately, they progress slowly and organically. It's just a really good isekai series with two really good main leads that deserves to be read more!


I'd definitely count Digimon as isekai, especially Adventure and Frontier.

From Far Away is one of those super niche things, that I had to comment on, as it was one of those "I feel like I was the only one who read it" series. I LOVED the use of language and not the usual "oh you understand Japanese, but call it xxxx here?" sort of thing that happens. It was a great series, and I enjoyed and bought the whole thing as it was finishing up being released by Viz. Too bad it never got reprinted.

I was always meaning to get into Red River too, but at the time it was hard to find copies of it, being a longer series and the older volumes went OOP pretty fast, it seemed. I was always surprised when I saw the "EXPLICIT CONTENT" stamp on it, since well, Fushigi Yuugi sure had a lot of stuff that really pushed those boundaries (for a western rating, that is). Did you ever check that one out? I was always curious on how bad it actually got, to deserve that rating.
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TheAncientOne



Joined: 06 Oct 2010
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Location: USA (mid-south)
PostPosted: Mon Jan 21, 2019 9:42 pm Reply with quote
Great Rumbler wrote:

Isn't that pretty much what Re:CREATORS is?

Given that those brought to our world were the protaganists of their own stories, I think it fails rather hard on the "a nobody" front.
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Cptn_Taylor



Joined: 08 Nov 2013
Posts: 925
PostPosted: Mon Jan 21, 2019 9:59 pm Reply with quote
I thought Mike Toole knew everything about old school anime. So Dunbine is the first isekai anime ? Nope, not by a long shot. There is another isekai anime that predates Dunbine by a couple of years. And this one aired in Europe and maybe even in the US (I'm not sure about this last part so sorry if I'm wrong). It's a children's show kinda like Alice in Wonderland. It was Tatsunoko's Paul's Miraculous Adventure. An isekai anime from 1976, that's 7 years before Dunbine. Laughing
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trescaballeros



Joined: 02 Oct 2008
Posts: 71
PostPosted: Mon Jan 21, 2019 10:31 pm Reply with quote
Props for mentioning Wataru! It is nigh unheard of in the West(and I am aware of Keith Courage),probably because it’s one of those shows which are deemed TOO Japanese for the mainstream Western audience I think. In fact, I ended up studying Japanese(and considering to learn Mandarin) just to have someone to talk to in the fandom. Even today, I am certain that Wataru won’t be given a chance there in the West since it’s a fairly formulaic kid’s show with juvenile humour, and the trend there seem to be on the dark and edgy side. Which is a shame, since this is a show with great characters and a lot of heart.
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harminia



Joined: 24 Aug 2015
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Location: australia
PostPosted: Tue Jan 22, 2019 12:41 am Reply with quote
modern isekai sucks because they don't have Jinnai in them Crying or Very sad


ok but really we need more rival characters getting transported too. I really love the idea of someone getting transported to another world and, instead of wanting to get home or whatever, they decide they want to rule this world.

Isekai is a fun genre, and people forget how old it is. when they talk of being sick of isekai, it's not so much being sick of the isekai genre so much as the "dude dies and is transported to another world where he is amazing and everyone loves him" plot lines that continue to flood the genre.
re;zero was refreshing because people didn't like subaru much, and to zawa113's comment, though he could magically speak and understand the language, he couldn't read or write it and had to learn.


also yeah digimon is totally isekai
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Zalis116
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Joined: 31 Mar 2005
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PostPosted: Tue Jan 22, 2019 1:10 am Reply with quote
I feel as though the fandom once called this genre "Girl in Another World," as so many of the protagonists from the 90s and 2000s examples were female. Obviously the turn towards ecchi/harem and straight-male wish-fulfillment was a more recent development. While many credit/blame Sword Art Online for that trend (as well as for launching the boom of "trapped in video game" stories that .hack// never got off the ground), I'd point at the franchise that gave us three of the mere twelve 2000s titles AniDB lists as isekai: Familiar of Zero.

Ordinary Japanese high school boy unwittingly transported to fantasy world? Check. Boy immediately meets girl with high relevance to the fantasy world's issues? Check. Boy finds he's imbued with extraordinary powers that tie him inextricably to the world's major events? Check. Boy develops ever-expanding harem? Definite check. Harem provides copious fanservice? You'd better believe that's a check. FoZ was also an incubator of the Harry-Potter-inspired "magic school" genre that was prevalent in the early/mid-2010s, although those have been displaced by isekai as of late.

