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Fuck that nigger. You wanna draw manga, you should be chained to your chair, pen in hand. Two chapters a week for the rest of your life or until I drop your book.
 
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Just want to say that I’m really glad that both My Friend's Little Sister Has It In for Me! and Inexpressive Kashiwada and Expressive Oota both received anime adaptations, and when I get around to watching them, I will enjoy it.
 
I recently watched Hell's Paradise and I like the aesthetic of the island (mostly in the forest). It's very bright and colorful. But there are problems with the story and pacing. This part of the story seems like it should have been drawn out into 2 seasons, and it ends on an unsatisfactory note. I also hate how the characters end up developing. The forced character arcs are janky and feel bland. They presented these criminals as horrible disgusting people but immediately kill off most of them while strong-arming sympathetic character motivations to whitewash the rest. Why are authors in this genre incapable of having character arcs that aren't about friendship or secretly caring about everyone? Somebody needs to stop making these self-insert safe edgy characters that have no depth while pretending it is dark and mature.
 
Mayfly said:
I recently watched Hell's Paradise and I like the aesthetic of the island (mostly in the forest). It's very bright and colorful. But there are problems with the story and pacing. This part of the story seems like it should have been drawn out into 2 seasons, and it ends on an unsatisfactory note. I also hate how the characters end up developing. The forced character arcs are janky and feel bland. They presented these criminals as horrible disgusting people but immediately kill off most of them while strong-arming sympathetic character motivations to whitewash the rest. Why are authors in this genre incapable of having character arcs that aren't about friendship or secretly caring about everyone? Somebody needs to stop making these self-insert safe edgy characters that have no depth while pretending it is dark and mature.
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The author really cucked from making it be a fantasy horror death game and into generic shonen slop. At least the villains are literal degenerate trannies.
 
wtfNeedSignUp said:
The author really cucked from making it be a fantasy horror death game and into generic shonen slop. At least the villains are literal degenerate trannies.
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This is the issue with every death game manga/anime. Eventually you need to stop killing off characters so the plot can actually progress, but the author has no idea what the answer to the mystery behind the death game even is until it’s time for answers, and any characters that were introduced as actual characters who could drive the plot forward were unceremoniously killed off because that’s “shocking.” So now you have a bunch of people your audience has been taught to not care about having no reasonable way to play a proactive role in the plot because the antagonistic forces are so overwhelming. It’s what happened to Gantz, it’s what happened to Hell’s Paradise, it’s what happened to Mirai Nikki. Ironically, the only one that actually pulled the concept off, despite ostensibly being shonen slop, was Lucifer and the Biscuit Hammer, because the plot presented to the characters was divorced from the actual plot of the series.
 
Sanda is probably the most interesting anime of the season, but that's a very low bar. I tried My Status as an Assassin Obviously Exceeds the Hero's but I feel like it will absolutely be a dud because they already started out with cringe pacifism memes about how he won't kill because it would make his mom and sister sad.
 
Lone MacReady II said:
Oh shit lmao. They say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery... I guess.

When it comes to OPM, it was a good 1-off show buoyed entirely by Madhouse being Madhouse, an interesting but short-legged concept, and ludicrous somewhat deserved hype. But here's the thing, when your Shonen deconstruction/parody becomes just another Shonen, the venture is mute. I think Madhouse knew that fact which is why they only did that one season. They made it, they busted their asses on it, and then they moved on to greener pastures before shit got stale...
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Frieren gets multiple Madhouse seasons, and OPM only gets one.
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The Madhouse of yesteryear has been dead for well over 10 years at this point and OPM S1 was considered an outlier even back then because everyone who was involved in it weren't affiliated with Madhouse so they were able to bring out so much from the material based on talent alone which is vastly different from the "CG and filtering" lightshows that has effected the current anime landscape.

Red Dragon said:
I found the first episode kinda mediocre, but the art is so gorgeous I'm willing to watch at least 3 eps to see where the story is going.
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Sanda had a pretty underwhelming premiere. Like most Saru Science works, it looks great, but the characters don’t grab me, and the premise feels half-baked—more like an excuse for the creator to draw whatever comes to mind than something meant to be taken seriously. Beastars started strong but eventually lost focus, and Sanda seems headed down the same path after just two episodes.
 
McMitch said:
This is the issue with every death game manga/anime. Eventually you need to stop killing off characters so the plot can actually progress, but the author has no idea what the answer to the mystery behind the death game even is until it’s time for answers, and any characters that were introduced as actual characters who could drive the plot forward were unceremoniously killed off because that’s “shocking.” So now you have a bunch of people your audience has been taught to not care about having no reasonable way to play a proactive role in the plot because the antagonistic forces are so overwhelming. It’s what happened to Gantz, it’s what happened to Hell’s Paradise, it’s what happened to Mirai Nikki. Ironically, the only one that actually pulled the concept off, despite ostensibly being shonen slop, was Lucifer and the Biscuit Hammer, because the plot presented to the characters was divorced from the actual plot of the series.
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Ideally you'd want to pace the deaths so the plot progresses until the end. Issue is that authors either do a mystery box, or just kill way too much characters for it to work.

Biscuit Hammer is more of a shonen than death game, the deaths was more drama than a necessity for the plot. I'd put Danganronpa and Juni Taisen as more appropriate examples of it being done well, though the former is a VN and the latter is spoiled by the premise.
 
