---
title: 'Fixing "Gamer Fantasy" Anime'
source: 'https://youtube.com/watch?v=NXnnmZ2drRw'
video_id: 'NXnnmZ2drRw'
date: 2026-06-14
duration_sec: 1734
---

# Fixing "Gamer Fantasy" Anime

> Source: [Fixing "Gamer Fantasy" Anime](https://youtube.com/watch?v=NXnnmZ2drRw)

## Summary

This video critiques the overuse of video game tropes in modern fantasy anime, particularly isekai and litRPG. It explores the historical roots of these tropes in Japanese RPGs and argues that while game elements can be useful narrative tools, they often undermine worldbuilding and immersion when used lazily. The video offers examples of better implementations and suggests alternatives.

### Key Points

- **Golden Age of Anime** [00:00] — Jeff Thu declared the current era a golden age for anime, but was bothered by the prevalence of 'gamer fantasy' tropes.
- **Problems with Gamer Fantasy** [01:02] — The subgenre suffers from being too 'video gamey' and 'colony' (cringey), with RPG elements like stat screens and guilds that feel artificial.
- **Historical Roots in JRPGs** [04:22] — Japanese fantasy anime's game-like tropes stem from the influence of Ultima and Wizardry (1981), which shaped Japan's RPG design ethos and fantasy fandom.
- **Adventurer's Guild Trope** [07:48] — The adventurer's guild, originating from Wizardry and Dragon Quest, is often used as a lazy plot device without logical worldbuilding, ignoring historical precedents.
- **Better Guild Examples** [12:39] — Shows like 'Sentenced to Be a Hero' and 'Legend of Heroes: Trails' handle guilds more realistically, with political complications and moral ambiguity.
- **Adventuring as a Job** [14:12] — The concept of 'adventurer' as a day job is philosophically weak; terms like 'delver' or 'mercenary' are more fitting.
- **Decentralized Power Structures** [15:57] — Better worldbuilding involves multiple guilds with conflicting interests, creating organic conflict rather than a single quest hub.
- **Dungeon Design** [17:43] — Avoid 'floor bosses' that respawn; make monster deaths permanent to maintain stakes. Dungeons should feel like ecosystems, not game levels.
- **Game UI in Anime** [19:34] — Stat screens and HUDs are immersion-breaking but can be justified if integrated into the lore (e.g., DanMachi). They serve as a signifier for the genre.
- **Shared Knowledge in LitRPG** [21:53] — Game mechanics allow transferable knowledge between series, but the best stories use them as a springboard for creative, unbalanced builds.
- **Visual and Flavor Design** [24:14] — Boring UI and system voices kill fun. Examples like Dungeon Crawler Carl's AI and Chrysalis's Gandalf show how to inject personality.
- **Conclusion: Tools, Not Crutches** [28:02] — Game elements are narrative tools; understanding their utility and limitations is key to using them effectively.

### Conclusion

Game tropes can enhance fantasy stories if used thoughtfully, but lazy implementation ruins immersion. The best gamer fiction uses these elements as a foundation for creativity, not a crutch.

## Transcript

On the last episode of Mother's
Basement, Jeff Thu declared the golden
age of anime to be right the now.
However, while he was working on that
video, one thing did keep bothering him.
Well, two things actually. I hate
talking about myself in the third
person. And the second thing is, of
course, thoseing things. You know,
there's a guy in the hero's party. He
gets banished for how his inconveniently
huge car keeps tripping him up in
fights. Right after leaving, he
discovers he can blast ropes that take
the head off a dragon at 50 paces. Three
to seven gorgeous women start riding
around everywhere on his dick. And
either by design or by accident, he ends
up trapping his former companions in the
salty hot glue of revenge before the
story's through. That sort of thing.
though the sort of thing that I just
described, you know, the one with the
thing would probably be more fun than
most of the actual [ __ ] things that
get made these days. There's a lot of
problems to talk about regarding this
oddly specific subgenre. Not the least
of which being how coliny the whole vibe
can get. But the biggest problem for my
money is how video gamey the vibe tends
to be as well. Which, just so we're
clear, Mr. Fox News has nothing to do
with the Colombininess of it all. Those
are two separate issues, far more so
than even your average isekai, where it
is still very much a problem. These
things are absolutely lousy with RPG
elements in their world building that is
for the most part pretty lousy, too.
