Deatte 5-byou de Battle

The death game genre has reached a pit of mediocrity in modern anime standards. Most shows in this genre usually turns out to be god awful from the start, or has a decent beginning but crashes and burns in the end. So when I saw a new death game anime in this season, my immediate reaction was “Not another one” a saying DJ Khaled would be really offended by. But I’m honestly surprised to see this show hold up pretty well, enough to get me to watch the whole thing, start to finish…or it did at first. Does that mean it’s great? No, not really. Thepremise is pretty straight forward like most death games. Kill or be killed situations, surviving a platoon of super powered people and be the last man standing. It starts off with a giant, 8 foot crocodile ass looking man attacking our mc. Our mc manages to escape his assault and trap him in an abandoned building and manages to kill him. A bit unrealistic, as the more typical reaction would be to shit your pants when you’re attacked by a large menacing figure than to go full Tom Cruise mission impossible on the guy. He then proceeds to get transported by an overtly annoying cat girl with a top hat, and brought into the death game, where he’s given the full explanation of things. Sort off at least. The remainder of the story we see our mc in various fights and precarious situations. The premise is straightforward and not gunna lie kinda boring. The death battle genre is one that I rarely like, but even without personal dislike, it doesn’t have any uniqueness to it, or any factor that sets itself apart or grabs your attention. The powers and in this show feels unrealistic in the sense that there’s so much flexibility in them. There’s no borderline for how overtly unusual powers could be, and since we as viewers are in the dark about several rules of the game, it gets frustrating to see one dumb power coming out of nowhere. There’s no balance in that sense which leaves you confused and kinda annoyed. You feel a slight repetitiveness in the shows storytelling. It revolves around a problem being created, mc using his intelligence to solve the problem, everyone else losing their shit tryna figure out how he did it. There’s no opposing force, there’s no “L” to our mcs “Light”. This sets up a rly plain sailing plot with no added tension or suspense. You see a situation occur but you already know it’s going to get resolved with no added consequences. Although, I was dumb to expect proper storytelling in a death game so it’s honestly bad on my end The best part of the show is the mc. Most death games either have a mc who’s a complete whiny annoying character who’s scared shitless all the time, or someone who’s over confident, unusually strong and has will smith I am legend levels of smartness and survival tactics. The mc here is minimally intelligent and knows how to use his intelligence properly. He dosent have the whole “I can beat you, cause my friends are relying on me” bullshit. He knows a serious fight, plans ahead, and uses his brain to win rather than the friendship rocket launcher. His power compliments his intelligence a lot, which is one of my fav aspects of the show. Since it’s so vague what his power actually is, it gives him the liberty of experimenting and slowly figuring out the limits of his abilities, which is quite entertaining to watch. Other characters such as Ruri is a recurring presence in the show. She’s a girl with a troubled past, due to lack of parental affection, and she finds solace in caring for her little brother. She has a decent backstory but we don’t see that implemented into her character that much. She’s always cheery, active and loud. We rarely see her past effecting her personality. It would have been refreshing to see her all quiet and anti-social initially, but Akira helps her come out of her shell and makes her bright and cheery. We also have Walmart Bakugo, blue haired Joe Exotic, nerdy gamer girl, manipulating red head milf and a lot more. There’s an abundance of characters but all of them are super generic and extremely forgettable. They have their own parts to play but feel more like an NPC out of Skyrim than an actual character. The villain has the classic “Im the bad guy, I’ll kill everyone” look and leads the gang green gang of annoying misfits. The only character that’s remotely decent is the glasses guy that looks like he’s paid the subscription for every Onlyfans model in existence. His cunningness is somewhat amusing to watch in the last arc of the show. Besides that, forgettable, generic, annoying side characters. But we all know the best character is the banana head man The art in this show is not consistent. It starts off with a fairly vibrant art style, which was one of the things that made me curious about the show. But as more time passes, you notice CGI being used in most places. And if you’re wondering yes the CGI is horrible, almost comical. Im really wishy washy about CG in anime. When it’s well done, it’s actually pleasant to watch, like Beastars. When it’s awful, or combined with animation, it feels disgusting, like an unholy amalgamation of good and evil. It’s like oil and water, it just doesn’t mix. That’s the long term problem in this show, as even main characters start getting CG’d more often than animated. The fight scenes also has more CG than animation in the later parts, and most parts are covered with flashy lights, big explosions or smokescreens to avoid putting effort into their show. Like bruhhh, if a show that has “Battle” in the title dosent have its fight scenes properly animated, it begs the question “what is your budget going towards?” Characters also have their rough times, with disproportional facial animations that makes them look like something outta Resident Evil, and not even the good Resi games, like some shit outta Resi 6. Not going into details about the sound. OSTs are fine, OP & ED was fine, and voice acting was generic yet well done. Although the cat girl was super annoying, like enough to make my ear drums bleed levels of annoying. Even with its amplitude of flaws, I honestly think it’s one of the better death games out there. It’s not a good show, but it out runs its predecessors in most factors which is something I can appreciate. It was more like a rocky ride than a constant downhill that I felt watching Darwins Game. The mc is the highlight of the show, and outshines most characters and was the only reason I came back to the show weekly. Fun show overall.

