Thread 281798667

Is SAO an isekai or native isekai?

sci-fisekai

>>281798667 (OP)
both

>>281798667 (OP)
it's AN isekai
it's THE isekai

>>281798667 (OP)
It's cyberpunk.

>>281798667 (OP)
SAO is not an isekai until Alicization.
Sword Art Online is a game that they leave midway through the first season, and from there it is primarily a drama about the ramifications of SAO. That includes Alicization, but Alicization gets the isekai label because about 95% of its 50 episodes are set in a fantasy land where they fight a war against orcs.
And it is not "the" isekai >>281799154 or whatever. I've tried tracing this out, but I cannot see any real impact SAO had on the anime scene whatsoever. Familiar of Zero was the far more influential work and actually kickstarted the modern conceptualization of isekai.

>>281798667 (OP)
It's isekai. The new world they enter just happens to be virtual.

>>281800356
>I cannot see any real impact SAO had on the anime scene whatsoever
You had to be there. You could literally feel the waves that SAO made in the anime industry.

>>281800551
That's the thing, I was there. The same season SAO aired, a deconstructive isekai anime also aired. Two seasons prior, ZnT ENDED.
Isekai was already a thing by the time SAO arrived. It could maybe be ascribed with pushing the WN -> LN -> Manga -> anime trend, but that also goes back to Zero no Tsukaima, which popularized narou isekai.

>>281800636
SAO set off every gamer's neurons because they realized they can just write about their video game experiences as a novel. That's why stuff like adventurers guilds, game systems, etc are all inseparable from isekai.

>>281800773
>SAO set off every gamer's neurons because they realized they can just write about their video game experiences as a novel.
Eh, it really shouldn't.
SAO's first novel, and what comprises half the "SAO" content, is a romance novel, while the second is more general slice of life (and some tragedy). It's nothing like a video game because it wasn't really intended to be, it was more a Digimonlike examination of the oncoming new technology and how it could change the way people interface with their interpersonal relationships, which is what the ALO arc is primarily about, with Suguha understanding Kirito through engaging with the world he lived in, and Kirito having the power to save Asuna through this new medium he has mastered in contrast to the overlord of it all, who is a conman with no real idea what makes this new stuff so captivating for Kirito.

The one that's actually more about a game is Alicization, but it only covers two "guilds", that being the dueling academy and the Integrity Knights.

As for isekai itself being about that, that's mostly because of Japan's own love for RPGs. LitRPG is a genre in western amateur lit as well, though few are as brazen as the stat screen having isekai LNs.

>>281800868
You got invested into the story, but if you take a step back and look at it from an objective angle you'll see that it's just a gamer power fantasy.
>MC's ability is fast reaction times
>Gets granted unique abilities from the rest
>Gets a rare drop items
>Has hidden knowledge of the game that other people don't have
>Finds a cute gamer gf
>Is always on the top of the leaderboards
Isekai also has similar versions of this.

>>281801076
Yeah, but again, that's only in the first arc, and for the published version, only the first two volumes of the LN, one of which is entirely side stories.
Everything following that is government conspiracies like it's Patlabor, and Alicization has more to do with Saint Seiya than the typical idea of an isekai by the midpoint.

>>281800636
>It could maybe be ascribed with pushing the WN -> LN -> Manga -> anime trend
It did not. Man, this shitty myth keeps being peddled around while ignoring very obvious facts such as SAO's serialization only happening due to the author's previous ties to the LN industry from a light novel contest (i.e. the typical way for LN authors to start, and nothing to do with the groundbracking new approach of picking up random stuff from the aggregator sites) and then being instantly picked up from the author's self-published personal website into the Weekly Shounen Jump equivalent of LNs: Dengeki Bunko.
So then what's the real starter for the WN->LN->manga->anime model? It's none other than Mamare who posted a play of Maoyuu on 2ch and an Enterbrain editor was the crazy guy to first pick it up to publish it and in case you don't remember, it was a huge success at the time and received several different manga versions simultaneously. Then Mamare later published Log Horizon on Narou and Enterbrain picked that up as well, and that was the key point. You could actually get picked up as a LN on Narou as an author and people flocked over to try their luck and the rest is history. What Mamare and Enterbrain did caused a chain reaction which led to the golden age of narou and isekai.
If you look at the top LN series (+manga adaptations) which series top the list? Surprise: Top 2 are from Narou: Reincarnated as a Slime (1st) and Apothecary's Diaries (2nd).
As for SAO, it's only in 4th place after Raildex at 3rd.

