Deatte 5-byou de Battle

tl;dr: A death battle anime purely about the battles, but with pretty good battles.

This anime has the standard battle game premise that involves a group of people being given supernatural powers, and then forced to fight each other in a systematic fashion with a variety of different rules and match types. As far as this season gets, absolutely no background has been provided on who’s running things or what their goals is. There’s not even a hint of mystery or foreshadowing. It doesn’t seem to touch the subject at all. As such, the plot is centered entirely on the fights themselves.

The protagonist, Akira Shiroyanagi, has ... an ability that’s a bit unique, though what it is and the specifics of how it work could be considered spoilers so I’ll be vague about it. It’s an ability that requires mind games and manipulating his opponents to use effectively. Akira is the logical type that’s always thinking ahead and trying to predict what his opponents are thinking and how they’ll react to him, so he ends up acclimating to his power rather quickly and uses it quite effectively. This anime also has a pretty strong emphasis on characters keeping powers hidden or mispresenting them in order to trick their opponent, so it fits into the broader dynamics pretty well.

Akira has somewhat of a character arc that starts with him being pretty cold and treating everything like a game but he eventually comes to care about his allies. This character arc is significantly advanced through his budding relationship with a girl named Yuuri. Yuuri and a lot of other characters also get some background that helps explain their personality and motivations. Still, none of any of this is all that strong. There’s not all that much depth to anyone. There are characters that you’ll probably find likable because they’re cool, funny, or easy to empathize with. But I didn’t feel anyone was all that well written.

The anime starts off with 1v1 matches. This part is interesting due to how Akira is still figuring out how his power works and has to experiment in the middle of actual battles, and also because this is the point where his ability to use his power is most limited. After that it transitions into a large scale group conflict. Having an ally he can trust removes a significant number of the limitations on his ability and the need for psyching out his opponent and such, which makes things much simpler for him for a bit. But the anime writes around that by separating him from said ally, and thus it goes back to him having to use mind games and well thought out plans to achieve victory.

These battles aren’t amazingly well written. However, the variety of powers and the fast pacing is enough to keep things pretty interesting from beginning to end. It overall flows really well and though there aren’t any major twists, it’s good at handling the smaller ones. Also, while there is a lot of death and it can certainly be serious at times, there’s a surprising amount of comedy, especially early on. So all in all it was a pretty fun ride. The ending obviously gets nowhere near the ending to the full story, but it ends an arc while also showing off a lot of interesting elements in where the story will go in the future. Thus, I was pretty satisfied with it.

The art and animation were decent enough for the most part, though never really good. The biggest exception to that was the ‘final boss battle’ so to speak, which very heavily involves really bad 3DCG and was jarringly awful looking. The character designs were solid enough. The OP and ED were both pretty solid in terms of the songs and visuals. The soundtrack was also decent.

“Battle Game in 5 Seconds” is what happens when You have a pretty nice idea to put a twist on a survival game genre but get lazy almost as soon as You show it off for the first time.

The plot follows one Akira Shiroyanagi. One day when he was out and about he got attacked by a mysterious humanoid. Keeping his cool and using his intellect and love of games, he manages to kill it. As a reward he gets killed.
He wakes up, fully healed, in a mysterious place, surrounded by other people, where a sociopathic catgirl declares that everyone there was chosen to ... be a part of a game. They are given powers and force to take part in fights. Now… no one tells explicitly that people have to kill each other but let’s be honest, it wouldn't be a survival show if everyone played nice. And so our not likely hero finds himself in a death game and it turns out he takes pleasure in being there. Even if he doesn’t admit it out right.