It's not impossible to build a
believable livedin world on video game
logic, but it sure is a whole lot easier
to just not do that. And the problem
isn't limited to stat screens. It's all
the blatantly artificial video gamey
tropes that come part and parcel with
them. Any one of which can rip you right
out of an anime's world if you think
about it for even a moment longer than
the writer obviously did. Now, is the
ubiquity of these things and isekai in
the same vein enough to make me rethink
calling this a golden age? Absolutely
not. There is so much good fantasy on
right now with none of this gamer
nonsense in it. But as a gamer who does
love him some nonsense, it pains me to
see just how bad most of this stuff
gets. Which is why today I want to do my
part to fix the problem by exploring
exactly what these anime are doing wrong
and how some better stories do it right.
And one of the positive examples I'll be
using throughout the video also happens
to be one of the most exciting sponsors
I have ever worked with. Chrysalis by
Rhino Z. If you haven't heard me gush
about it before, Chrysalis is one of my
personal all-time favorite lit RPG web
novels, which follows this kid named
Anthony who gets reincarnated as a
monster ant in this dungeon the size of
a planet and slowly builds his humble
colony up into a utopian global empire
where every citizen gets 8 hours of
sleep a night or else. The books are
just a delight to read and especially
listen to, carried by rocksolid action
writing, sardonic Aussie wit, and more
beautifully tortured ant puns than you
can shake an antenna at. All of which
are further enhanced by the unrivaled
audiobook performances of Sound Booth
Theater, who also offer IMO the best way
to get into the series through their
phenomenally generous box set, which
gives you the first three audio books.
That's 55 hours of listening for just
one Audible credit. As somebody who is
addicted to audiobooks, it's like the
best value I have ever found in the app.
With the hotly anticipated latest book,
Antindustrial Revolution, due out on
Kindle July 15th, there has never been a
better time to get into Chrysalis. And I
was recommending this [ __ ] months before
they paid me to do it. So, you know, I
mean that. And having said that, my
sponsorship obligation is now
technically out of the way. So, you also
know that every time I reference it from
now on is purely for the love of the
game and OF COURSE FOR THE COLONY. TO
understand why so many modern fantasy
anime are like this, you first need to
understand why JRPGs are like that.
Which all comes back to 1981 and the
releases of Ultima and Wizardry, the
most influential PC RPGs of all time,
especially in Japan. That might come as
a surprise since neither series saw an
official release there until 1985 after
homegrown games like Lizard, Mugan, No
Shinszo, Tower of Duaga, Hidelide, and
Dragon Slayer had already taken root and
right before Dragon Quest would turn
console RPGs into a full-blown
phenomenon. But none of those games
would exist in the first place if
Japanese computer nerds like Yugji Horry
hadn't fallen in love with import copies
of Ultima and Wizardry earlier in the
decade. Everything about Japan's
divergent branch of the genre stems from
that point. In the west, the fundamental
ethos of CRPGs has always been emulate
the tabletop experience with deeper
character customization and eventually
more role-playing options. But the
Japanese never had that experience to
begin with. Not until TSR tried and
mostly failed to bring Dn D to their
shores in the mid80s when the JRPG boom
was already underway. So in Japan, the
ethos for designing RPGs has always been
build a better wizardry and or Ultima,
which led them to more console friendly
video game ccentric innovations like
action RPGs and linear cinematic
narratives told through complex in-g
engine cutscenes much sooner than
Western devs who were busy going allin
on more textheavy playerdriven stories.