>>281801111
Well that's probably another reason why people say stuff like "everything after aincrad sucks" or "aincrad had so much lost potential"

>>281801130
>As for SAO, it's only in 4th place after Raildex at 3rd.
Honestly, I could see that more for SAO being known as a WN first for ages. The LN and anime have only relatively recently reached the point where the WN had concluded back in 2008, with Alicization.
But I'm in agreement that SAO is ultimately not a very significant work in this regard.
>>281801153
That's moreso a western opinion, and one that has come about relatively recently.
Back when SAO was being translated (pre-anime), people used to say something more along the lines of everything after ALO sucking up until B-T finally reached Alicization, which is when people got interested in it again.

>>281801222
>That's moreso a western opinion, and one that has come about relatively recently.
It's not. I can find Japanese threads talking about the Aincrad arc if you want. Also, do you really think the author would come out with Progressive just because of western opinions?

>>281801303
>Also, do you really think the author would come out with Progressive just because of western opinions?
Progressive isn't really a seriously published thing. It primarily started as basically a summer special where he'd post for one floor a year- and this was after SAO ended.
And I'm sure you could find Japanese opinions, but it's far from a dominant opinion like it is in the west (if it were, those Progressive movies wouldn't have ended with the second one).

>>281801373
I'm pretty sure at least this is universal.

>>281800551
>>281800636
>>281800773
>>281800868
>>281801076
You guys claim to have been there, but have you really? At least it seems like you have very selective memory.
Think back what the trend was around that time, still in the late 2000s and early 2010s, not just in Japan, but even world-wide: SURVIVAL & BATTLE ROYALE.
Survivalshit was literally everywhere. In the West you had series like Lost and the Hunger Games books/movies while in Japan you had stuff like BTOOOM, Future Diary, Cage of Eden and Fate/Zero (which unlike F/SN actually appealed to this type of suvival/battle-royale demographic).
So SAO was just one of those. There's also that weird misconception that SAO is somehow a "frontrunner of OP MCs" even though it had only like 2-3 scenes where Kirito flexed on noobs, but actually more scenes where he just completely jobs in the most pathetic ways.

Doesn't look good for SAO, but hey, maybe the creators of the first isekai give some kind of respect and/homage to SAO in their works?
Let's see...
>Log Horizon
It very strongly emphasizes that the protagonist is support and can't fight alone. Complete opposite of SAO...
>Overlord
To join the guild Ainz Ooal Gown, you need to be an adult working member of society that can provide for his own livelihood... I guess Kirito won't be able to join! But surely that's just a coincidence, right?
>Shield Hero
Wow, the Sword Hero sure is being portrayed as a retard, but he's totally not meant to make fun of Kirito, right? Giving him the same VA in the anime is surely just a coincidence, hahaha!

>>281801618
I don't know why you seemed to disagree with me before agreeing with me.
My point was that SAO largely wasn't that influential and can't really be described as an isekai.

>>281798667 (OP)
It's a copy of .hack, that's what it is.

>>281801689
>It's a copy of .hack
It predated .hack by a couple months.

>>281801675
In regards to the impact of SAO, yeah. I was just disagreeing that the first arc is just first romance then slice of life. I mean sure, those were also in there, but it was overall still a "death game", i.e. survival/battle-royale kind of stuff which was the overarching plot. The goal was to survive and to successfully leave the game while alive.

for me its Lisbeth

>>281801780
I would disagree given the way SAO frames its story.
The first volume is primarily on the relationship of Kirito and Asuna over the course of two years, with the death game as a backdrop to that. It's significant, it informs their characters, but not as much as Future Diary or Hunger Games would, as those are entirely about their death games.
I think it speaks to a degree of misreading Kawahara did with how he handled SAO, given how much people love that initial death game concept, and that's why I'm surprised it didn't lead to a barrage of fanfiction like how ZnT caused a narou boom wherein people essentially switched Saito out for a character of their choosing.

>>281801618
Isekai isnt just OP MCs. We had that before with battle harems or 'chosen one' leads. The most important distinction is the video game aspect, and new writers calling on their video game experiences as writing material.

>>281801831
Which tie-in SAO games are worth playing?

