A decade after its initial publishing, The New Gate isekai series is getting a 2024 adaptation, perhaps to its detriment. While eager fans of the novel series look forward to a better implementation of a premise started by Sword Art Online, right now The New Gate is facing some stiff competition. It may be one of the first adopters of the current isekai conventions, but now it is merely just the first of many.
The announcement of the anime adaptation came with the unveiling of an official website. Kensho Ono, Asami Seto, and Kaede Hondo are the big-name voice actors revealed so far for this upcoming work. Nonetheless, there is only so much interest in the show such star power can eke out in light of a premise that has come too late after the novel’s original release.
The New Gate Is Late To The MMO-Isekai Mania
A synopsis for The New Gate by licensing publisher One Peace Book, who handles the manga adaptation, says:
THE NEW GATE―an online game transformed into a life-and-death struggle for its players. Thanks to the valiant efforts of Shin, the most powerful of them all, an end to the game and freedom for everyone seemed within reach. But just moments after Shin defeats the game’s final boss, he finds himself bathed in an unknown light and transported some 500 years into the future of the in-game world. Thrown from a simple game gone wrong into a strange new land, one young swordsman of unrivalled strength is about to embark on a legendary journey!
Details are still sparse at this point right now, but some of the production staff have been revealed already. Most significant is that Tamaki Nakatsu is handling directorial duties, while production will be handled by both Yokohama Animation Labs and Cloud Hearts. Nakatsu is an experienced veteran of the industry, while both studios are relatively new when it comes to standalone projects. Yokohama Animation Labs, however, has many more years of experience supporting other studios, while Cloud Hearts only formed in 2021. Yokohama Animation Labs is also notable since they are handling another anticipated anime, Whisper Me a Love Song.
Reading the synopsis, most anime audiences will immediately catch its similarities to Sword Art Online, which began with a similar “killer VR game” premise. It’s not surprising, since the original novel was first published in 2013, when SAO hit mainstream popularity with its 2012 anime. But if The New Gate is an alternative, the time has long passed for an anime of this type to feel fresh. The anime landscape in the decade since has been inundated with fantasy works, isekais, or stories set in virtual reality, to the point they’ve blended all together, meaning that there may actually be no room for The New Gate.
The decade-long pause could be attributed to The New Gate’s publisher, Alphapolis, which has been described as being reluctant to allow further access to its properties. Another of its works, A Playthrough of a Certain Dude’s VRMMO Life, also waited a whole decade before an anime came out this October. As things now stand, these shows now tread ground long overrun by a myriad of otherworldly swordsmen, elves, and RPG terms when they could have arrived in the early 2010s when the conventions hadn’t tired out. However, the recent success of Shangri La Frontier proves that anime with an RPG video game premise can still work, which hopefully bodes well for The New Gate.
