Yoshitaka Amano was on fire on the ‘80s. His style, as referential to British Folklore as it is to Scheherazade’s One Thousand and One Nights, has a certain delicate elegance that is unreplicatable. It’s as feminine as it is fierce, and was well-suited for Yoshiki Tanaka’s popular The Heroic Legend of Arslan series. Arslan concerns a young prince (Arslan) whose kingdom is annexed by a neighboring nation after his father, the king, is betrayed by his inner circle. This is the kind of intrigue and immersion you can expect from fantasy anime of the time. Arslan and its contemporaries, such as Ryo Mizuno’s Record of Lodoss War and, of course, Kentaro Miura’s Berserk laid the groundwork for these types of adventures, with varying degrees of seriousness.
Mizuno has been open about the influence of tabletop gaming on Lodoss War. The original novels were meant as a companion to a RPG he was writing at the time, which was meant to take place in Lodoss War’s world of Forcelia. Far before the advent of actual play podcasts, companies like Group SNE were publishing transcripts of RPG sessions as a form of serialized media, which garnered much attention even among non-RPG players. As opposed to actual play podcasts, these transcripts (which are sometimes in video format) are edited for the purpose of consumption, with gaffes and superfluous chatter nixed. They are distinct from novels, which are commonly adapted from RPG sessions, in that they mostly recount the action of sessions in a back-and-forth script.
Lodoss War Replay by Ryo Mizuno
It’s easy to see the influence of tabletop even in the early moments of the 1990 Lodoss War OVA. We’re treated to some world-defining exposition, a history of creation that, for all intents and purposes, doesn’t come up that often. Because, after all, how often does your campaign’s ancient history effect play? Instead, we’re treated to some reasoning for each character’s attitudes later. We’re then thrown right into a dungeon, like any good first session. The group enter the halls of a great dwarven civilization shrouded in cloaks and rain. After learning a bit about their mission, they’re besieged by gargoyles and tear away their cloaks, revealing their signature weapons and colorful armor. And they look rad as hell.
The characters themselves are, of course, blatantly of classic fantasy races and classes that you might find in the D&D Player’s Handbook. Each has their own reason for caravanning together, too. Deedlit, a High Elf, comes from an isolationist society and fears her kind may be on the path to extinction if she doesn’t find a solution. Ghim, a Dwarf warrior, searches for a young priestess who was kidnapped shortly after saving him from a mining accident.
These backgrounds are intensely personal, and don’t exactly intersect—they’re personal arcs set up at the beginning of the series without clear answers or endings. That doesn’t mean that the characters’ interests are completely parallel though. Each interweave through each other in varying degrees of complexity. Slayn, a magician, is an old friend of Ghim and has a romantic connection to the woman Ghim is searching for. This sets up their relationship as bickering companions; they respect one another, but because of their stock archetypes, they argue often.
This is the kind of playful exchange you can expect from just about any fantasy-based TRPG system. Your relationships begin with some precedent of bonds, but they might be shallow and develop over time, or might remain mysterious until it comes to a head later in the campaign. In tabletop, everything the players do (and most of what the DM does, too, if they’re good at their job) is improvised. That’s the joy of the experience—to occupy another world not as a visitor, but as one of its natural denizens, and to explore what that means for them interpersonally.
Hajime Kanzaka’s Slayers leans into all this with a comedic edge, and feels much closer to the experience of many actual play podcasts. The show playfully questions why adventurers might sell cursed contraband to an item shop without accounting for the murderous consequences, and the characters struggle to solve issues without accidentally razing entire villages. Slayers does all this while maintaining an interesting and unique female lead in Lina Inverse, a laughably powerful sorceress that will do anything if it’ll line her pockets.
When compared to modern fantasy anime, I can’t help but feel a little sad. Shows like The Rising of the Shield Hero, Re:Zero, Overlord, and of course Sword Art Online feel distinctly different from the fantasy shows 20 years their senior. For one, all these shows are isekai, shows where the protagonist (or more people, sometimes) are tossed from the real world into another. More often than not, it’s a classic fantasy world, and at least half of them take place within a video game or manga that exists in the main character’s world.