>>281801827
Is it really? I'd argue Future Diary was more about the "romance" than SAO was, even if the "romance" there was quite twisted with Yuno having been the poster child of yandere at the time (Overlord S1 ED even had Albedo imitate the infamous yandere pose of Yuno).

>>281801948
I'd say yeah it is.
Again, Future Diary is obviously romantic, but it's also dedicated to that death game idea in a way that SAO really isn't. SAO's death game is a framing device for a one shot narrative that illustrates 2 years over the course of about 200 pages.
Had Progressive been SAO's start, then I'd call it a death game narrative, because that is focused on the whole of the idea, with how the environment creates tribalism, factions, plots to gain power, people content to languish in the new reality to avoid the death game, etc., and above all, they do engage with the mechanic to leave the death game, via clearing floors.

The first volume only has them clear I think four floor bosses if I recall, out of 75 (out of a greater theoretical 100). It has death game, but it's not really all death game.

>>281801873
being a fan of SAO carries most of them to a certain degree but I find them all fun
Hollow Fragment and Hollow Realization has very MMO-esque gameplay
Lycoris is an action game with RPG elements
Fatal Bullet is generally regarded as the best gameplay wise

>>281802068
Fatal Bullet is cool I just wish I didn't suck at it

>>281801831
>The most important distinction is the video game aspect
Bullshit. If that were the case you'd have tons of VR stuff made and isekai wouldn't have picked up at all. Yet the only ones like that that made it to an anime so far are Shangri La and Bofuri and maybe one or two others I don't know about, that's it.
And even with game elements if you look at isekai that ended up being popular, nothing leans on this whole video game aspect quite as much as you make it out to be and those that do also are more often tied to TTRPGs (e.g. Overlord, Slime) rather than video games which makes them more like the pre-2000s "TTRPG replay" fantasy such as Record of Lodoss War where people created novels based on their actual TTRPG sessions.
Many of them just straight up have nothing to do with video games at all (e.g. Tsukimichi, MT).

>>281802179
I think you are mistaking video game experiences with literally writing about video games. I meant that writers are using thoughts and experiences they had while playing videos games and extrapolate that into a story. And yes, there are a ton of isekai with video game mechanics. This paradigm shift was extremely noticeable after SAO. Even if you look at video game anime from before SAO like dot hack, they feel more like proper fantasy stories with a video game setting tacked on.

>>281802431
And I am saying even if the so-called paradigm-shift happened, there is absolutely no proof that SAO had anything to do with it other than releasing around that time and being relatively popular among the survival crowd because SAO and the isekai have nothing in common. Like straight up. Why would people copy just this singular aspect from SAO and nothing else? That's the contradiction you are entirely unable to explain away. Early isekai show clear disdain towards SAO as well. Shield Hero's WN utterly dunked on SAO in the sense that it portrayed the other Heroes as retards who treat the world as a game and cause disasters because of that. "This is like a video game and I am its protagonist!" is more often than not treated as a very dumb mindset that set will be your undoing in several isekai, where they show other isekai'd characters get too high on being the hero and such.
The only ones who copied SAO as a role model ended up being flops no one cares about, which shows how little effect SAO had. There was actually more SAO-mocking than SAO-copying going on, especially for the more successful series.

there is nothing to discuss

kirito is literally me

>>281804214
what all girls and some guys want to do every time they see kirito

>>281798667 (OP)
>native isekai

The dogshit discussion quality here that revolves around parroting whatever the eceleb in turn made up to look smart makes me wish 8 chan wasn't so fucking dead when it comes to the /a/ board.
Somehow their /gacha/ and /v/ boards are active but /a/ is fucking dead.

>>281805058
>Somehow their /gacha/ and /v/ boards are active but /a/ is fucking dead.
Timeline of general /a/ population travels, starting from the start of /a/ for simplicity:
>/a/
Always bleeding users, peak of activity was 2012-13.
2014-15 caused a quieter exodus than the more explosive /v/ and /pol/ (and the earlier /r9k).
>8/a/
Got good use, though most people crossposted on 4/a/ as well. This continued from 2015-19.
In 2019, 8/a/ died and so
>the webring
The death of 8 caused massive user bleed, but some people found their way here.
Since then, its just been user bleed. There is no "/a/ population" anymore because nobody comes to 4chan for anime. Anyone posting here is inevitably viewing/using /a/ as a secondary or tertiary board (hence the massive amounts of generals and hyper popular anime on this board). 8/a/ is dead because nobody on 8ch watches anime, and the few that do know about the webring, and the webring is dead because those original /a/ users fucking went to the next great adventure (meaning they moved on with their lives or went to discord, because most of old /a/ was primarily active on blogs and skype).

