Ryan Jonathan

For many readers or viewers, literary fiction provides a sense of entertainment and the needed escapism to endure the difficulties of the daily struggles. Unbothered by the scientific and society laws, fictional stories explore the endless possibility that shows an imaginary world where dragons battle in the skies, aliens try to maintain diplomats between planets, and strange creatures cohabitate on earth with us, humans. Fictional stories are only limited to one’s imagination. So to go deeper into the fictional stories, there will be different genres that come along with them, and we will analyze two genres in this article.

What is Fantasy?

When talking about your favorite genre in terms of anime, manga, or even movies, one of the most famous genres is, for sure, fantasy. Fantasy is a genre that presents a speculative fictional universe involving fictional elements and is sometimes inspired by folktales or myths. It provides a unique experience because of the magical or supernatural elements that do not exist in the real world. The fictional universe can contain its physical laws and logic and is populated by imaginary creatures and races. Fantasy is imaginative and is not tied to reality or scientific fact.

What is Isekai?

Isekai itself is a genre that revolves around a person transported to and has to survive in another world, such as fantasy world, virtual world, or even parallel world. And there are different categories when examining the depth of isekai as a genre. The main factor to see when mentioning isekai is how the character transports to another world. Some stories involve the main character being reincarnated or getting teleported through dimensions by accident. These reasons are examples that isekai has a lot of subcategories and what makes the genre has fantasy elements into it.

Fantasy, Isekai, How Different are they?

So looking at the criteria of fantasy and isekai genres, we can see that isekai itself is a part of the fantasy genre. They share the similarity of being a fictional story with fictional elements. However, isekai has a specific ingredient that makes isekai an isekai, a story with the main character transported into another world. Meanwhile, fantasy is a general genre where any fictional stories with magical and or supernatural elements, including strange creatures, are in it.

So when talking about fantasy and isekai as a genre and subgenre consecutively, the only difference they have is that fantasy is the broader genre when comparing the two. At the same time, isekai would most likely be a part of fantasy’s sub-genre because of the fictional storyline that does not have real-life physical laws. With that, we can see that isekai has more impact in expanding fantasy as a genre rather than being different from each other. The endless possibility of fantasy as a genre has really been improved with isekai as an introduction to the concept of another world. When mentioning that fictional stories are limited to one image, it is true because it will not stop there.

Lastly, one of the hottest things about it is that it could be found anywhere in our daily life quickly. If you want to taste the feels of Isekai, you can try to feel it through movies, anime, or even the easiest way is by playing isekai based games such as an otome game called Memories Interactive. Memories Interactive is a story-based game in the isekai world that lets the player be a part of a character in the isekai world, such as in dynasty, college life, or idol life. If you want to go deeper into Isekai World, you can try to play Memories Interactive freely through this link for Android and this link for iOS. Happy playing!