Forum - View topicThis Week in Anime - The Name of the Game is Death
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Joe Mello
 Posts: 2560 Location: Online Terminal |
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I think the reason I generally bounce off death games is a similar reason I bounce off isekai; the premises used in both feel more like crutches than methods of telling insightful stories. If you want to intricately describe new and spectacular ways to turn people into chunky salsa just do it. That's basically what Yu-gi-oh was before it got hit with the Shonen Jump Battle Shonen Bat.
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MFrontier
Posts: 20003 |
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I enjoyed Darwin's Game and Battle Game in 5 Seconds.
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gsilver
Posts: 765 |
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I'm a Kaiji fan over here.
Not strictly my introduction to the genre, since I previously saw some of the classic Western scifi movies that the genre heavily draws from, but it was my introduction to the Japanese side, anyway. I still haven't played/read/watched too many other things in the genre, but I did finally play 999 a couple of years ago. |
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Cho_Desu
 Posts: 263 |
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A few recs:
Battle Royale - Both the film, and the novel it's based on. Both are excellent, and pretty different from each other. I like Hunger Games well enough, but Battle Royale ultimately hits harder because the kids are classmates—they all know each other, yet must kill if they wish to live. Dangan Ronpa series - 1, 2, and V3 are all fantastic games. There's nothing else like 'em. Magical Girl Raising Project - Unfortunately it came out at a time everyone seemed really tired of dark takes on mahou shoujo. It's a solid light novel series though, and not just edgy grimdark fare like you might expect. Alice in Borderland - It's a shame this released on Netflix around the same time as Squid Games, because it's really good stuff. Just as intense as it is unpredictable, it keeps you guessing and invested in its wild, desperate scenarios. I appreciate how the "death game" subgenre can take different forms. There's the "everyone fights to the death" variety that most people think of. But others are ultimately mystery series, and others involve the characters having to complete challenges or solve puzzles (where failure means death, of course). Which means many of these stories aren't action-focused, since the characters aren't actively trying to kill each other. I think one of the appeals of the subgenre is the large casts of characters they naturally require. Good takes on it require the writer to be able to introduce a bunch of people, make them memorable, and get you to care enough about them to not want them to die (or, you know, feel bad when they do die). It's also obviously an extremely conflict-driven subgenre. The stakes are high, and nobody is safe. |
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Hiroki not Takuya
 Posts: 3036 |
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I don't care about "death game" shows but when I saw Big Order was written by the author of Future Diary my jaw dropped. Now, saying anything about B.O. was brilliant I had to comment. If someone said it was a brilliant stealth comedy, I'd totally agree, especially that bit with getting Iyo pregnant! Rin trying to get Eiji killed and triggering every trap herself while he obliviously walks on through was pure gold...I rewatch this when I need a laugh to this day...
MFrontier's comment reminded me I had actually watched a "death game" (sort of) once and I'm here to say I really enjoyed Battle Game in 5 Seconds After Meeting too. BTW, I can't believe Running Man is getting a redo..but I doubt it will have an MC to equal Evil Family Feud Richard Dawson...Survey Says...! |
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Yuvelir
 Posts: 1698 |
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I'm... not a fan of death games. I don't like when characters I enjoy get written off, so unless the act of dying is made very significant, rather feeling the shock or the tragedy of it or admiring the supposed bravery of the writer, I just feel annoyed. A genre built on facilitating those deaths is thus very unattractive to me. Which doesn't mean I haven't enjoyed some of these "death games" (man is the term broad in this column lol) but the way they're written is paramount.
I'm also not a fan of how artificial and fabricated the setting often needs to be for the killing to happen at all. Speaking of such cases...
That tiredness is something I never understood! People gaslighted themselves into that! After Madoka ended, I too was predicting that due to its popularity many dark magical girl shows would pop up so I looked for them season after season... and they just didn't happen. Some cases in manga, probably more than I can imagine in the LN realm and basically nothing on anime. When people complained to this show that they were tired of the "grimdark magical girl trend" I was like, what trend? This was like the third or fourth dark magical girl show (are we counting Symphogear here?) after Madoka and one of them was famously in production since way before it! There are more isekai shows in any single season than there are dark mahou shoujo shows as a whole. That said, I don't have many kind words for the show itself. The overly moe style was eye-catching and it did affect me enough to love some characters (Top Speed and Hardgore Alice in particular) but I really don't like the anthological way all their stories were written to extract some cheap pathos out of their imminent deaths. Everything else in the series sounds more interesting by concept, let's see what the incoming adaptation does with it. |
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Fluwm
Moderator
 Posts: 1625 |
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I really enjoyed Kaiji, and the Danganronpa games (and the Nonary Games), but ultimately I find myself agreeing with the folks who don’t find the genre very compelling. The whole concept, for me, is just too contrived. The psychological tricks and mind-games and thriller aspects are all grand fun, but none of the, require the characters all be trapped together in an elaborate game, inevitably orchestrated by some impossibly-resourceful, nefarious mystery-person.
And I can’t help but feel that we’re missing out by not having these sorts of stories told using the trappings of other, more interesting genres/settings. |
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