Now don't get me wrong, standard qualifier from an avid anime watcher, yes, isekai fantasy anime was always generally considered pretty trash. I consider it the junk food of anime where you know it's terrible for you but you kind of watch it anyway and I've sometimes found it entertaining because the studios redeem the shows with decent character writing and backstories.
The last couple of shows overall have been so bad it's surprising and it's almost woke levels of shittiness and I hope this is just a blip because it's summer anime but how do you manage to fuck up such a basic premise as making an interesting fantasy story? It doesn't have to be original or even amazing, just make it decent. I'm seeing the newer stuff come out and it's like they've shamelessly copy-pasted scenes and plastered them onto the new characters and their budget is clearly very low because you've got the poorly rendered 3D monsters problem again.
Maybe Frieren raised my expectations way too much but even by Isekai trash anime standards it's been a particularly poor showing at the moment. Once you notice all the shit they do to cut corners in animation like literal slideshow scenes with audio ( It's usually a hotspring scene or they're 'wandering' around a market ) it's really hard to unsee it and I despise studios that do this.
The animation corner cutting is widespread. I forget what it was I saw a couple of weeks ago, it wasn't fantasy or isekai, but it was a static drawing with insane camera panning all over. They didn't even bother with some stock effects overlaid. I think it was a battle so they could have done some smoke or sparks or something that moved to hide the still image.
Fantasy need a bit more life and creativity pumped into it and to stay away from the video game tropes. I know it's an isekai but I'll use Konosuba as an obvious example. It has jobs, parties, levels, mission quests, and is basically a video game being played by Kazuma. That is fine in a comedy isekai story like that but I see it seeping into stories that aren't. Goblin Slayer is close because it nearly has all 4: ranks instead of levels, no character has a name just their job, and obvious mission quests, and just straight up parties. Frieren, despite how good it is, still has jobs and parties and almost has levels in the form of mage guild ranks (very coarse).
Record of Lodoss war is hard to beat even if that is just a D&D game turned into a story but we need more like it and LOTR and even just some sword and sorcery like Conan, the barbarian not the detective. Don't use the word "party". Surely there is a Japanese word you could use with a meaning like gang, group, band, fellowship?