Pretty sure I already agree, but why is Log Horizon the Truest Isekai? And I guess for that matter what do you mean by Truest...
Pretty sure I already agree, but why is Log Horizon the Truest Isekai? And I guess for that matter what do you mean by Truest Isekai?
Okay so:
In most isekai, or at least the more modern ones, the existence of multiple worlds and of our world specifically isn’t mandatory to the story.
What I mean is that you can have Overlord without Momonga being a former Salaryman. Just have him be a lich from an epic ancient history who came back with his servants, and the story would go mostly in the same direction, the main lose would be the internal monologue jokes. Same with Re:Zero. As long as Subaru has depression, suicidal tendencies, self esteem issues and a unfounded belief that life will get better if he leave his home behind, he can come from a neighboring kingdom and still act mostly the same way. And I could go on with this.
This isn’t a problem, at all, I like many of those stories. Hell, from a sheer writting perspective I consider Re:Zero to have Log:Horizon beat. I just consider Log:Horizon to be better at the Isekai stuff.
L:H is different from the others because you can’t really remove the existence of other worlds and the fact the characters come from our world. The world slowly changing to become less of a VG and more of a real fantasy world require it to be a game or simulation from the start. The character motivations are specifically about how they feel about THIS game, and what it mean to them (from “I’m a game addict and I thought I was getting out of it but I got stuck in the one thing I saw as a prison so I want out” to “This game was how I escaped my self loathing so I thrive here but not really”). There’s also the AI gaining sapience in a way that HAS to come from game NPC, the use of the players’ unused characters as body by mysterious non corporeal entities, and so on…
Log:Horizon is the truest Isekai, because it’s the only one I can think of that need to be DIEGETICALLY about two worlds. The real world in L:H, even if not physically present, has a weight on the narrative that you cannot remove, unless you rebuild it from the ground up, but then you’d just have made “earth 2″ and it’s a waste of time to just get the same result.
