Liar, Liar

Years of waiting for a No Game, No Life Season 2, and people were thinking this would be similar to that. Well, let me just say, if you thought NGNL was stupid, this will be some abyss fiction to you. With a title like Liar, Liar, you’d expect that it’d be all about cheating and lying through games, and while there’s plenty of that in this anime, it’s done in a very underwhelming way, with contrivances up the wazoo. Powers come out of nowhere, twists come out of nowhere, and in the end, it’s just a trashy harem show with no real spice whatsoever. I’m not usually a fan of ecchi, but I’m not gonna lie, maybe some more ecchi could have at least kept my attention on the screen more.

The premise in a nutshell is that Shinohara Hiroto goes to Academy Island, where everything is settled through games, with the strongest student having the ranking of “seven stars”. Hiroto beats the strongest student on his first day, and took the name away from her, becoming the strongest himself, albeit in a fake sense, thus the anime name. The anime started out decently, as something I could call dumb fun at least, but as the show went along, it became heavily contrived and overly complicated, yet bland because of the numerous info dumps throughout the show. That said, the explanations and the world building just wasn’t up to snuff, as sometimes the games just contradicted themselves or an extra rule would be thrown in last minute. It kind of reminded me of Classroom of the Elite, with the rankings and competitions, but just infinitely more stupid.

The production quality looked fine at first, but like the plot, declined in quality as the show went along as well. The animation was mediocre along with the character designs, and the voice acting had some hiccups too at points, as some of the louder, more epic lines (with big mouth flap movements, mind you) were delivered in such a lackluster way, like the VAs were just bored out of their minds reading their scripts. The best part of the entire show was probably the OP and some of the music, in terms of the technical aspects go.

Character wise, they were very tropey and one-note. You got the tsundere, the OP protagonist, and a maid. Harem hijinks ensue. Whoop-dee-do.

Overall, this anime was exactly what I feared it would be, though I was coping that after a very solid premiere episode, it would keep up the fun times, but unfortunately, it fell off relatively quickly due to the poor writing and characterization. Just another schlock suspense anime that will be forgotten quickly, not even turning off my brain was able to allow me to enjoy it, though in my opinion it is still minimally watchable for anyone who enjoys the premise and has a high tolerance for buffoonery.