“Battle Game in 5 Seconds” is what happens when You have a pretty nice idea to put a twist on a survival game genre but get lazy almost as soon as You show it off for the first time. The plot follows one Akira Shiroyanagi. One day when he was out and about he got attacked by a mysterious humanoid. Keeping his cool and using his intellect and love of games, he manages to kill it. As a reward he gets killed. He wakes up, fully healed, in a mysterious place, surrounded by other people, where a sociopathic catgirl declares that everyone there was chosen tobe a part of a game. They are given powers and force to take part in fights. Now… no one tells explicitly that people have to kill each other but let’s be honest, it wouldn't be a survival show if everyone played nice. And so our not likely hero finds himself in a death game and it turns out he takes pleasure in being there. Even if he doesn’t admit it out right. To be honest there are only two characters in this show I actually gave a damn about. They are: Akira Shiroyanagi - our MC. A 16 year old high schooler who is bored to death. When we meet him he contemplates finding a new game to play and immerse himself in. Well… be careful what You wish for. He ends up in a death game and has to fight to survive. His intelligent, knowledgeable about sociotechnics (although the show never calls them that for some reason) and able to keep a cool head. Unlike most anime protagonists he has something that could be considered a seed of personality. He’s not a Goody Two Shoes and doesn’t let others push him around. But that’s about it. His main drawback is that he talks a lot. Specifically about what he has done to conquer his opponent. Instead of keeping quiet he just has to brag, and his bragging is cringe af. The fact that most of his plans work is thanks to the fact that he has plot armour thicker than a bowl of oatmeal makes him annoying at times. He has one of the most interesting powers I’ve seen in a survival game genre. His power is… anything that the other person believes him to have. Pretty cool idea. Shame it’s not utilised more creatively. Mion - a sadistic, violence loving, cheerful and weirdly sexy cat girl. She appears to be the host of the death games. Having a weird obsession with Akira, she watches him diligently and even sometimes intervenes to help the kid out. Something totally out of character for someone who gets off on violence and death. Yes, she’s a side character but she’s far more interesting than the “love” (and I use this term loosely) interest of the MC. Seriously, Yuuri Amagake is pretty boring as a character. It appears she develops a crush on Akira after just one joint venture. She has one of the most OP powers in the show, only eclipsed by the MCs power. She can multiply her physical abilities by a factor of five. Let’s be honest the survival game genre doesn’t exactly have much room for innovation. You take some people, give them some kind of power or gear to make things interesting and just let them go to town. The main way that these kind of shows keep You invested are the way it handles fights between the competitors and the characters themselves. One of those is handled… adequate. The second one… yeah… mediocre at best. When it comes to fight choreography… yeah… 90% of the time it’s bad. Not horrendous but bad. Despite having some awesome powers to play and make them fight each other, most of the fights are really generic. Either the fight is over in seconds because someone has a skill that can kill or incapacitate his enemy in an instant, or we get the same boring shit that we’ve seen a million times - screaming, running and waving weapons without a real plan. Even when we get to see a fight between two swordsmen who have the same skill we still don’t get a proper fight. It’s… disappointing. The fact that some powers are more common than others doesn’t help. The writers got lazy pretty fast. I think episode 3. Instead of finding creative ways for Akira to make use of his powers he just uses the fact that most people know that he has one power and uses that. It makes his fights predictable and boring pretty fast. I get that he fights trash mobs mostly but that’s still not a reason to get complacent with the plot. As long as there is someone who knows that he can use a canon power he can just “tap” into that person (even if it’s an ally) and just shoot the place up. It gets old pretty fast. The characters aren’t much to write home about but their interactions are pretty fun to watch. The inner monologues in Akiras head give a sense of secrecy, suspense and importance and watching people trying to guess each other's powers and how to get an upper hand in a fight isn’t as tragic as I was afraid of. The problem is that those kind of mind games are reserved for… 2 fights in the whole show. Another thing that rubbed me the wrong way is that, despite being in a death game, a lot of people just trust him and tell him things they really should keep to themselves. Even when the leader of a faction he joins is wary of him he is still trusted enough to fight alongside their members. Pretty irresponsible. At the end of the day this show isn’t a tragic one. The interactions between the characters can be fun to watch and moments when Akira manipulates others are pretty entertaining. Even if a lot of those “manipulations” are pure ass pull and some are done retroactively. It can be enjoyable if You don’t have high standards for writing.