Quote:
It was so good that they kept making more Fushigi Yuugi, even though they didn't need to and probably shouldn't have done.
Really, most of the blame for that falls on Watase herself (and/or the publishers) for keeping the manga going past an obvious/natural conclusion point. Volumes 14-18 had a strong tacked-on, quasi-fanfiction feel to them, and that's what the first two OVA series were based on. If the manga had ended at Vol. 13, AKA the end of the TV series, it wouldn't have been that much of a loss. Eikouden, otoh, was the true anime-original travesty of the franchise. While Fushigi Yuugi was well-liked in its time (and the surprising amount, for a shoujo work, of straight-male-targeted fanservice didn't hurt!), I do have to wonder how FY's pervasive use of "Rape as Drama" would go over today.

Quote:
What I mean to say is, Sword Art Online is exactly like the 1986 Super Mario anime movie. They should do a crossover.
Hey, what about the 1993 Super Mario (live-action) movie? That's total "isekai based on Japanese story" right there, at least for suitable values of "story" Cool

Cptn_Taylor wrote:
It was Tatsunoko's Paul's Miraculous Adventure. An isekai anime from 1976, that's 7 years before Dunbine.
According to Wikipedia, it was only distributed in English in the Philippines, so one can hardly fault Toole for not knowing about it. And the database tagging for older shows, whether here or at AniDB/MAL, isn't as thorough as it is for newer works.
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Top Gun



Joined: 28 Sep 2007
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PostPosted: Tue Jan 22, 2019 2:03 am Reply with quote
I think there's a clear distinction to be made between many of the older series that Mike mentioned and what's referred to as "isekai" today, even though at their core they all involve someone being transported to another world. As Zalis noted, many of those older titles had female leads, riffing on the basic Alice in Wonderland trope, and tended to put a fairly heavy emphasis on general world-building. Twelve Kingdoms is straight-up high fantasy with a hefty dose of political intrigue, and Escaflowne leans more towards the purely fantastical but also spends a good deal of time fleshing out its setting. In contrast, a lot of the cookie-cutter modern isekai series seem to play a randomizer game of "let's get the protagonist into X universe with Y goofy premise and Z superpowers!" At this point I can hardly tell the difference between the plot summary of a series parodying the genre and one playing it dead straight. The majority of newer titles tend to have males in the lead role, more often than not with the express purpose of throwing in some harem hijinks otaku wish-fulfillment. Even limiting things to the trapped-in-a-video-game sub-subgenre, something like .hack//SIGN is a very different animal than SAO.
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Ingraman



Joined: 07 Feb 2005
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PostPosted: Tue Jan 22, 2019 5:25 am Reply with quote
Sheleigha wrote:
zawa113 wrote:
This is yet another time where only looking at the anime side of things gets a really good quality manga-only series overlooked with From Far Away (which Viz did put out in its entirety! But is now OOP :cry: ) [...] But From Far Away also addresses something that I feel like a lot of other isekai gloss over: Noriko, our magic heroine from our world, literally cannot speak the language. Viz's translation did a great job showing this as her speech gradually gets better over the course of the series, which I think is pretty awesome. Noriko also has zero super powers.

From Far Away is one of those super niche things, that I had to comment on, as it was one of those "I feel like I was the only one who read it" series. I LOVED the use of language and not the usual "oh you understand Japanese, but call it xxxx here?" sort of thing that happens. It was a great series, and I enjoyed and bought the whole thing as it was finishing up being released by Viz. Too bad it never got reprinted.

FFA was a series that I bought and read as Viz was releasing it. I loved the need for her to learn to speak the language, rather than have her know it upon her arrival in the world (or have it magically gifted to her). I loved that aspect of the series, but much of the rest of the plot appealed less. I ended up giving my FFA volumes away to either a friend, or my local library. Looking at Amazon's website, I think that they're selling it for the Kindle, so it looks like it's still accessible (maybe in other ebook formats elsewhere as well?).
Quote:
I was always meaning to get into Red River too, but at the time it was hard to find copies of it, being a longer series and the older volumes went OOP pretty fast, it seemed. I was always surprised when I saw the "EXPLICIT CONTENT" stamp on it, since well, Fushigi Yuugi sure had a lot of stuff that really pushed those boundaries (for a western rating, that is). Did you ever check that one out? I was always curious on how bad it actually got, to deserve that rating.

I liked that series well enough that I still have my Red River books. There's definitely nudity, but I don't recall specifically if there was anything more. Sex between the lead couple is pretty likely, but I haven't read the series for a few years...
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