>>281802740
>Early isekai show clear disdain towards SAO as well.
The author of GoT has disdain for lotr. It doesn't mean anything, it's still a derivative. If you weren't influenced by it, you should not care about it at all.
This argument feels like a falseflag to convince me that SAO indeed influence isekai. The more you point out that isekai writers have kirito in their minds, the more convincing it sounds.
>The only ones who copied SAO as a role model ended up being flops no one cares about
The thing is, you can easily run into a bunch of those flop game isekai if you look around, manga, ln/wn/etc. I might name 5 on the stop or even find stats screens. It's hard to discount them just because it doesn't reach the Hall of Fame. You have a point about TTRPG in Overlord but there's a game background in those so it's kind of a mix. Adding to that, you left out Konosuba, clearly a game isekai that is part of the Hall of Fame.

>>281801618
>>You guys claim to have been there, but have you really?
Even people that were actually "there" didn't actually watch much less read SAO, they just mindlessly consoomed the gorillion of videos made by dozens of ecelebs desperately trying to launch their careers through the anti-SAO craze.
Mind you in retrospect it would not surprise me to learn that shit was sponsored by USAID antijapan money in some way.

>>281801831
>The most important distinction is the video game aspect,
most isekai doesn't even have status screens
the one most people somehow use as a poster child for this (eminence) doesn't even have a proper magic system, let alone status screens, it basically runs on DBZ style ki powerlevels

>>281802068
>Fatal Bullet is generally regarded as the best gameplay wise
Only by people that either don't play that many anime games, or are very desperate for a small niche of gameplay given it's basically aliexpress pre-fortuna pre-spacekids warframe but with a SAO coat of paint.
Not calling it bad mind you, it's pretty good, but calling it amazing or the best SAO game just shows they aren't that familiar with much else.

>>281805058
Shilling your alt is cringe. It's like saying the board isn't good and as an alternative you bring up fucking reddit. It was explicitly made by /v/ AND /pol/ for lame /v/+/pol/ reasons, they probably hate anime, of course it's dead.

>>281806316
if you mean picrel it was made by a schizo otaku who happens to be an asukafag
/gacha/ there is far more active with real posters than /vg/ is here now, the tipping point on /vt/ also happened around last month

>>281806466
kys shill

>>281806316
You're thinking of 8 kun which was mostly Q niggers that would eventually make shar ty.

>>281806532
>Pajeets fear the anonymous thread IDs due to not being able to samefag all the way down.
Love to see it.

>>281801783
>>281801820
Lis is too cute, I wish the new game was better so I could have actually kept playing it.

>>281805929
>This argument feels like a falseflag to convince me that SAO indeed influence isekai. The more you point out that isekai writers have kirito in their minds, the more convincing it sounds.
I don't know if you didn't notice but nigger's basement just released another jewtube video shitting on isekai trying to pretend SAO started it all.

>>281799154
Absolutely

Okay xX-kiroto_darkness-Xx

>>281806538
moe was made by and for /v/tards

i don't understand how it managed to keep going for as long as it did
i can see how it exploded at the start, first 2 episodes were actually good
then its momentum just fizzled out before becoming aimless
i like the idea of each arc: surviving a death game, human experimentation, serial killing, VR for medical use, AI development
sucks that everything was executed poorly

>>281806103
>>281802068
>Fatal Bullet
I see that it's on sale on Steam right now. I'll go for it. Thanks

>>281807898
It feels like a lot of potential was wasted in certain points. Some stuff was decently executed, like the mystique of people getting Death Game'd in GGO despite the safety features, or the twist of the Alicization program having world ending cataclysm as a stress test was a decently high point in the later arcs, but so much of it just falls apart. It wants to have harem in its tags but even the games treat the girls better than the source material.
Speaking of source material, I still stand by Gun Gale Alternative being the superior series, and it's written by a completely different author!

>>281808343
>Speaking of source material, I still stand by Gun Gale Alternative being the superior series, and it's written by a completely different author!
it also is just aliexpress shangrila frontier: cawadooty edition

>>281798667 (OP)
Immigrant isekai