Signal 100
a review by TheGruesomeGoblin
a review by TheGruesomeGoblin
#*ADDITIONAL WARNING: ALSO, IT'S A DEATH GAME.*#
When I read a death game manga, there's one thing above all else that I'm looking for. And that's death.
/anime/99698/kings-game Characters dying. Usually, in horribly brutal ways. That's what I'm primarily looking for in a death game.
And while it may be perceived that I am actively searching for bad death games, this is not the case. Death games don't automatically have to be bottom of the barrel trash. They really don't.
/manga/72005/torikago-no-tsugai Yet... so often, the only horror I'm presented with from a death game is the realization that I am still reading the death game. No matter how much awful unneeded sexual content is included to get fanservice in there, no matter how lame and boring the deaths are, no matter how infuriating the characters are and how bad the writing is.
I still don't drop the death game. But at the end, I'm typically just annoyed or flabbergasted at what I just read. So I just immediately fly right off the handle typing up a six thousand word long review in which I end by making a prayer to the almighty Dark Lord Satan to erase the piece of media I had just consumed.
~~That's not even hyperbole.~~
What I'm getting at is... this is a review of a very special death game manga. In that it has all of the features of these death games I fucking despise and honestly outdoes quite a few of them, but the feeling I had at the end of the manga wasn't that of pure misery. But rather, that of pure jubilation.
...I actually massively enjoyed reading this death game. Genuinely.
#Dumpster Diving#
I read this on a complete whim. If you're actively rooting around in the dumpster that is the horror genre, sometimes you just have to take a chance. Sure, there's a chance of getting horribly sick, but you're hungry so you just gotta dive in and hope you'll find something edibile.
Today, I ended up with Signal 100 by Arata Miyatsuki (story) and Shigure Kondou (art). A death game manga.
Immediately, I was reeling with regret. This is just gonna be another one of those death games where the creators are just filled to the brim with absolute contempt towards high schoolers.
EDIT: Oops, guess I had one more death game page to link to. But I didn't include an image to accompany it...? Totally forgot why I put this one here...
~~And probably people they actually knew in their own experience with high school because let's be honest where else can this shit possibly come from? Seriously, some of the most horrible shit I've seen done in horror manga is usually done by high schoolers/teenagers.~~
None of the characters are gonna be allowed to leave the school once the death game's started, the adult characters are going to be completely oblivious to what's going on, there's going to be awful bully characters and they're going to be comically extreme in their bullying,
there's going to be some dumb annoying death game mascot character that'll pop up every once in a while and say "okay now we're doing this blah blah blah", and even though the cast is entirely of high schoolers there's for sure going to be completely and utterly unneeded sexual content because they have a required quota of fanservice pages and they're going to fill it, god damn it.
If all of these things are in this death game then... why did I enjoy it so much despite it all?
#The Dead Word Puzzle Effect#
My brain was just constantly awash in a swirling tidal pool of conflicting emotions. Not since Dead Word Puzzle have I encountered a death game that caused me to struggle so much in figuring out if the creators were actually being serious.
/manga/90911/dead-word-puzzleI'm being fucked with right now. There's no fucking way that this is real.
The death here is... she... committed suicide by smashing her own face in with a chalkboard eraser? What??? Fucking what?????????? Well uh maybe the hypnosis gave her extra strength to assist in the task of killing herself??????????????????????????????????????
I mean, thinking about it, later on there's literally a character who just straight up rips their own face off, so I guess that's not too extreme of a stretch.
But no really, I was honestly impressed that this death game really never eased up on the gore. If anything, it just kept accelerating further and further until the end which is just one big huge bloodbath. It's exactly what I always want from death games of this caliber and I so rarely end up getting it. And if I do get it, it's Dead Word Puzzle and it's a complete farce.
This, on the other hand, is a full length death game and as such, it had no business to be as riveting as I found it. Usually, death games make it to the bottom of their bag of tricks and twists well before the end. But with this, every single time I thought oh it's gonna settle down now, it just bitch slapped me with something new. And sure some of the twists I ended up predicting but there were others that just fucking came completely out of left field.
The worst thing a death game can be is boring or one note. Because that's when they often become truly miserable and painful to read. There's so many characters dying or characters actively scheming to kill other characters, it never lets you get to that point.
And a part of the reason for that is...
#The Rules#
The teacher of this class of students, having been driven insane by being constantly abused and disrespected by all of his students for so long, has them all gather in one classroom... to hypnotize them.
Signal 100! There's one hundred signals! Do any of the hundred and the hypnosis is going to be triggered and you're going to immediately try to kill yourself. If you're not anywhere near a potential weapon or somewhere high, you'll just bite your tongue off. Or shove your fingers through your eyes. Or as I said before, literally rip your own face off.
And somehow, unlike Dead Word Puzzle, this never got old. Granted, almost completely random suicides is way better than literally just random blood explosions but...
