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With how video games are an inherently multi-medial entity, it’s no wonder that a common trope of story telling is being transported into a game or having a character sent to another world. In Eastern animation and fiction this is called an “isekai” style of story. “Isekai” means, literally, “different World” in Japanese and in urban slang is the name of that entire genre for anime, manga, movies, and lite novels. In Western Fiction, the term “portal fiction” is used instead but both describe very much the same phenomena. Within video games, there are many examples of portal fictions and isekai since games are from all over, though with my own personal library a lot are from Japan. There aren’t all that many differences between the Eastern and Western versions of these stories, therefore, by my definition portal fiction and isekai are very much interchangeable. However, in the interest of simplicity, I will hence forth just use “isekai” as it is one word.
There are so many examples of this sort of story within the Eastern and Western traditions of stories, that I will mostly only be taking about how it is handled in regards to gaming. One of the more recent examples of an Isekai game that I’ve played is “Ni no Kuni 2.” Another that I’ve played is “Exist Archive,” and a third is “Brave Story.” Despite being from disparate companies and having different approaches to the genres and even having differing sources, they share a central thing in common: the one transported from the real world is a male from a world very much like ours through a sudden event either it being a directly harmful event or something that could have been harmful.
The fact all three of these share a male protagonist, I suppose, shouldn’t be too much of a shock. With just a brief mental search of the Isekai anime and manga that I know of (and am fond of) almost all of them have males in the lead. Sword Art Online, The Boy and the Beast, That Time I got Reincarnated as a Slime, and Konosuba. One of the only ones I can think of that is a quasi-Isekai that doesn’t have a male lead only doesn’t have one on a technicality and that was .hack//SIGN where (spoiler) Tsukasa was a girl offline the whole time. I’m not saying there aren’t any female led isekai adventures, as I count Spirited Away as an isekai and Chihiro is definitely a girl. Same could be said for The Cat Returns. My Neighbor Totoro is one that is kinda Isekai too. However, I will plead ignorance on other female isekai fictions in Eastern fiction, but I’d love to know more.
Something else the shared male protagonists have is they are from a modern setting. This is not mandatory but is very common as it is a grounding element. In this we have a deviation between the exact origins of the three transported characters. The protagonist of Exist Archive Kanta Kujo is a teenage boy. The player character (whose stand in name is Traveller) of Brave Story is an elementary student a lot like the character of Wataru from the book of the same name from which it was adapted. Roland from Ni no Kuni 2 is by far the most above average person to be in an isekai scenario as he was president of a whole country. Those other anime and fictions I mentioned before, the people from the world like ours is ordinarily an average person.
Roland stands out a bit more than the others once it’s seen that while he is a major character, Ni no Kuni 2 is more about Evan and his kingdom than it is Roland’s adventures in that new world. Whereas with the other two games, the characters that are played as are the ones whom the story revolves around. Traveller differs from the other two in that he didn’t die to get to the other world called Vision whereas the other two died outright. Kanata in a sort of accident/domestic terrorist incident and Roland during an assassination attempt.
Yet, despite those minor differences, the stories start in sort of the same way. The transported characters through a strange event end up headfirst in a new world and end up encountering some sort of guide—be it a person or mystical—that guides them as to what they need to do. This is usually immediately followed by battle, since that is the best way to fit the combat tutorial into a game. Beyond that the three stories go different ways, for the most part. Brave Story is a standard hero’s journey. Exist Archive is a hero’s journey mixed with a mystery of the world that Kanata and the others find themselves in after their deaths as well as the mystery behind the identity of Mayura Tsukishiro, the white haired girl with pigtails and no memories. Ni no Kuni 2 is more about Evan’s coming of age than anything else.
In my experience playing these three games, these central conceits did help with introducing the worlds to me, and helped suspend my disbelief while playing and helped me get into the worlds and stories. The reason this works so well is most video games are designed to pull players into their worlds to begin with. To reference Jesper Juul’s Half-Real, it’s because the player is a piece to completing the puzzle. By making the story one that transports characters from a familiar setting to another is an easy way of getting players deeper into the game. This even works with games that are more in line with western portal fantasies, like Kingdom Hearts. The tutorial area might be a tropical island but its a lot like something we’ve seen before and the players are there long enough to get a feel for the Destiny Islands before the main story begins. Of course, what Kingdom Hearts has as an advantage over other isekai games I’ve mentioned is that the other worlds were mostly the worlds of well known films. Still, thanks to the half-real state of play, games are already sort of an isekai like experience in and of themselves to begin with.Therefore it’s a logical conclusion a lot of modern isekai style stories exist in games, and why a fair few iseakai fictions outside the realm of games tend to use video game logic. It’s already an adventure you go on, just taken a step further.
Works Cited
Brave Story. PSP. Xseed Games, 2007.
Exist Archive. Playstation 4. Spike Chunsoft, 2016.
.hack//SIGN. directed by Koichi Mashimo. Beetrain, Funimation, 2002.
