Plot: 8/10
The main selling point of Liar Game is, of course, the battle of wits that occurs between the duo of protagonists and the varying antagonists. However, it's important to realize that these battles are a lot more realistic and tamer than what you may be expecting. If you want a thriller manga with intellectual duels on the level of something like Death Note or Akagi, you won't find it here. The plots and plans may not be what you thought of, but you'll never have your socks blown off or anything. What you will find though is incredibly realistic plans that match the personality of the character who schemed it up, making for an interesting dynamic where geniuses with their own individual flaws battle it out. I personally found that doing the battles in these ways could actually be just as interesting and dynamic as a battle where two super-geniuses continuously one-up each other for domination. I definitely feel as though each and every one of the battles within this manga were written well.

Characters: 9/10
As mentioned prior, much of the battles focus on what each character's specific personality brings to the table. Some characters specialize in emotional pandering, others in pure deduction skills, and the list goes on and on. The big thing to point out here is that all of these characters and their plans are believable. Another key factor that contributes to the high score here is character development. The main female lead starts out with many flaws and her transformation as a character is not fast, but the transformation does happen, and she does become quite formidable as the series progresses. Seeing Kanzaki go from zero to hero is one of the best parts of the manga, but it does take a long while to happen which isn't necessarily a bad thing, but I do know plenty of people who have dropped the manga because they can't tolerate the protagonist being as gullible and one dimensional as she is. If that is your reason for wanting to drop the manga, my advice to you is to at least wait until chapter 28 is finished before you go ahead and stop reading. I promise her development is worth it.

Ending: 6/10
Since this is spoiler free, I'll just say that the ending was fine. It answered the majority of the plot points and questions, and it overall felt like a satisfying conclusion to the story. I will say though that the ending wasn't life changing or mind blowing in any way, it was just a stock standard good ending.

Overall, Liar Game is a solid 8/10 manga, with the strong points being its character development and use of personalities and the only facets dragging it down being a lack of an amazing ending and a somewhat bland art style throughout. I'd heavily recommend this manga to most people.

Spoiler Add-ons

This is the last warning for anyone who does not want to be spoiled, as I plan on going through some of the character's decisions and the battles that take place. This section is for me to talk about some of the specific aspects of the manga that I really liked or didn't like.

As mentioned in the non-spoiler review, my favorite parts about the manga were the pacing and the characters, whereas my main issue with the manga was a lack of a compelling ending. Since I have scores and general thoughts in the non-spoiler review, I'll leave this section more for specific things I want to point out that made me decide on the score I went with.

Kanzaki never went back on her original intentions

For me, chapter 28 was one of the biggest moments in the entire story. The way I see it, there were a lot of different paths that could have been chosen here in regard to how Kanzaki's character could progress. The easy way out would have been for Fukunaga to take the L and have Akiyama and Kanzaki celebrate their victory. This could have led to a series where Kanzaki slowly becomes better and better at winning the games as the stakes get higher and the opponents get stronger. I was pleasantly surprised that the decision made was to stick to her guns and work to save everyone. For me, this was a tonal shift in the story that made the possibilities for the future a lot more interesting.

The power creep was handled perfectly

A lot of battle manga fall into a common trap where as the protagonist wins more fights, the enemies must become stronger in order to match. Take for example a series like Naruto or Dragon Ball. The main character is losing to the enemy, then the main character finds some crazy way to power up and win. In order to keep the series going, a new stronger enemy must come along that can beat what the protagonist's power up was. This creates a cycle where eventually a bullshit enemy must come up to then be beaten by a bullshit powerup of magnificent proportions that will eventually again be overpowered by another bullshit enemy and so on. There are a few good ways to avoid this kind of power creep. One Piece and Tower of God are great examples of this, and they use the same method of establishing the hierarchy beforehand. You know from the get-go who the strongest are and what they can do, and even when the main characters get stronger over time, there are constant reminders of just how large the gap is between them and the final boss. Liar Game uses a completely different way to handle the power creep issue, and it's an interesting way that I've never quite seen before. Instead of having the protagonist power up and utterly defeat the antagonist in order to introduce a bigger threat later, Yokoya, Fukunaga, and Harimoto are simply recurring characters that never actually get stronger or weaker, and are never actually completely overwhelmed by the protagonists. Fukunaga is shown from the start to be very smart and cunning, enough so that he can defeat the average players and Kanzaki, but never enough that he can beat Yokoya, Harimoto, or Akiyama. This dynamic never changes, and Fukunaga is given plenty of chances to show off that he's still just as smart at the end as he was in the beginning. In turn, Yokoya, Harimoto, and Akiyama are all presented as about equal, and it's shown as they continue to outwit each other over and over again. None of the three of them are unstoppable, but none of the three end up falling out of relevance at any point. By doing the battles this way, the focus shifts away from the power of the characters, and instead the new dynamic of each game. In my opinion, this was a perfect way to handle the power creep issue while still making every battle feel meaningful.

The ending felt a bit lackluster

If my understanding is correct, the result of the final battle is that Yokoya, despite having the power to "win" the game, chose to admit defeat because his philosophy of betrayal and domination was proven to be inferior to Kanzaki's philosophy of trust. On paper, I actually love this ending for a final battle. Yokoya even foreshadows his willingness to admit defeat with his references to Hitler's suicide being his biggest flaw, so it makes sense that Yokoya would be willing to admit defeat like that. I also found the explanation as to why this thought process occurred to be a good enough explanation that everything made sense. My big problem with the ending was the time that it took for this to happen. The entirety of this realization essentially occurs within 1 chapter, that being chapter 200. The final panel of chapter 199 is Yokoya refusing to admit defeat, and then he admits defeat by the middle of 200. I personally thought this was the one issue with the pacing, and I wish a little more had been done to make this ending as good as possible. Maybe a stronger showing of Kanzaki's influence leading towards nobody wanting to win through betrayal would have been nice, or Yokoya putting up one last show of defiance before admitting defeat. I also thought that a lot of the explanation of what the Liar Game actually is was a bit bland. It all made sense, but I found myself not really caring all that much. Rablais being Yokoya's father was a prime example of this. It's a cool reveal, but Rablais was never fleshed out enough, and neither was the dynamic between Yokoya and his father in my opinion, meaning that the reveal had very little impact for me personally. For something of that magnitude, I'd prefer to be completely taken aback instead of feeling indifferent. I also have the same complaint with the closing panels that reveal the Liar Game footage was taken off the internet. In theory, it's a great ending that shows how impossible it is to defeat the corrupt system that surrounds us. In practice, there was barely enough time given to build up enough tension for a decent payoff. I feel like if the last 2 chapters were expanded to 4 or 5 chapters, we could have gotten a great ending that defined the entire series. Instead what we got was a solid passable ending that I'll probably forget in a year or two.