So, to keep it short, the dynamic of the show was: bad premise, quite good continuation, and gradually getting worse second half. Despite having one of the most stereotypical and bad premises out of there (and also character introductions), the following episodes got way better and actually interesting, only for the growth to be completely thrown out of a window later, with the story becoming stagnant, typical, and boring. The characters don't really help either, not even the interesting back stories being able to save the show. The fact that it loses its realistic factor, that made the characters feel human, only makes it completelyruined. The story starts with an arrogant loner gamer boy that's extremely intelligent and thinks other people are not worth his time (that's definitely the first time we hear of this, right?) getting attacked on the street by a buff mummy that gets out of a car right in front of him and starts chasing him. Luckily, because he's smart and an ace at playing games (including startegy games), he manages to defeat him, and a quircky evil catgirl with a high picthed voice abducts him. Where does she take him? In a room full of people where she explains that they are part of a game now and were granted super powers. A set of games, to be precise, with more stages, that put their lives on the line. Pretty basic and used so many times before, isn't it? But here comes the good part: our (male) MC's super power. That's where it starts to get better. Unfortunately, the good part ends when we have to watch a single stage of the game go on for half of the episodes and it becomes all just a mind game that should have been impossible, actually. It has a little supsense, but not enough and it loses part of its meaning anyway, but I'll stop here for the sake of not giving that many spoilers. Point is, in my opinion the focus in the second half wasn't on what it should have been to make it a good show. Oh, and the characters. Aside the annoying male MC that I already described, (that gets a little more tolerable after a bit but still could have been a little more original), that has the typical appearance of a brown haired boy with brown eyes as well, we have the female MC that looks exactly like Rei (Highschool of the Dead) and has pretty much the same personality. Her backstory was pretty interesting and her character is tolerable, but her design kinda pisses me off tbh. There are also some interesting characters, and their backstories are pretty interesting most of the time (even for the more boring ones). To top it off, at the end the animation gets pretty bad on some parts (around episodes 11-12), especially when it comes to fighting scenes and one particular character, where the CCG is pretty obvious and doesn't fit well with the rest of the animation. The sound is okay, the sound track not exactly what I would listen to. However, I'd say the ED went especially good with the anime. Well, that's pretty much all I had to say. Too bad it had to go like this, the anime had potential at some point.

In terms of the anime's story, it's actually unique because every time there is a fight scene they immediately fight after meeting for 5 seconds. The strength of each character is quite unique. The battle scenes in this anime rely on strategy so I don't get bored while watching them. The opening song in this anime is a banger. For the ending song, I think it's normal and nothing special. What makes this anime less good is the animation that looks stiff and lacks detail so that the battle scenes that should be epic and exciting are now ordinary. Perhaps this is due to rushedproduction and short deadlines. What a pity

Merchandise

Links may contain affiliate references

Studio

Producers

Themes