But Wizardry and Ultima didn't just give
Japan its first taste of role-
playinging. They were also foundational
to its entire fantasy fandom. Of course,
Japan had produced plenty of fantastical
films and shows in the preceding
decades, inspired by various mythologies
and fairy tales from around the world,
but as far as that medieval European
capital F style of fantasy went, Lord of
the Rings was translated in the 70s
around the same time as Earth Sea and
some other influential Western epics,
which did go on to inspire some
important Japanese literature, most
notably 197 79's Green Saga, a legendary
light novel series that is still running
today at 150 volumes and counting. But
all these books were a niche within a
niche at a time when genre fiction was
almost entirely synonymous with science
fiction to the Japanese. Aside from a
few exceptions that emerged around the
same time and out of the same nerdy
zeitgeist as the first wave of JRPGs,
Swords and Sorcery stuff only gained the
cultural clout needed to justify, for
example, making a whole mess of anime
out of it after the gaming boom began,
with some of the earliest hits being
adaptations of Dragon Quest, Dragon
Slayer, and Wizardry. While the west
sees stat screens and other gaming
conventions as an offshoot of an
offshoot of the foundational works of
fantasy, in Japan, games are the
foundation. So when, for example, the
adventurers inn and Gilgamesh's tavern
from Wizardry 1 were amalgamated into
Patty's party planning place in Dragon
Quest 3, and the idea was then
standardized as the adventurers guild by
other games in need of party recruiting
and questing hubs. It was only natural
for fantasy books and anime to adopt the
concept as well, often with very little
thought put toward how such a thing
might actually, you know, work outside
of a video game. Now, guilds in general
obviously had a place in the medieval
societies that fantasy strives to
emulate, but the logic that justified
their existence doesn't necessarily
apply to adventuring. And we know that
because there were no guilds for the
realworld equivalents of adventurers in
wartime. Mercenary companies had very
little reason to form regulatory bodies
with other mercenaries they were
probably going to be trying to kill next
week. Plus, they already had a pretty
standardized apprenticeship program of
here's a spear, try not to die. And in
peace time, most of them were too busy
being bandits to build bureaucracies. Of
course, having loads of monsters to hunt
instead of killing people could
potentially change that calculus, but
historically speaking, hunting was the
near exclusive privilege of the
nobility. In part because wild game is
full of valuable resources, and in part
because the hunts themselves made great
murder practice for knights. Two factors
that are going to be even more
applicable if we're talking about
magical monsters rather than deer or
foxes. None of that's to say that
fantasy worlds have to be 100%
historically accurate. That wouldn't be
very fantastic. But historical precedent
is vital to crafting even the most
imaginative of worlds because history is
the best model that we have for how
civilizations tend to behave. And the
mark of a great worldbuilder is how well
they can justify deviations from that
model with good answers to tough
questions. So, what purpose does an
adventurer's guild serve? Not to gamers,
but society. What could possibly make a
state want to let essentially an
independent freelance militia operate
within its borders? Why would the army
not be dealing with monster related
problems and reaping the associated
rewards? What effect does seeding those
resources and that authority to private
individuals have on politics or the
economy? On that note, who's even paying
for all these quests in the first place?
And what do they or the adventurers get
out of running their monster part
trades, surveying contracts, bounties,
and such through these middleman
organizations instead of just working
with each other directly. Far too many
gamer fantasies just completely ignore
all that. The Adventurer's Guild exists
because the protagonist really needs an
instant support network after getting
isekai or some governing body to manage
the employment contract with the party
that just banished him. And that's it.
It's there cuz the story needs it there.
And once it's there, it is likely to
warp that entire story and the entire
story's world around itself because
these guilds are just such darn useful
writing tools. Can't figure out how to
get your hero where they need to be for
the next arc? Put it on the quest board.
Need to create a sense of power
progression? Give them a rank up. Need a
place for them to meet a new ally or
rival? Hey, the guild tavern's right
there. In that way, this place that has
no place within the world becomes our
hero's primary point of contact with the
entire civilized side of it. filtering
every bit of the setting that the writer
did bother fleshing out through this
physical embodiment of a video game menu
and giving it the same artificial
aftertaste. And this isn't just
detrimental to immersion. It also
hamstrings storytelling as every major
player in the fantasy world is now
forced to play around this blatantly
video gamey, often politically inert
plot device. It becomes a spanner in the
gears of organic character-driven social
conflict that good worldbuilding is
supposed to create and all but forces
the writer to fall back on clichéed
formula. Of course, it's not impossible
to tell a good story around the guild.
