A memory that forgets only what does not matter, characters in shades of grey, and a public leaderboard of what its creators earn, in dollars. It holds the story together far better than it holds the ledger.

Isekai Zero is an AI roleplay and story game made by ARX Media Sdn Bhd, a studio in Kuching, Sarawak, Malaysia. You pick a storyline — a world, a premise and a cast written by another player or by the studio — choose who you play, and play it out in prose with an AI narrator. It runs in the browser, so it plays on a PC as well as a phone, and there are apps on Google Play and the App Store. Storylines rated 18+ sit behind an age check.

Update (25 September 2026): this entry previously said the iOS app had been taken off the App Store. It was, temporarily, in September 2026, while the studio worked through Apple’s requirements; it returned with version 1.2.0 on 24 September, the day this entry was published. Our rating is unchanged — availability is not one of the seven axes.

Storylines come with a main cast, and the game adds supporting characters of its own as the story needs them. You can read a story as plain chat, with a narrator’s voice, as a light novel with illustrations, as manga panels, or in a visual-novel mode with character sprites and backgrounds. Some storylines also attach a rules referee, the Dungeon Mind, which rolls a d20 on the server and keeps a character sheet. You choose the model yourself, and you can switch it partway through a story.

What It Scores

Isekai Zero scores 3.4 out of 5, fifth of the twenty-seven platforms on our benchmark, just above Master of Dungeon and Tidefall. It is strongest on memory and weakest on its ledger, where a game needs to be strict.

Memory & Continuity — 4. This is the axis that surprised us most. In our play Isekai Zero forgot only small things — details that did not matter to the story — and it never forgot something that did. It is not perfect: those small slips produced one or two strange messages. But it is better than most of the field, and it puts Isekai Zero level with Craft, Tabled, WyrdTale and Hidden Door, behind only Voyage.

Signature Design — 4.5. Isekai Zero pays its creators in money. When other players spend paid credits in your storyline, you receive a published share of the price, and it is paid out through Wise or XRP. It also publishes a leaderboard of what creators earn, in US dollars: the top creator made $1,523 in August 2026, and $1,279 in September up to the 23rd. Hidden Door and Dunia also share money with creators, but Isekai Zero is the only one where we could see how much. It also shows you what every message costs, how many tokens it used and how much was cached, and how full your context is against the model’s limit. And it has a memory system of its own — summaries in chapters and arcs — that you can open, read and edit.

Player Agency — 3.5. There is no puppeting. By default the game does only what you write; if you want the AI to fill in or polish your actions, there is a setting for it. What costs points is railroading. The main cast and the plot points follow you even when you leave them: if you walk away from the cast to go your own way, the story keeps bringing them back.

NPC Fidelity — 3.5. The characters make decisions from their own personality, not from what is right or wrong. They are not good or evil; they sit in shades of grey and act according to where they are. But they never change. A character who acts like an undefeated fighter keeps acting undefeated after losing every fight, unless you add a note to the prompt yourself.

Longevity — 3.5. A memory this strong carries a long campaign, and it is held back by the same things that cost points on the other axes: a cast that will not step aside, and a ledger that does not count.

Mechanical Depth — 2.5. Combat and dice rolls are there, and the Dungeon Mind gives some storylines a character sheet, health, conditions and levels. There are no maps, no positioning and no mechanic that is only Isekai Zero’s own. This is where it has the most room to grow.

Determinism & Fairness — 2. The narrator gives too much power to what the player writes. We said we would get a guildhouse, and the story gave us one with many facilities and no cost — it said our party paid with money we had earned, without a number, an expense or any accounting. We could also create objects just by saying we had them.

Pricing

Free to play, with free models and a free currency. Paid play is by the message, with a published price. Figures from Isekai Zero’s own pricing documentation, checked on 24 September 2026.

Currency	How you get it	What it is for
Free models	Nothing to pay	Play with no credits at all, with a smaller context
Mana	Free: daily check-in, streaks, watching ads	Standard models; cannot be bought, cashed or transferred
Arcane	Bought: 100 Arcane = $1	Premium models and features; never expires

Payment fees are added on top of the $1: about 10% when you buy on the website and about 34% in the Apple and Google stores, so 100 Arcane costs about $1.10 on the web and about $1.34 in an app. Isekai Zero says $1 buys up to 1,000 messages on its default model with full memory.

It also publishes where each credit goes. Of every 100 Arcane you spend, 77 pays the AI provider, and a 30% markup on that cost pays for the rest: 5.75 to the storyline’s creator, 1.15 to whoever referred you, and 16.10 to running the platform. Only paid Arcane earns creators anything — free Mana does not.

Verdict

Isekai Zero holds a story together better than almost anything on our board, and its characters are more interesting than most of the field’s. It loses its points on the ledger, where anything you say you have, you have, and on a cast that will not let you leave it. At 3.4 it is fifth on our board, and a strong pick for a long story where the characters matter more than the dice.

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