Had some great ideas but sadly ruined it with the handling of the abilities later in the story.
It can be quite hard to find something new, something fresh in the supernatural genre when it comes down to abilities. But to my suprise, this is where Battle Game 5 seconds picked me up in the first place. The ability of Akira, the main character, is "whatever the other person thinks it is". From the point where I got to know about his ability, I was looking forward how he would psychologically trick the other characters to use the full potential of it. My perception was, that he really needed to make the others "believe", that his ability is XY... Unfortunately, when the anime goes more into how his ability works, it is revealed, that this is not the case.
Later down in the series, Akira befriends with another participant of the death game in the name of Yuuri and ends up telling her about his real ability. She now knows the truth of his ability, so his ability won't work on or with her anymore, right? right? Wrong.
From this point on, Akira is basically a god, because unlike I thought, he doesn't need to make others truly believe that his ability is this or that. Nope, he only needs someone to literally think or imagine a specific ability, thinking it is his; and BOOM, that's the ability he will have. That means, as long as Yuuri is on his side he can practically use any ability he... well to be correct... Yuuri can imagine. For me this is what killed this anime. From that point on, why didn't he just use some OP ability to get the hell out of this place or just insta-kill his enemies? A lot of questions to be asked...
So, the story is very poorly written, not only because of how the abilites are handled but also because in some fights, somehow, the characters are predicting the predictions of other characters. As an example: "Haha, I predicted you would make that move, I was prepared for that" - other character: "Haha, I predicted that you would predict my move, it was a trap all along!", and that went on for like 3 more times IN ONE FIGHT.
On the other hand the animation isn't too great (but it's also not bad either).
The characters are all right and you can sympathize with some of them. However there are also characters whose motivation I can literally not understand and that don't make a lot of sense to me.
Overall, as I said in the beginning, this anime had some aspects that could've made it interesting, especially the ability of the MC. Unfortunately, they handled it very badly and the rest is just mediocre at best. I wouldn't really recommend you to watch this show.
