This manga is one primarily centered around people playing a combat-oriented game in real life, and the manga does a good job at using that for really good action. Everything literally being a game allows for the implementation of various game like mechanics to spice things up. The bombs used as weapons are clearly designed to have their own strengths and weaknesses. There’s a radar like system that can track players that has intentional limits placed on it for the sake of more exciting combat. And the game masters change up the rules on the fly at times, which changes things up and keeps things interesting. Since the plot is straight up that everything is being set up for interesting fights, it should be no surprise that as a result the fights were all interesting. They’re really thrilling with a lot of variety to them and a lot of interesting tactics. How the mechanics in play keep changing also results in the action never feeling like it’s getting repetitive or dull either and thus the pacing is great too.
Furthermore, the cast of players in the game are mostly all interesting and add another layer to the action. The players in the game weren’t chosen at random, but rather the group chosen was one that especially had a lot of emotional and psychological baggage. There are also cases where players know each other. All of that effects how they participate in the game, and the manga does a good job of fleshing out their background and how it’s effecting their actions in the game. With that said, the cast of characters themselves and their stories independent of how it affected the action was a mixed bag.
The protagonist Sakamoto and the heroine Himiko were pretty great characters. Sakamoto is somewhat of a mess, but a believable mess for the most part. Him being an action hero isn’t really all that realistic, but how the manga portrays his mental state and how he essentially suffers from and recovers from a mental breakdown as a result of everything going on on the island and grows a lot as a result felt pretty well written, even if it was intentionally ridiculous a lot of the time. While he has his issues, he’s also pretty reliable when it counts, and is thus overall pretty likable. Himiko’s character arc is centered pretty much entirely around her relationship with Sakamoto in her finding something to live and fight for. But the romantic development between the two felt pretty strong so that felt enough to make her a pretty decently developed and likable character.
Everyone outside that was a mess. As mentioned, everyone on the island has issues and many have both done terrible things and do terrible things over the course of the manga. But it really doesn’t do a good job of tackling that at all most of the time. As a result, how characters are treated by other characters and by the story itself feels pretty inconsistent at times, especially towards the end. It was also really weird how a single character just had supernatural powers as there was nothing else supernatural in the manga at all.
In terms of the overarching story regarding why they’re on the island playing the game in the first place, that was just all around pretty stupid. Writing a good and complex story for why a bunch of people were thrown into a death game isn’t all that easy so I am especially fond of when it is done well. This was not done well. It seems to try to be overly complicated and say things about society and such, but none of it really works at all. It works well in terms of justifying the various twists and changes that occur on the island that change up the game, but beyond that I didn’t find it all that interesting or enjoyable to read about at all.
As a result, I suppose it shouldn’t be surprising that the ending, or rather endings, were pretty weak. This manga does something pretty rare in that it has two endings, Light and Dark, wherein they represent a good end and bad end respectively. Unfortunately, both felt pretty lacking, though strangely enough each felt lacking in different ways. Thus, even though I don’t think it was really all that possible to give this manga great ending, I think if it took the best of each ending it may well have been possible to produce one that was satisfying. As is, the ending was wholly unsatisfying either way. Still, the ride through was interesting and enjoyable enough, and this felt like a manga that’s much more about the journey than destination anyway so the lack of a solid ending didn’t detract from the manga all that much.
The art was incredibly high quality from beginning to end with a good art style that showed off the action and character’s quite well. It also managed to have a couple really good character designs despite its setting not really allowing for all that much creativity.
