To preface this review, there will be some small spoilers for Liar Game.

Going into Liar Game I had heard some good things, and considering how much I love Kaiji and how I enjoyed watching One Outs, I thought I'd enjoy it. Frankly, I was disappointed. In every area gambling manga should excel, such as conveying strong emotions in art, creative gambles, understandable characters, and unpredictability, Liar Game feels relatively average.

Plot:
The plot of Liar Game is relatively straightforward. Basically, people randomly get selected to take part in the "Liar Game", in which the goal is to lie and swindle people out of large sums of money. People enter the game through receiving a package in the mail, and as soon as they open it they have started the first game. However our protagonist, Nao Kanzaki, has complete trust in everyone and doesn't like to deceive people. It's pretty obvious how Kanzaki's personal philosophy goes against the point of the game, so there needs to be another main character to help her out. Enter Shinichi Akiyama, a man who was recently released from prison because he took down a multi-level marketing scam. With the help of Akiyama, Kanzaki progresses through the various challenges of the game while trying to save as many people as possible, even if it means taking on a massive debt of their own.

A big issue with Liar Game is how it focuses on making creative challenges instead of making creative solutions to those challenges. There'll be a really long explanation for a game which seems like it should be setting up for a creative solution, yet the payoff never happens. For example, at one point Akiyama is playing against a man at a game of poker with special rules. However, the other man can see the cards while the dealer is shuffling, so he always knows where to cut the deck to ensure he gets the best hand. What's Akiyama's solution to this dilemma? He just counts cards and wins. Everything feels so mundane and I just expect so much more. Both the man watching the cards being shuffled and Akiyama counting cards feel like the most obvious answer to what's going on, making it feel so predictable at times.

Characters:
There are some important side characters in the manga but for the most part I'm going to focus on the two main ones, Kanzaki and Akiyama.
Kanzaki seems like she could be a good character because of how her beliefs contradict everyone else, since most people are only in this game to earn money, but she feels so stale a lot of the time. The author never really does anything with her character, he just presents her as she is. We never see why Kanzaki is so selfless and is willing to put herself in hundreds of millions of yen in debt just to save some people she's never met, we're just supposed to believe that she does that because she's nice. Even after constantly getting betrayed again and again, she still feels the need to believe everyone completely, which I know is the point of her character but it just makes her look so stupid and it's frustrating to read most of the time. She has her moments, like how in the game of roulette she actually deceived someone, but these moments are few and far in between.
Akiyama is exactly the type of character that I can't stand. Nothing he does makes any sense and he always just seems to know everything. He helps Kanzaki out because...? They make a point at how Kanzaki reminds him of his mom and how she was too trusting and therefore he wants to help her, but is that really enough of a reason to risk millions of dollars on? Clearly as seen with Akiyama taking down an MLM scam and how he swindles people out of money during the Liar Game constantly, he doesn't seem to have many qualms about putting people in debt, so what reason does he have to help Kanzaki, who's a total stranger to him at the beginning of the series. Basically everyone he encountered in the Liar Game would be ruined if it wasn't for Kanzaki being the reincarnation of Jesus Christ that she is. When it comes to Akiyama's intelligence, he just knows way too much than he should. He'll make his "I have a keikaku" face and then setup a plan revolving around guessing what people will do. And as I touched on earlier, these plans aren't very interesting either. During the game of musical chairs he just knows that the observers will form a wall around one of the contestants so they can't reach their chair. It's not really a creative solution and he relied on that for winning the game. So what explanation do they give as to why Akiyama can know so much? Oh, he's a psych major. It's pretty laughable how far they push this psych major narrative, because as far as I know, being a psych major doesn't grant you the answers to the world's secrets.

Art:
The art was fine for the most part, but like most other things in this manga, it was bland.
There really isn't much emotion behind these drawings, and considering that people are basically gambling for there lives here, they really should be. Compare this to a moment in Kaiji, where at this point he's only gambling with 3 million yen instead of 300 million.
The heavy inking and close up on his face really emphasizes the sweat and expression on his face, making it so much more impactful.
Liar Game also occasionally has some awful paneling that makes no sense.
Here you can see Akiyama saying the exact same thing on back to back pages, yet the reaction it gets is completely different. I'm assuming he says the same thing twice to act as a summary, since the page on the right is the end of a chapter and the left is a start of a new one, but then it doesn't make any sense as to why the reactions of the crowd are so drastically different. It completely messes up the flow of the manga, because one of those pages is pointless as they convey the same information, Akiyama has a plan. The reactions being different is just the icing on the awful flow cake because now we don't know which reaction is the one that actually happened, and the reactions are different enough to where they most definitely did not happen simultaneously.

Conclusion:
Obviously, I'm not really a fan of this manga, but I don't particularly hate it either. Most of my review is harping down on the negative side because I was quite disappointed, but it's not to say I didn't get any enjoyment. If you're really curious and you still think you might really like this manga, go check it out, but if you're having doubts after reading my review, I recommend staying away.