Like the moment this series establishes that it's just going to be characters suddenly deciding to kill themselves, it first seized my full attention. Because I've never experienced a death game that is just pure and utter chaos BECAUSE of its rules. It's far more often that it's chaos because it has absolutely no established rules until it's convenient to establish them. AKA, right when a character breaks them.
But with this, right out of the gate, we're told no, not only are there rules, but there are a hundred of them. We're just not told them all. Or rather, some characters know them and actively aren't telling the others because it'd give them an advantage which is way WAY better than just fucking horrible writing.
We get like a third of the rules at a time. The most important of which are of course #2 and #13.
Don't try and tell the adults about the death game going on in school and also don't leave school because that's where pretty much the entirety of the manga is gonna take place. Like okay, those are infuriatingly common staples in tons of death games manga.
Then #1 is kinda weird... but refreshing. No violence. After all, you don't want the students just murdering each other with brute force.
Rather, you have students trying to get others killed by having them violate the rules. Hey everybody, why don't you just all get on this bus and leave school together? But when that didn't work quite as well as he wanted it to, the delinquent character instead just forced the girl who still trusted and liked him to touch his genitals
rule #8
so she would decapitate herself by wrapping a chain around her neck and squeezing real fucking hard.
And then the rest literally either don't matter or only exist to make a specific death happen. Like imagine if this death game never ended. I hope at no point in your life you require to physically have to touch money or oh no, you just broke rule #33 and now I guess you have to kill yourself. I mean I guess I'm kind of understating the gravity of rule #2. Forget about existing in normal society, you literally have to live the rest of your life in your high school.
...These rules are insane. Batshit insane. And that's without going into how the other two thirds of the rules are used later in the manga. These rules are so batshit insane that the characters are actually understandably afraid to do anything after the first death happens.
Fuck, what if walking breaks one of the hundred rules??? Which we're shown is actually a genuine concern because rule #96 is literally you'll die if take a step with your right leg? ~~But rules like 75-100 are used in a weird way because obviously every single character would have died in the first volume if that rule was in place from the start. Hell, one of them is literally just standing? Are you standing up? Well, I guess it's time for you to kill yourself.~~
And also in addition to these crazy ass rules you also have the existence of at least one character who is completely free of the rules. And as a result they are simultaneously chaos incarnate and a source of balance because when the fucked up characters are trying to get others killed, they remind the others that
"oh hey, remember that I'm not beholden to rule #1. And by that I mean, I'll murder the absolute shit out of you."
That character worried the absolute shit out of me at first because they just seemed like such a cookie cutter death game character. He looks so bland he may as well as be a male death game protagonist.
But very quickly my worries were soothed because it rapidly became clear that something was a bit off with him...
#The Best Worst Death Game#
It's not like there's a lot I could spoil. I mean, it's a death game, right? But even so, due to how much I actually enjoyed this one, I don't want to break it down any further than I already have or go into detail about the twists.
But it's just so fucked up. Even though I enjoyed this manga there are still really some typical death gamey moments that are just purely awful. Granted, while it does do me a favor and quickly vanquish the stereotypical death game character who wants to use the situation to literally get himself a harem...
in a horribly fitting way...
I can't really applaud it for that because later on, the creators decide they do still need to include an attempted rape while the death game is actually going. ~~After all, there is the one that happens before the manga's start but that actually does tie into the plot. And it's actually made even more fucked up when the plot gets back around to it.~~
And who better to have it happen to than the female character whose mind has been broken because she had to do every form of bullying she ever did to the one girl to herself and it didn't even end the game.
So okay yes, she's an awful human being. But she's been revenged and her mind has been shattered to dust. Can't that just be the end? Do we really need to bring the gym teacher back from before the beginning to have him attempt to rape her literally just because???
I mean it's at least prevented in the end I guess, which is actually more than I can say about other death games, but still god damn it. Just god damn it. Like can you just not?
I mean... actually, I guess they have to. They have a quota to fill, after all. Fanservice by any means necessary...
#Still Trying To Wrap My Head Around It#
To be honest with you, I wrote this review immediately after reading this so I'm still mulling this series over in my head. It can't literally just be the gore. All the awful components of a death game that I hate are all still here.
~~...Not gonna lie, as a death game mascot, the teacher who wants revenge on the class and kills himself at the start isn't bad. Even though if you pick at it, it doesn't make any sense. He's proven not to be a ghost, he's talking to them all through the hypnosis he put them all through, meaning he correctly predicted the final survivor out of thirty seven students ahead of time???~~
Yet for the first time, a trashy death game actually managed to serve the purpose of a pageturner to me.
...My brain just broke.
I have no better way of putting it. Hell, I even liked the ending despite the fact it's one of the most death gamey endings I've ever seen.
It's awful, it's terrible, it's gross, it's just fucking chaos from beginning to end... but it's one of the very few death games that there is even a mere chance of me ever rereading. It's simultaneously the most entertaining death game I've perhaps ever read yet also one of the absolute worst.
Wait, no. I actually just thought of a much better way to put it.
Signal 100 excels at being a death game.
And it is a 1 out of 10.
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