To be honest there are only two characters in this show I actually gave a damn about. They are:

Akira Shiroyanagi - our MC. A 16 year old high schooler who is bored to death. When we meet him he contemplates finding a new game to play and immerse himself in. Well… be careful what You wish for. He ends up in a death game and has to fight to survive.
His intelligent, knowledgeable about sociotechnics (although the show never calls them that for some reason) and able to keep a cool head. Unlike most anime protagonists he has something that could be considered a seed of personality. He’s not a Goody Two Shoes and doesn’t let others push him around. But that’s about it. His main drawback is that he talks a lot. Specifically about what he has done to conquer his opponent. Instead of keeping quiet he just has to brag, and his bragging is cringe af. The fact that most of his plans work is thanks to the fact that he has plot armour thicker than a bowl of oatmeal makes him annoying at times.
He has one of the most interesting powers I’ve seen in a survival game genre. His power is… anything that the other person believes him to have. Pretty cool idea. Shame it’s not utilised more creatively.

Mion - a sadistic, violence loving, cheerful and weirdly sexy cat girl. She appears to be the host of the death games. Having a weird obsession with Akira, she watches him diligently and even sometimes intervenes to help the kid out. Something totally out of character for someone who gets off on violence and death. Yes, she’s a side character but she’s far more interesting than the “love” (and I use this term loosely) interest of the MC.

Seriously, Yuuri Amagake is pretty boring as a character. It appears she develops a crush on Akira after just one joint venture. She has one of the most OP powers in the show, only eclipsed by the MCs power. She can multiply her physical abilities by a factor of five.


Let’s be honest the survival game genre doesn’t exactly have much room for innovation. You take some people, give them some kind of power or gear to make things interesting and just let them go to town. The main way that these kind of shows keep You invested are the way it handles fights between the competitors and the characters themselves.
One of those is handled… adequate. The second one… yeah… mediocre at best.

When it comes to fight choreography… yeah… 90% of the time it’s bad. Not horrendous but bad. Despite having some awesome powers to play and make them fight each other, most of the fights are really generic. Either the fight is over in seconds because someone has a skill that can kill or incapacitate his enemy in an instant, or we get the same boring shit that we’ve seen a million times - screaming, running and waving weapons without a real plan. Even when we get to see a fight between two swordsmen who have the same skill we still don’t get a proper fight. It’s… disappointing. The fact that some powers are more common than others doesn’t help.

The writers got lazy pretty fast. I think episode 3. Instead of finding creative ways for Akira to make use of his powers he just uses the fact that most people know that he has one power and uses that. It makes his fights predictable and boring pretty fast. I get that he fights trash mobs mostly but that’s still not a reason to get complacent with the plot. As long as there is someone who knows that he can use a canon power he can just “tap” into that person (even if it’s an ally) and just shoot the place up. It gets old pretty fast.

The characters aren’t much to write home about but their interactions are pretty fun to watch. The inner monologues in Akiras head give a sense of secrecy, suspense and importance and watching people trying to guess each other's powers and how to get an upper hand in a fight isn’t as tragic as I was afraid of. The problem is that those kind of mind games are reserved for… 2 fights in the whole show.
Another thing that rubbed me the wrong way is that, despite being in a death game, a lot of people just trust him and tell him things they really should keep to themselves. Even when the leader of a faction he joins is wary of him he is still trusted enough to fight alongside their members. Pretty irresponsible.

At the end of the day this show isn’t a tragic one. The interactions between the characters can be fun to watch and moments when Akira manipulates others are pretty entertaining. Even if a lot of those “manipulations” are pure ass pull and some are done retroactively.

It can be enjoyable if You don’t have high standards for writing.

The only thing I can say that this anime was good, the theme of the challenges that are presented are of different dynamics so that the battles are entertaining using the powers to the maximum than a simple batle royale.

But in the rest of it falls to the deepest depth of the ground, first the characters have nothing to highlight if you put them in another anime there would not be a difference as the protagonist we are already tired of the typical protagonist expert calculating master of the theme of the series and The opposite character to make the comic relief that would be ... the blonde who has a headache and the second is important the animation that is bad with a mixture of a sloppy CGI and poorly designed background, leaving flat and static the episodes of leaving the characters with a very marked delay as if the production had not done its work yet, it does not surprise me that the director and deputy art director had fired from the project, how bad it is