Isekai is giving the anime medium the perfect opportunity to blend traditional stories with a more video game aesthetic these past few years. Sword Art Online, Overlord, and Log Horizon are just a few examples of anime heroes living in a world that seems ripped from an MMORPG, and Shangri-La Frontier is aiming to be a big Isekai entry for 2023. To help prepare fans for its October release, the anime adaptation of the Shangri-La Frontier manga/novel series has released a new poster and trailer.
The anime isekai game is only growing each year, and Shangri-La Frontier will make for a welcome addition to the current roster. Unlike series such as Konosuba: God’s Blessing on This Wonderful World and Jobless Reincarnation, the star of the Shangri-La Frontier manga, based on the novel series, is simply a player who is an expert at “trash video games” and doesn’t die only to appear in a new world. What the Shangri-La Frontier anime, presumably, will focus on is Rakuro Hizutome taking control of a video game character and viewers witnessing his exploits as he navigates this digital world, ala Sword Art Online. With the arrival of Hizutome’s exploits, the isekai genre adds one of its most unique-looking heroes to its line-up.
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Shangri-La Frontier New Trailer
The latest trailer from animation studio C2C, which might be best known for its work on WorldEnd and Reincarnated As A Sword, gives us a closer look at Hizutome outside of the game universe while taking the opportunity to feature the bird-headed hero in the digital landscape as well. Shangri-La Frontier first began in 2017 with the novel series written by creator Katarina. To this day, both the novels and the manga chapters continue, so the anime will have plenty of material to pull from for its adaptation.
If you haven’t had the opportunity to check out Shangri-La Frontier, an Isekai series focused on a hero who is taking a page from My Hero Academia by highlighting an adventurer with a bird head, here’s how Kodansha describes the series:
“Second-year high school student Rakuro Hizutome is interested in one thing only: finding “sh**** games” and beating the crap out of them. His gaming skills are second to none, and no game is too bad for him to enjoy. So when he’s introduced to the new VR game Shangri-La Frontier, he does what he does best—min-maxes and skips the prologue to jump straight into the action. But can even an expert gamer like Rakuro discover all the secrets that Shangri-La Frontier hides…?”
