I went off anime when the isekai and moe craze took off about 10 years ago.
I tried to get into modern anime, but couldn’t (JoJo is based off an 80s manga, that doesn’t count as modern to me).
But I’m on episode 3 and I’m really digging Dungeon Meishi/ Delicious in Dungeon. I’m watching the English dub and It’s like if Monster Hunter and Dimension 20 had a baby. The humour is great, I actually laughed out loud a couple of times. The world is cool too.
I like how it isn’t following the anime tropes. The characters aren’t high schoolers, the women act like real human beings, there’s no Shonen toy commercial BS. It’s just a good fun adventure.
My only criticisms are that it’s a little videogamey, it makes me hungry and that the title Delicious in Dungeon makes no sense, it should be Delicious in THE Dungeon.
Senshi is my favourite.
I wanted to like Isekai. I mean who doesn’t want to get teleported to another dimension and make new friends and have an adventure or whatever, but they always make the protagonist so impossible to identify with. Yeah there’s also the “Guess slavery is okay here. When in Rome!” Shit. I liked Dr. Stone up until they awoke Mr good guy capitalism. You literally had communism in your hands and you threw it away!
One of the oldest isekai anime, Aura Battler Dunbine, is pretty cool. It’s also based off of a Tomino-written novel, so it has that going for it.
I at least like that the good guy capitalism womanizer man appreciates all women, no matter shape or size they’re all beautiful, which is like one micron better than Sanji
Still hated that part of Dr stone though, like fuck off with the strongest primate highschooler baki Jojo shit, I wanna watch these prehistoric communists recreate all tech pls
The problem with isekai is not that its isekai. I mean its just this all encompassing premise for fantasy it must be responsible for half of all stories in the genre. The problem is that its a fad. And with all anime fads its self referential to the point of absurdity.
The only isekai I liked was Log Horizon and Grimgar. The former because it actually takes the premise of being trapped in an MMO and does things with it. It’s more about the player politics than anything else. Grimgar otoh for all its faults made it so that being conscripted to the fantasy militia monster killer corps sucks ass.
Re: zero also isn’t too bad, at least the mc has an actual personality and don’t get everything handed to him unlike most isekais, he’s just a normal human, no super isekai power (well, he does go back in time when he dies, but it’s more of a curse than a power), he’s not good with any weapons, barely know a few basic spells that are useless against most enemies, and while he can be smart when he needs to he also does plenty of dumb shit driven more by emotion than logic.
The Neverending Story was technically an isekai, but it lacked the “what if capitalism ruining the place that’s supposed to be the escape from capitalism” part of typical isekai.
The problem is not isekai itself, some of the most beloved animes like Fushigi Yuugi, Inuyasha, Spirited Away are isekai (specifically, girl-isekai) and even Digimon, all of them are fantastic. It is a great way to introduce a protagonist with background you can relate into fantastical world (Spirited Away is the best example for this).
What poisoned the chalice is the mid 2010s onwards Japanese light novel - anime adaptation - merchandise meta. This is why modern isekai has a long, clickbaity title such as “I’ve Been Killing Slimes for 300 Years and Maxed Out My Level” or “I Got a Cheat Skill in Another World and Became Unrivaled in the Real World, Too”. The meta is so that the people pick up the light novel just because of clickbait title, and based on 1st volume sales alone one can get an anime adaptation, then make money off selling waifu merchs. So what happened is that the initial transport is not well-thought of (hence, truck-kun joke for the mechanic of transporting the protag), video game rules (in a sterile, bright colored, generic medieval fantasy world) and waifu-harem cast (to sell merchs).
To add on a bit, the clickbaity titles are literal clickbait because what happens is that a lot of these stories start out by being published online for free on what are essentially fan-fiction boards in the hopes that publishers will pick up the most popular ones and they get book deals. That’s the reason for the overly long titles summarizing the plot, also why most of these aren’t well written (usually the first time an editor sees the script, it’ll be when the story is picked up for publishing and usually there are very few rewrites etc).