McMitch said:
This is the issue with every death game manga/anime. Eventually you need to stop killing off characters so the plot can actually progress, but the author has no idea what the answer to the mystery behind the death game even is until it’s time for answers, and any characters that were introduced as actual characters who could drive the plot forward were unceremoniously killed off because that’s “shocking.” So now you have a bunch of people your audience has been taught to not care about having no reasonable way to play a proactive role in the plot because the antagonistic forces are so overwhelming. It’s what happened to Gantz, it’s what happened to Hell’s Paradise, it’s what happened to Mirai Nikki. Ironically, the only one that actually pulled the concept off, despite ostensibly being shonen slop, was Lucifer and the Biscuit Hammer, because the plot presented to the characters was divorced from the actual plot of the series.
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I thought Mirai Nikki was fine. It probably helps that the main antagonist isn't the guy who actually started the death game, but one of the main protagonists in a twist that has enough foreshadowing that it seems the author planned the general idea, even if he might not have plan out all the details. The only thing that's really messy is that one major character turning out to be alive is done in a way that just feels like a convenient asspull despite being blatantly set up and sign posted to the reader a while before she seemed to have died.
 
McMitch said:
This is the issue with every death game manga/anime. Eventually you need to stop killing off characters so the plot can actually progress, but the author has no idea what the answer to the mystery behind the death game even is until it’s time for answers, and any characters that were introduced as actual characters who could drive the plot forward were unceremoniously killed off because that’s “shocking.” So now you have a bunch of people your audience has been taught to not care about having no reasonable way to play a proactive role in the plot because the antagonistic forces are so overwhelming. It’s what happened to Gantz, it’s what happened to Hell’s Paradise, it’s what happened to Mirai Nikki. Ironically, the only one that actually pulled the concept off, despite ostensibly being shonen slop, was Lucifer and the Biscuit Hammer, because the plot presented to the characters was divorced from the actual plot of the series.
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Feels like this is becoming a more frequent issue with mangos regardless of genre as newer authors play the spec chapter/competition/whatever lottery and it's been kinda pissing me off of late. Maybe there just used to be more shame in obviously not having a plan, I don't know. I'm still kinda pissed off about 20th Century Boys pretending this was the case when it was obviously more about the publisher not wanting it to end yet with the actual bad guy.

It's more glaring with any kind of mystery box story I guess since everything's riding on it not feeling like a giant ass-pull.
Kaiji's basically death games, but it avoids it completely since there's no cryptic alien puppetmasters or whatever so there'd be no need for exposition buddies and everyone would be expendable even if it didn't exercise its flexibility to host arcs which don't throw a hundred people into a meat grinder. Might be cool if some other authors gave that a shot in this post-squid games world since I enjoy it when everybody dies.

In related news I watched that live-action Alice in Borderland adaptation recently, and it sucked ass so nobody else should, but it had an extreme and retarded enough case of this to be funny. The introductory main cast gets massacred with only the MC surviving by like episode 3, and from then on the the number of new characters introduced (complete with long-ass life story flashbacks) only to die by the end of the episode gets seriously grating. They even do this for the fucking one-shot villains.
Then in the climax of the main story, our new hero team gets variously:
  • shot and left to bleed out all day,
  • allegedly fatally burned and thrown off a four story building and definitely about to die any minute now for the past week and then blasted with a shotgun and left to bleed out all day,
  • stabbed 30 times in the chest/back/thighs,
  • shot like six times in the chest with a handgun,
  • blasted at point blank range with an assault rifle, in the chest, with nearly an entire magazine,
  • shot in the face from three feet away with a handgun, complete with blood splat painting the wall behind him.
This is followed by the guy who clearly just got his brain blown out rescuing the MC by being in an explosion with him, then telling him to go finish the final game and that "everyone's fine." MC proceeds with his bleeding-out girlfriend to the arena on top of a skyscraper somewhere, and plays croquet for the rest of the afternoon and following night while his friends hang out unconscious in pools of their own blood in an alleyway. He wins thanks to said barely-conscious girlfriend slicing her own wrists for a morale boost or something. And yeah, turns out everybody was completely fine.
 
Gimmick Account said:
Kaiji's basically death games, but it avoids it completely since there's no cryptic alien puppetmasters or whatever
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I would say gambling series do not fall into the death games genre. They largely differ by 1) the protagonist’s participation is usually compulsory in the latter, 2) the plot in the latter does not rely on characters mastering the elements of the game, with things usually being a disorganized free-for-all until time comes to kill of a character, and 3) the very reason why the death game is taking place is a major driving element to the plot. By the way, Usogui is another gambling series that at least stands shoulder-to-shoulder with Kaiji.

Gimmick Account said:
know. I'm still kinda pissed off about 20th Century Boys pretending this was the case when it was obviously more about the publisher not wanting it to end yet with the actual bad guy.
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Funnily enough, the part in 20th Century Boys where they go off to fight the sphere robot and it hard cuts to years later where they’re all pariahs after failing prompted me to write my own death game story, derivative of that interaction. No amount of rewrites or editing would ever make it fit for the light of day. I got to where I had to actually figure out why such a thing is happening before I realized how retarded it was and abandoned the project.
 
Yeah I'm not really into defining ska or whatever; I brought it up because it's materially similar minus the mystery box element. I don't think this is a problem specific to death game stories, however we delineate those.
 
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