Lucky Star and K-on for CGDCT
Evangelion for meta-commentary and deconstruction, to the point that future works that qualify often get called the “Evangelion of <genre>”
Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood and Attack on Titan for battle shounen
Bocchi the Rock for girls band anime, specifically
Lupin III: The Castle of Cagliostro for pretty much all of Ghibli
Akira for 90s anime
Unfortunately I can’t think of any anime that really feel like they’re taking inspiration from Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood. Can you give any examples?
It feels like Sword Art Online and Rising of the Shield Hero sure got a lot of imitators though!
There were a lot of “stuck in a game” anime well before SAO.
Log horizon came a few years before[2 years after…]. .hack//SIGN about 10 years prior. And hell, Digimon came even before that.I don’t think Digimon quite occupies the same sphere – it’s like comparing Chronicles of Narnia to Ready Player One.
I’m not even sure how to rate the multiple .hack// series here because they were really experimental (one branch leaving half of its story in PS2 games) and AFAIK nobody was directly copying them. Meanwhile, after SAO…
I’m aware that it wasn’t the first but there’s no denying that SAO kicked off a big trend.
Also .hack//SIGN was boring af; only part worthwhile was the soundtrack.
Yeah, SAO feels like the start of the isekai boom
I might be partially wrong about the battle shounen. I could argue more strongly that FMAB (and DBZ Kai) set the tone for future manga-faithful remakes (Fruits Basket 2019, Rurouni Kenshin 2023, Ranma and Urusei remakes, etc.)
I forgot about how SAO became the blueprint for modern isekai 😂
Not just SAO! I called out Rising of the Shield Hero because unfortunately it popularized the trope where an isekai protag goes and buys some slaves.