Pros:-
• Games follow rules. While I loved series like Kaiji and Kakegurui (actually, that was just OK), there was sometimes/often some ass-pulling and cheating that led to the victory, which often relied on luck and wouldn’t work in real life. This took away some of the satisfaction of the ‘win’ for me, but with Akiyama being the super genius that he is, the games he wins are all because of strategy and sure tactics.
• The show is grounded in its morals and messages, and in particular the main character is less over the top like Light in Death Note with his holier-than-thou attitude.
• I was thrilled to see actual game theoretic and psychological principles cited correctly rather than taking a concept and bastardising it - often the case with strategy manga. This is another reason why the show is more grounded.
• Just very clever and believable writing all around. When it comes to strategic and tactical manga, Shinobu-sensei is by far the best.
Cons:-
• There is a clear lack of character development. With the show focusing more on the games themselves, almost 100% of screen time pertains to that, and especially Akiyama gets little human development (bar a couple of pages of flashback) as they focus on his brilliant mind.
• Whilst the games are all extremely clever and well written, with no breaks in between each round the format of the manga gets very repetitive.
Spoiler:
• Villains are set up to be very menacing and threatening, however, this is undermined by the fact that Akiyama ALWAYS gets the win, so the credibility & consequences of an opponent’s strength is left unknown (looking at you, Yokoya). If the antagonist got even one win it would have increased the stakes of the games in general.
• The ‘fodder’ characters are not consistent in their intellect. One moment they’ll have a really good epiphany but then the rest of the time they’re almost retardedly stupid.
• Bad Ending - Rushed and Inconclusive. It’s been said already tons of times and other people have explained it better than me.
Conclusion:
All in all, I absolutely adored this manga because of the clever and believable writing and the suspense that was built. Yes, the ending is rushed and inconclusive but every game had me binging it without even realising.
Edit: Mods got passive-aggressive about the length of my review. I just transferred my review here from MyAnimeList as a backup (will I get in trouble for mentioning another website too? We'll find out) where it did satisfy the character length requirements (why not include spaces as characters?), but out of the things that AniList is better for, this is not one of them. I always hated reading overly long reviews when looking for new shows/manga as I just wanted a concise few points to give me an idea as to whether I wanted to watch/read it without all the pointless fluff that made it feel like we were in school again so I try to write mine similarly. Alas, this seems to have been taken issue with, so I will try and add some more points about the manga to satisfy the necessary constraints (despite it being over half a decade since I read it), although I want to specify that everything above the dotted line is my main review as I originally wanted it to be written.
Other Things I Liked/Disliked About Liar Game:
7.5 out of 8 users liked this review
