Just saw In Another World With My Smartphone...

[Anonymouswizard]

I actually like the first little bit of Smartphone, because it had this lack of pretension to it and reminded me of Hayate no Gotoku in its art style and certain choices in its production are similar -- though I don't believe it's the same studio. That maybe it would just be a gormless, breezy comedy where dramatic tension wasn't necessary.

Then it just sort of phased out even rudimentary cohesive story-telling or developing much potential humour and became about the harem fantasy aspect of it. Even if you're into that kind of fanservice-heavy anime - and there's certainly a market for it - it doesn't really work with the limitations of the art style and cheap looking animation.

That's the thing, Hayate no Gotoku might technically be a harem series, but it has great writing and it's funny. It manages to be a harem series that doesn't rely on fanservice,

Re:the genre itself. When you talk to me about "in another world" fantasies the first one I remember is the Narnia books. Though I only read the first two. The genre is effective, in my opinion, because you get to combine a real-world POV with a fantasy world. That makes the delivery of information to the audience a bit more organic.

I also toyed with the idea of writing my own, though it's in all likelihood just a pipe dream.

Yeah, it's a tricky genre to write. How much time do you spend establishing the real world (my answer is actually that I begin as a fantasy story and the portal aspects are revealed later, but that's subject to change), how well do you have them fit in, how powerful do you make real worlders, and so on. On top of all the high versus low fantasy stuff (low fantasy for me, because I'm playing with some tropes I dislike).