The isekai genre has become one of the most tired and overused themes in the East Asian culture industry over the last ten years, largely because it has become little more than a poorly disguised power fantasy. It is a shame because the genre has a lot of promise, as early games and anime in the genre, such as the legendary .hack franchise, showed. Where will Isekai Villain land? Will it be the next .hack//Infection or the next Conception? Read on as Cubed3 skillfully dodges Truck-kun and falls into Sewer-san to begin this isekai journey!
It felt a bit worrisome to boot up Isekai Villain for the first time, as expectations weren’t exactly high. While KEMCO is definitely able to produce wonderful JRPGs at times, they are just as likely to release something that would make a rerelease of the original Dragon Warriors feel like a fresh take on the genre. This, combined with them taking on the already overdone isekai genre, seems like a recipe for disaster.
The worries quickly disappeared. Isekai Villain took this concept and did something very intelligent with it from a storytelling perspective while managing to dodge most of the genre’s pitfalls. The biggest tell that this won’t be a typical power fantasy harem isekai is that it happens in the very first minute of the game. The protagonist is walking through the city, looking at his phone. Any fan of the genre knows that this is when Truck-kun appears. However, he skillfully dodges the wagon of death, only to fall into a pitfall in the sewers for a more humbling start to his isekai adventure.
From this point onwards, the game keeps dangling bad isekai tropes in front of the player’s face, only to contradict them just as quickly. This creates an adventure that is very easy to get pulled into, especially when combined with a surprisingly well-written and humorous cast. A great example of this is the fact that the protagonist is not the final villain. Instead, he takes on the role of a grunt and aims to use his meta knowledge to avoid his own death flag rather than to rule the world or get a harem.
Ironically, although the writing is one of its strongest suits, the localisation team takes things back to the 90s in another way than through 16-bit-era graphics and gameplay: poor translations. The sentences are unnatural. Overly complex words are mixed with broken sentence structures in a way that only translation software would do. Sadly, it makes the otherwise well-written story feel like the infamous “All your base are belong to us” quote from Zero Wing.
Another problem is how F2P elements have been implemented into the main game. The infamous gacha system is back in full swing, and there is also a battle pass. Both of these are obviously being bought with freemium currency that, in the premium version of the game, can be farmed, as has become standard for KEMCO RPGs.
This time, it is not just an issue because it clutters the game’s menus; it also impacts the balance in a way that can only be described as the worst of both worlds. On the one hand, the main story is trivial if the player even remotely uses the freemium currency. On the other hand, the post-game introduces such massive level gaps that if the player does not heavily invest freemium currency to make the grind easier, they will spend a lot of time between each of the four post-game dungeons, one of which also has to be unlocked by a hefty sum of freemium currency.
It is deflating when the final superboss still one-shots the entire party before they get to take a single turn after spending hours grinding from around level 100 to the level cap of 999 in the post-game. The solution is to spend even more time grinding freemium currency and the same stat-boosting items that threw off the balance in the main story. It definitely feels like these fights were designed to be beaten by spending money in the F2P version of the game, and this experience translates poorly into the premium version.
It is a massive shame, as the combat system of Isekai Villain is fun and engaging. It is a typical turn-based JRPG system with an added twist: the player can perform chains and break combos when attacking enemies using certain attack combinations. This is an interesting way to reward the player in an element-based combat system without making it feel like they are punished for attacking with other elements.
The base building, while basic, is also enjoyable to dabble in. It is something that makes the mandatory grinding rewarding, and it allows for further ways to customise the gameplay experience. However, certain things in the system are time-gated, another poor relic from the game’s F2P roots.
When looking at how well Isekai Villain handled its isekai roots and kept them from tarnishing the story, it is a depressing contrast to see how it let its F2P roots infect and destroy its gameplay. While this is nothing new from KEMCO, the F2P elements here are on an entirely new level in terms of their impact on gameplay, which is a shame. If Isekai Villain had been designed as a buy-once title, it would have been a great 16-bit-era-style JRPG.