Mushoku Tensei is absolutely peak, but
the guild is mostly a means to other
ends there, providing funds for the
actual adventures. The only part of the
story that's really driven by just
taking random quests off the job board
is the arc where Rudy is profoundly
depressed, which I think maybe says
something about the emotional texture of
that particular plot structure. Now, I
did quite enjoy how sentence to be a
hero handled its adventurer's guild,
which was by uh basically just not
having one. The organization that bears
the name is really just a loosely
affiliated band of thugs and killers
working under a former pirate lord who
went semi-legit. It's an explicitly
amoral entity that causes problems from
basically the moment it's introduced and
ultimately betrays humanity in a
desperate grasp for wealth and power as
one would expect a bunch of mercenaries
to do. If you think about it, it's kind
of weird how often adventurers guilds
are instrumental in saving the world.
Now, I say that, but one of my favorite
explorations of the trope, period, is in
the Legend of Heroes Trails games, which
are in no small part about the political
complications of running such an
organization and the ramifications of it
existing at all. Smaller countries tend
to love how the guild supplements their
military and police, but those
organizations have their own
antagonistic relationship to the
civilian contractors that are taking
their job separate from public opinion
or how the overall government feels.
There are also bigger countries where
the guild has no presence at all because
the leaders see them as a threat even
though they have a strict policy of not
interfering in politics. The series does
so much to make this inherently fake
concept feel like an organic part of a
living, breathing world. I also think
I'm a bit more inclined to like the
Bracer Guild just because they don't
call it an adventurers's guild. This is
definitely a personal nitpick, but I
find the idea of adventuring as a day
job to be deeply philosophically
underwhelming. It's not that I don't
like stories about ordinary jobs in
fantastical worlds. Drifting Dragons,
Planetess, and Interspecies reviewers
are all among my favorites. But
adventure definitionally has to be a
break from routine. If someone is
fighting monsters and exploring dungeons
every single day for a living, they're
not an adventurer. They're a gold farmer
or a delver, dunge engineer, mercenary,
monster hunter, explorer, seeker, cave
raider, bracer. Call them whatever you
want. Just call them literally anything
else, please. Or better yet, do
something else. If you've got a big
dungeon in your story and absolutely
need a guild to manage access to it,
fine. But instead of making them a
catchall guild for every kind of dungeon
explorer, maybe have them work with
other guilds for mages, rogues, and
warriors. Buy equipment from the armorer
and fletchers guilds and sell materials
to merchants and alchemists. Or better
yet, let those guilds post their own
quests in their own guild halls and hand
out their own rewards for killing
monsters outside the dungeon. You're not
actually making a video game. You don't
need one monolithic entity to act as
your quest hub, temp agency, vocational
school, and power scaling leaderboard.
So all those things can be in one nested
menu. Instead, try spreading those
duties out to a bunch of different
organizations with their own different
needs, strengths, weaknesses, and this
is the crucial part, reasons to [ __ ]
with each other. Maybe the merchants
don't like the thieves for self-evident
reasons, or the mages and alchemists are
competing for influence with the
nobility. Perhaps the church distrusts
the Delvers Union for their proximity to
that obviously demonic dungeon. Or maybe
some bishop is just using that rhetoric
as a justification to have the Paladin
affiliated warrior guild take their
place as dungeon gatekeepers. The more
you decentralize the power structures
your world is built on, the easier it is
to pit them against each other and make
some interesting [ __ ] happen that
doesn't have to start on the job board.
In Chrysalis, there is both a
semi-secret society of OP dungeon
crawlers called the Abyssal Legion and a
separate guild of adventurers who are
really just monster resource farmers and
rarely make it past the top layers of
the dungeon, but still think they're hot
[ __ ] The Legion has power and influence
with the surface kingdoms, which it uses
to heavily regulate the flow of
resources in and out of the dungeon and
try to stabilize its monster ecosystem.
While the guild would very much like to
usurp that power and milk the dungeon
for all it's worth. All of which ends up
coming to a head in some of the most fun
and unpredictable moments of the early
books. Don Machi does just have the one
adventurers guild, but it's really just
a mediating force between all of the
different familias and the gods that
lead them, who of course have their own
rivalries and relationships with each
other, and the adventurers under them
have similar relationships, and it just
creates a very messy situation where
organic conflicts can naturally arise.
