Warning! Spoilers ahead for Return of The Frozen chapter 4!
Return of The Frozen Player is proving that manga can still incorporate some of the most popular tropes from Isekai that fans can't seem to get enough of without rehashing the same plotlines over and over again.
The Isekai genre and its reincarnation subgenre currently face an existential crisis. All of their stories are essentially identical with a few deviations here and there to keep them from being cold carbon copies of each other. Some of the most overused plots involve your average Joe getting Isekai'd (usually by summoning) into a land of magic, a just person being reincarnated after death as a reward for good behavior (usually for pushing a stranger out of the way of a Mac Truck), or a high-level gamer finding themselves sucked into a game or waking up in a world with RPG stats as a level-one character. But they're always in luck. Either a system glitch or a benevolent god bestows upon the protagonist a cheat that will allow them to survive or quickly level up into a massively powerful warrior.
All of this happens in Return of The Frozen Player except there's no reincarnation, no Isekai. Instead, Specter Seo Jun-ho and his companions face off against a tyrannical Frost Queen who froze the Pacific Ocean and unleashed monsters on mankind. The Specter defeats and absorbs his frozen nemesis' power, but it forces him and his companions into a frozen hibernation until Specter fully absorbs the Frost Queen's nucleus. Then 25 years later, only the Specter breaks free from his frozen prison and learns that after the Frost Queen's defeat, a Dimensional Elevator with 10 floors descended upon the Earth that had to be defeated. Over the decades, mankind only managed to complete the second floor, but gained unimaginable wealth from the treasures there, transforming their world into an affluent society. But in order to get through the intense heat of the third floor, they need the Frost Queen's nucleus, which has been stored inside of the Specter.
Of course, Specter volunteers to complete all 10 floors and save the world from this mysterious enemy. But there's a problem. After being frozen for a quarter-century, he is demonstratively much weaker than he was before his encasement. However, the Specter discovers that he will not only gain an incredible amount of power each time he completes a floor, allowing him to eventually surpass his original strength, but he will be able to make the Frost Queen's power his own to eventually free his companions from their frozen prison.
Return of the Frozen Player essentially borrows all of the qualities that attract so many readers to Isekai. The Specter never Isekai'd or reincarnated into another world. But the world he wakes up in after 25 years of hibernation is essentially transformed, not just because so much time has passed but due to the fact that mankind gained an incredible amount of wealth while he was frozen. Specter's friends might as well be in another world as well since they're alive but unreachable because they're still frozen. Then there's the Specter's cheat. He doesn't receive new powers from some sort of unidentified gaming glitch for some ambivalent reason. Nor does a god grant him a cheating system because they feel sorry for him or believe he deserves it. The Specter absorbs it from the Frost Queen. Although Return of the Frozen Player is obviously taking advantage of the momentum and popularity that come with being an Isekai manga, the series is, at least, adopting a more creative approach by not actually being Isekai.
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