Seeing the World of Gensokyo

Why I See Gensokyo More Clearly Than Any Anime World
BY DIGIBRO

width=200px|alt=This is the only result I got for ‘Gensokyo map’ ROFL

One of the things that anime is surprisingly not very good at is creating a fully-realized fictional ‘world.’ When you open up a fantasy book (and fantasy is of course the best genre for fictional worlds) you are often confronted with a ‘world map’ right off the bat. You will be given details about all sorts of countries and locations and customs, etc., to bring this world to life as you read. The reason that this doesn’t really happen in anime is for the same reason it does happen a whole lot in JRPGs – time.

Anime aren’t long – usually, they are 4-8 hours long, which is hardly enough time to create a whole world and fill it with meaningful characters (Lord of the Rings trilogy took about 10 hours – around 30 episodes of anime? And good luck finding many any as good as LOTR). Actually, the biggest beef I have with a lot of anime stylistically, especially in fantasy and adventure series, is the lack of a fully realized world. It’s the meat that makes you feel like what you are watching is really happening somewhere, and not just anonymously existing in a world bent to the convenience of the story.

I like Scrapped Princess, but it had this terrible lack of sense about the world. We knew that the characters were fleeing one country for the next, but we never knew how big these countries were, or how far along they had traveled, or what this country was like. That show comes forth with a lot of details that are so out of left-field that they have you constantly reconciling new developments against what you’ve seen so far, and then you have to realize ‘the world was always intended to be that way, they just didn’t tell me so.’ (I guess that’s what the novels the show is based on are for.) Even a series with a beautiful, stylized world like Last Exile fails to give you any real sense of the world, and that show too gets a little head-scratchy when the world suddenly looks different in ways you didn’t expect late in the game. All of this is why most anime stay away from world-building altogether and reuse the same familiar landscapes, or otherwise make the world ‘consistently random.’

A series like One Piece or Kino’s Journey can use a set-up to their advantage where they keep certain things consistent throughout the series so that the world all feels ‘together’, but use the fact that all of the locations are far apart from one-another to make each one unique on the author’s whim.

If there is one series that stakes the claim of moving in the right direction, it’s 12 Kingdoms (I guess deserving of it’s title as one of the greatest anime fantasy series of all time) which gives you a world map and does a lot to develop that world and… until it ends after 45 episodes, leaving a lot of it yet to be explored, and therefor alien to the viewer. As it stands, I think that the only anime that have