Speaking of dungeons though, how to do
them right is really a subject that
deserves its own full video essay. But
if you'll permit me just one brief
comment on the matter, please stop
putting floor bosses in them unless your
anime or book is actually set in a video
game. You can have all the big cool
monsters you want gating the hero's
progression to the next floor. Just
don't call them bosses. And especially
don't have them infinitely respawn so
that every party trying to clear the
dungeon has to fight all the exact same
big cool monsters as all the other
parties in the exact same order. That
[ __ ] feels so boring, low stakes, and
video gamey. Sword Art Online didn't
even do it. Look, I'm not saying your
dungeons have to be ultra realistic and
devoid of game logic. The idea of a
self- sustaining underground magical
ecosystem is one of my favorite things
about Dungeon Meshy, Maiden Abyss, and
Chrysalis for that matter. But if you
just want to have a big evil magic hole
in the ground full of monsters, puzzles,
and maybe some lore, that's cool. I like
those. All I'm saying is if you're going
to make me spend a whole episode
watching a guy kill a big cool monster,
it should stay [ __ ] dead. Jack of all
trades, stakes of none. Boom. Got him. I
sat through like eight more episodes of
that show as research for this video and
I feel like I watched literally nothing.
It's solo leveling minus the hype and
aura. It honestly put in perspective how
little of a problem stat screens and
skill points really are in the grand
scheme of immersion shattering video
game nonsense. Even without any of those
things, it feels more like watching a
bad let's play than almost any other
anime. and like half the dialogue in the
game they're playing is tutorials. That
said, putting a video game HUD in your
anime is just about the most glaringly
fake thing you can do to a nonVRMMO
world, and it's a big pet peeve for a
lot of fantasy enthusiasts. It even
bothered me back in the day when these
sorts of things first started coming
into vogue, except in Overlord and Slime
because those anime are, you know,
actually good. I kind of just got used
to it there very quickly. In fact, as is
the case with any good anime that does
such things. And while I do really like
how, say, Don Machi makes its stat
readouts a diagetic part of its world, I
don't even think that's strictly
necessary if you want to build an
immersive fantasy setting around RPG
systems like that. Ultimately, I've
reached the conclusion that game UI is
just another kind of signifier that
tells the viewer, "Okay, this show is
going to be like this other show you're
familiar with." In the same way as
seeing a glowing aura around a muscled
up martial artist, or a mage spewing
particle effects out of her staff, or a
dude cutting a boulder in half with a
sword. It's just one of many types of
magical aesthetic that some people [ __ ]
with. And if you use it, you just have
to accept you're going to lose all the
people who don't. Most of those people
do still complain about Don Machi after
all, even though it puts so much extra
work into justifying the numbers on a
lore level. Now, the numbers can suck
all the tension and strategy out of
fights by objectively confirming that
Protagon is in fact stronger than the
guy he's fighting and doesn't have to
worry about anything. But that's just as
true of power levels and shownen. By the
same token, choosing skills and spells
from a drop- down menu does kind of
demystify your fantasy world, but not
significantly more than any other kind
of hard magic system does once the rules
are fully explained. It just has that
effect quicker because anyone who's
played a video game before has a head
start on understanding those rules,
which also means they have a head start
on getting to the fun theory crafting
power scaling stage of enjoying those
rules. So, it is definitely a tradeoff
on your fantasy world's overall level of
immersion, but it has some serious
upsides. Part of the reason that gamer
isekai, those [ __ ] things, and lit
RPGs are so addictive and share so many
fans between each other is because so
much knowledge is transferable from
series to series. As soon as you finish
one, you can jump right into another and
get more of what you were enjoying on at
least a basic level. Problems only
really arise when a story fails to move
past that basic level and just gives you
yet another guy who's really strong and
fast and good at everything cuz his
numbers are so big. That's all fine and
dandy for Baby's first lit RPG, but as
soon as you get a taste for the harder
stuff, it loses its appeal. The best
gamer fiction uses that shared knowledge
pool as a jumping off point for dreaming
up hypersp specific builds and weird
broken synergistic skill sets that could
never exist in a real game because it
needs to be balanced and it would be too
hard for new players to understand. In
shownen power system terms, it lets you
jump right into coming up with part five
and six level stand concepts without
having to lay the groundwork of parts
three and four first. And those systems
succeed or fail by a lot of the same
metrics as a shownen power system. So
long as the skill sets or spell lists or
what have you are tailored to reflect
the main characters personalities and
their foes challenge them to use their
powers in interesting and creative ways
that the viewer or reader is able to
follow and anticipate by paying
attention. They're probably going to
have a fun time and that's all you
really need. You can of course go
further with it in the same way that
shownen like Hunter Hunter or Jujutsu
Kaizen can integrate their power systems
much more deeply into their settings and
themes. So I'm a Spider, so what has a
whole religion that worships the skill
system, which is a fun logical
extrapolation of what might happen if
everyone in the world had a magic voice
in their head that gave them magic
powers. Chrysalis takes the idea several
steps further with multiple dungeon
worshipping sects and cults split by
vehement dogmatic disagreements on
optimal build strategies and the ethics
of exp farming. But all of that is just
meat. So long as the gravy is tasty,
folks will eat your gamer slop right up.
