Ousama Game
King's Game

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Okay I might be in the oposite club for overall hated Ousama Game, but I´m kinda used to that already. Personally I really enjoyed Ousama Game manga. I binged it during waiting for anime.
The story is way better than in the anime, not to mention tension and action. Nobuaki is better portrayed, even enjoyable and when his part in the story ended, I felt he was missing in it. I do understand that lot of people don´t like Ousama Game because of anime, but manga seems like a different and better story in my eyes. Art was nice. And ending, ... hated by many - I liked it. Yes, it shocked me, too - but why couldn´t it be like that? According to me it was very original.
So, give it a chance and you´ll see. For me solid 7/10.

Ousama Game is ambitious. It strives to be character-driven. And this clearly becomes challenging as we delve further into the story. With the mysterious entity "Ousama" being the prime antagonist that is responsible for the story to continue on as it is, the manga often tries desperately to keep the story intense by having melodramatic conflicts between characters, sporadic killings and the question "who is the Ousama?" hang perpetually over the heads of the readers. The story handles the first two issues surprisingly well and unfortunately, disappoints with the latter (which is the main complaint of most readers as well).

Ousama Game involves a variation ... of the King's Game, except this time, the "King" reigns for the rest of the story and the people who're chosen for the challenges are revealed right off the bat. As usual, characters lose their shit and the inevitable philosophical soliloquies of "who can I trust?" and "who are the real monsters" begins to stir as the bodies start dropping. As far as a survival horror goes, its story runs pretty much the way you'd expect. As I mentioned before, there is a mystery as to who the "Ousama" is but it's disappointingly resolved with some pseudoscience. I'll go as far as to say that the resolution is its weakest link.

What Ousama Game surprised me with was its set of characters. They're students who behave like students, which is what mainly makes the manga so exciting to read. Their actions are reasonable given the context and even so, the manga still manages to be completely unpredictable at times because that's really what humans are like in the face of their impending deaths. They're irrational, fearful and desperate. Unpredictable. Even the MC himself is not an exception, which is something I'm quite happy with. As a result, their emotions feel real. They feel real. This is something that I think is integral in making a survival horror work and Ousama Game succeeds beautifully in that regard.

The art is crisp and clean. Being someone who's been drawing for over 7 years now, I'd say it's as good as your average shounen manga, which is - pretty good. The artist is able to depict grotesque scenes well without making it look too awkward, which is more than what I can say for most survival horrors.

Ousama Game is a refreshing read that falls short of what it wants to be. It's not clever and not all that enlightening. However, the people and the story itself is gritty and unforgiving.

I've read a lot of survival horror mangas and this one is pretty shitty. Mostly because the characters are weak, the art is messy, the premise is cliche, and the plot itself is poorly developed not to mention the stupid ending that didn't even seem like an ending.

To start with, I can barely distinguish the side characters from one another because they're drawn basically the same. None of the characters were compelling and we didn't really get any background or context for any of them either including the protagonist. Relationships were unclear too, at the start it seemed like Nobuaki and Chiemi were just childhood ... friends who secretly liked each other but at some point, people started referring to them as girlfriend and boyfriend. None of the other characters stood out either, I can barely remember their names except for Ria, who was probably the only character to have actual depth and personality aside from the protagonist, Nobuaki. In the end, I couldn't really empathize with any of the characters so none of the deaths were compelling or emotional at all.

The premise is a typical death game but the rules and structure of the game are so inconsistent and towards the end, it was annoying how random it became. The challenges also became repetitive and just plain boring, there was hardly any tension or fear factor. It started off with sexual challenges before moving on to violence and then the rules all of a sudden just become vague and senseless. The author doesn't really fully explore the premise, It definitely had more potential that wasn't tapped into. We never even get a believable explanation and the resolution is both unsatisfying and unclear. So the end is shitty because it was incredibly rushed and barely made any sense.

I would've rated this much lower but I can admit that some scenes took me by surprise, mainly the one with Nobuaki, Chiemi, and Naoya (you'll know what I mean if you've read it). But aside from that nothing else really stood out, none of the characters, none of the deaths, and I can't even explain what the game is really about because the manga doesn't do a good job of explaining it.