The isekai genre, better known as portal fantasy in the West, has been a dominant force in the Anime and Manga industry for over a decade. In 2024 to 2025, isekai made approximately 15% of all new TV anime productions. However, outside manga, light novels are where isekai call home, making up roughly 76% of the genre from 2015.
In the current year, most anime and manga fans would agree that the industry is saturated with isekai novels. Unfortunately, with so many stories in this genre being churned out, they have quickly become formulaic, copying story beats, settings, and tropes from the popular isekai stories that helped launch the genre.
It’s similar to the Romantasy genre in Western books. Many of the new releases tend to copy popular tropes and repackage them into stories that vary slightly from each other. For Isekai, most stories center around a medieval fantasy setting similar to that of Dungeons and Dragons, a world which often includes video game elements, particularly from role-playing games. When there is romance, it typically includes aspects from the popular harem genre, where the protagonist meets a variety of women who fall in love with him. It’s easy to see how this genre can get stale, and yet there hasn’t been that much effort from industry leads to help it evolve.
Simply put, the isekai industry knows its audience. They know for a fact that a large number of isekai readers are willing to read and promote average stories in the industry. What most tend to forget is that not every reader or viewer wants to read a stellar story all of the time. Pulp stories are popular for a reason and have always sold well. However, it can become a problem if that is all a genre has.
A simple solution would be to differentiate the story setting. In fantasy alone, there’s plenty of variety. Urban fantasy, contemporary fantasy, science fantasy, the list goes on. Isekai doesn’t have to stick to one subgenre. Just as it’s capable of pulpy stories, the genre also has massive potential to create thought-provoking stories like any other.