For the tastiest possible gravy, though,
it is best to add a little bit of visual
spice. Aside from making it play boring,
I think the worst thing you can possibly
do to your fake game is make it look
boring. And holy [ __ ] do a whole lot of
Gamer Fantasy anime ever look like Excel
spreadsheets and default RPG Maker
templates. Just a teensy bit of UI
design in your menus can go a long way,
and you can go a whole lot further with
that design because, of course, nobody
actually has to interact with them. I
think my all-time least defensible
nitpick of Sword Art Online has got to
be saying that the menus should have
been thought controlled. Nah, those
drop-down touch interfaces are
absolutely fire. It is never not fun
watching Kyito flick through a menu,
which is more than I can say for
watching Kyito fight. In many cases,
game UI also comes part and parcel with
flavor text and system voices, which can
do just as much, if not more so, to kill
the fun if they read slash sound boring.
Far too many anime, web, and light novel
writers treat those aspects as an excuse
to fill some time with dry, repetitive,
loweffort technical descriptions when
they should be using them as an
opportunity to inject some extra flavor
and personality into their worlds. I
don't think it's controversial to call
the AI from Dungeon Crawler Carl the
definitive example of how to make the
systems voice a compelling character in
its own right. Its sadistic game show
host personality and not at all
disguised fetishes imbue every item and
skill description with delightfully dark
humor from the word go. And the gradual
unraveling of its psyche is one of the
series most compelling subplots. It
makes every new item and skill we
discover feel as rewarding for the
reader as it does to the characters. And
that being my intro into the genre did
kind of set me up for disappointment
with almost every other lit RPG audio
book I've tried. But thankfully
Chrysalis wasn't one of them. And that
was one of the first things that really
sucked me into it. It makes it clear
very early on that the system voice
Gandalf is a dude with his own agenda
that may or may not line up with
Anony's. And while it doesn't quite have
that same laugh out loud factor as the
system AI, it is still very rewarding
every time Anthony unlocks one of the
full monster profiles with design notes
from Gandalf that reveal more about his
plans and personalities. And the full-on
conversations he gets to have with
Gandalf whenever he evolves are a
brilliant way of tying milestones in
Anony's power progression to some of the
story's most interesting lore reveals.
Low-key, one of my favorite things about
this season's The Strongest Job is
apparently not a hero or a sage, but an
appraiser provisional is how it handles
Protag's support voice, Sappochan, who
gradually evolves from a neutral
exposition dispenser into a proper
character over the early episodes. I
also really like how it mixes things up
by having the gods speak directly into
his brain, a conceit the show frequently
mines for comedy gold. You don't have to
go the funny route with this, though.
You can also make it a little scary,
like roll over and die, or put some Dark
Soulsy lore tidbits and mystery
breadcrumbs in your descriptions. I just
need some reason to care. If you can't
make your system voice at least as
entertaining as a Pokédex, your story is
probably better off without it in much
the same way that it's almost certainly
better off without an adventurer's
guild. At the end of the day though,
even that is a matter of how you use it.
Game elements are narrative tools just
like any other trope that serve to
streamline some aspects of storytelling
while restricting others. The key is
understanding their utility and
limitations and making them work for the
story you want to tell instead of
against it. If you are a storyteller,
then I hope this video helps you do
exactly that. And if you're just a gamer
slop enthusiast, I hope it makes you
better able to identify the really good
[ __ ] when you see it. I'm Jeff Thu, the
system voice of anime watching, signing
out from the sitting on my ass guild.