Isekai aren’t new by any means, and they aren’t always even bad. Isekai are simply in conversation with different elements of fantasy than the sword and sorcery genre. Where one examines fantasy from a naturalistic perspective, the other seeks to explore fantasy as a form of escapism, a post-modern interplay of our perception of the genre collectively. Escaflowne is something of a proto-example and used it to effective emotional ends. Later, The Twelve Kingdoms used it to tell a much more epic story, and Inuyasha playfully uses the back and forth between modern day and Sengoku era Japan as an (often comedic) plot device.
Perhaps the most seminal work on the shape of isekai today, though, is the .hack franchise. Across several games, anime, novels, and manga, .hack explored the interactions young people had with the internet through the lens of a highly popular virtual reality MMORPG named The World in a near future (read: 2009). Though they were a little early, .hack cleverly intuits the duality of identity when young people are raised on the internet, taking on anonymous personas to explore their interactions with gender, sexuality, and trauma. The franchise began with .hack//SIGN, in which we are introduced to The World through the eyes of Tsukasa, a player who loses his memories after he gets stuck in the game. Despite taking place in a goal-oriented MMO similar to, say, Final Fantasy XI, .hack//SIGN is a slow burn with little action and a lot of sensitive mystique.
If only the genre as a whole learned something from .hack//SIGN’s storytelling. Instead, shows such as Overlord rely on toxic power fantasies to keep the genre appealing. In Overlord, a plain, depressed salaryman plans to meet up one last time with his guildmates in the dying MMORPG YGGDRASIL. None of them show up. He then gets trapped in the body of his character, the guildmaster, who is a skeletal lich who obviously looks really cool. What’s truly off is how low the stakes actually are in Overlord. Ainz (the protagonist) is extremely powerful and kills nearly everyone who would threaten him with ease. His right hand woman, Albedo, is a succubus who is programmed to be hopelessly in love with him, who is similarly nigh invincible. The emotional texture of .hack//SIGN is exigent and gauzy, whereas Overlord’s paper thin pathos can’t even be bothered to concern itself with even basic inner struggles.
Newer shows attempt an even more lighthearted take on the genre, trying to humorously signal this with names such as Do You Love Your Mom and Her Two-Hit Multi-Target Attacks? and In Another World With My Smartphone. Even more so than Overlord, these shows use their world as tourist attractions, places where people can travel to strengthen their relationships with their family or have a harem waiting for them in the new world. These babes are inevitably impressed by the magic of the protagonist’s GPS app and, of course, are quick to travel with him as he moves from place to place solving problems the dumb locals were unable to settle themselves.
This, of course, reeks of colonial disruption. The people occupying these worlds have their own customs and culture already, but little mind is paid to them as the protagonist swoops in and introduces a new way of life (with accompanying problems, of course) with unrestrained abandon. I’m all for fantasy centering personal narratives, but the modern arc of fantasy anime seems to eschew stories of community in the process, instead effusively embracing a male audience in a titillating manner.
Though isekai can be done right, I’m wary of these stories of luxury vacationing and turned off by the masculinizing of an otherwise amorphous or even blatantly feminine genre. These worlds feel less like legacied worlds of mystery and more like vehicles stripped of their dignity to be a man-child’s playground. I don’t need to see “myself” in fantasy series—I feel uncomfortable with this kind of virulent pandering and hope anime gets back to removing the viewer from the narrative itself (or, at least, accounts for a more diverse viewer than a straight guy looking for a group of fawning admirers).
For now, I’ll retreat into my dream fantasy world locked away in my mind, a sparkling, blurry amalgamation of ‘80s camp and devotional, hypnotic flair, a place unspoiled by wayward toxicity. It’s as fantasy should be—an untainted flower that’s for everyone and no one.