This Week in Anime

The Name of the Game is Death

Lucas
Steve, let me tell you, Hawai'i was an absolute delight! It was full of great food, daily beach trips, and so many interesting characters!

(Disclaimer: Hawai'i is nothing like Danganronpa and deserves\ its independence) While on this tropical getaway, I had plenty of time to read, including some titles for ANN's upcoming Manga Preview Guide! One of these releases was Gantz: G and, while I'll save my perspective on that work for the preview guide, reading it made me realize that I don't think I've ever talked publicly about the death game genre!

So what do you say, Steve? Care to channel your inner Darumi and indulge me in this trashy micro-genre???

To start from the beginning, we likely wouldn't have titles like Hundred Line, Danganronpa, or any version of Gantz if not for Koushun Takami's Battle Royal novel. Crystalizing the idea of young people competing in violent games for their own benefit, the work was deeply controversial for its time and still hits pretty hard today! Not every element of it holds up, but it's still a deeply socially insightful and overtly anti-fascist text.

If Americans didn't have several violent sports to distract us from gestures at everything going on in America right now we'd probably have invented our own battle royale a couple times over by now.

Though the political aspects of the genre aren't what drew me to it initially. My love of death games kicked off before I was old enough to pick up on these themes, and instead, I was drawn to the moodier atmospheres and the drama of games that I could just barely wrap my head around, having impossibly high stakes. That's right. I, like a lot of people around my age, gained my affinity for death games thanks to Yu-Gi-Oh.

Battle royales even became FOR kids at a certain point! I was in high school during peak Hunger Games fever, and it's now my understanding that most social interactions between young people happen through social experience/battle royale games like Fortnite.

And, credit where it's due, Suzanne Collins does make the anti-authoritarian politics inherent to the genre pretty overt in The Hunger Games; even if I found it a little too steeped in "Blue Collar vs Metropolitan" aesthetics and theming to enjoy it as much as my peers.

Hey, the birthplace of the yandere archetype as we know it today is as good an onramp for the death game genre as any other! Is it the best the genre has to offer? No, but I still see characters making this expression in new anime today, so clearly it had an impact!

Agreed! And I think those over-the-top elements critically inform the franchise that most young people associate with death games today, Danganronpa.

While a little too silly for me, I am constantly shocked by this video game death game's staying power! I was walking around the other day and saw a thirteen-year-old wearing a Danganronpa shirt, and was flabbergasted that someone younger than the game itself would be into the franchise.

No shade from my end either! Even if they're not my cup of tea, clearly there's something about Danganronpa that clicks for a lot of people, and it's still overtly influencing the genre today. Though my death game flavor of choice is a lot closer to Kotaro Uchikoshi's 999: Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors. Far more serious in tone than Danganronpa and with over-the-top characters that don't quite slip into parodies of themselves, I can't recommend this game and Uchikoshi's larger body of work enough!

Oh my god, Akudama Drive absolutely WHIPS and is the best anime of 2020 for my money! Even if it's a little broad, what a great examination of criminality and how society defines it at a time when it was more relevant than ever. And while I can't personally speak to the quality of the Danganronpa 3 anime, I'll give props to any work that keeps Junko Enoshima a top-tier cosplay character! That is not an easy fit to pull off, and I'm impressed every time I see someone rock it at an anime convention!

Oh, it is so interesting that you say that, because I hate pretty much every character in their introduction in my favorite death game media, Gantz.

While Hiroya Oku's manga has aged extremely problematically and is sophomorically horny in a way that feels skeezier by the year, I can't help but love it. It's clear from even just the opening chapter that Oku had a TERRIBLE time in high school, intimately understands how that experience can make certain kinds of young men terrible, and then spends the hundreds of chapters that follow pulling characters out of incel and extremist pipelines in between some of the most brutal death games in the genre. I can't even recommend Gantz to most of my friends, but I love it to bits, mostly because it's largely about characters who suck finding ways to become better people.

I...am not familiar with Big Order! Does he get her pregnant??? I feel like the writers wouldn't make this character say that unless they were teeing up an impregnation later on.

I see. I think Big Order is about to be the only thing I'm able to think about until I watch it, and we've got to find a way to bully Lynzee until letting us talk about this 2015 anime in a future column!!!

Just scrolling through your and Nick's past column, this is giving Future Diary meets Juni Taisen: Zodiac War and I am here for it! Genres are supposed to be versatile and I love that death games can skew from the more grounded and politically charged Kaiji: Ultimate Survivor to something as big and dumb as Big Order to reimagined death game like BLUE LOCK which is big and dumb in it's own distinct way!

While I think we've had enough "dark magical girl" media to last a lifetime, this genre being pulpier does make it easy for writers to churn out new works quickly, with those works often being overtly iterative. Hell, Kakegurui is more or less just Kaiji but with horny teenagers, and that did well enough to get a live-action Netflix series!

I don't know a single living human being who actually watched Bet recreationally, but it's still neat that it got made!

Oh Squid Game. I'll forever love the series for popularizing the death game genre, and forever lament that most casual audiences didn't explore much beyond this middle-of-the-road entry point. And you raise a good point! I described death game fiction as a "micro-genre" at the top of this chat, but it's probably more accurate to say that it's a style of fiction with several distinct disciplines. Some works lean heavily on the "game" part of the genre with Squid Game and Kaiji, works that focus more on characters killing each other directly like Danganronpa and Future Diary, and then there are the works that get really conceptual like 999 and Gantz. There's a lot to love under this umbrella term and, thankfully, even the bad stuff is bad in a big enough way that it loops back to being a good time.

Platinum End also features a character turning to the camera and espousing the writer's overtly homophobic beliefs, which wasn't great when it came out and has only aged like milk since then!

I also got six episodes into God.app before realizing that Yoko Taro phoned it in on this one!

Square Enix really needs to give that man enough money to make another actual video game because, while his forays into anime and live service games have the capacity to be interesting, none of these side projects have lived up to what the creator is capable of.

I stand by my previous comments on Necronomico! If it were just a little bit better in every regard, I think people would view it as a great series, but as is, it's still very distinctly itself, and I love that works can still feel so authored in the death game genre!

While these kinds of titles don't drop at quite the clip that they used to in anime or video games, it's clear from this chat that I have plenty I can catch up on before the next high-concept murder marathon comes along!