The Name of the Game is Death – This Week in Anime

today24h24_x91uezسبتمبر 25, 2025

0 22 12 دقائق

Steve and Lucas look at the death game genre and hope to emerge victorious.

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed by the participants in this chatlog are not the views of Anime News Network.
Spoiler Warning for discussion of the series ahead.
Crunchyroll streams Necronomico, Future Diary, Danganronpa anime, Big Order, God.app, and Platinum End.
Netflix streams BET and Kakegurui.

Steve

Welcome back from Hawai’i, Lucas! While I’m sure you managed to grin and bear it, it’s too bad you couldn’t join in on our live show at Anime Lockdown—not just because it was fun, but because it was neat to juggle a three-person column for once. Luckily, though, I think I have something that can make up for it. I just so happened to find the perfect subject matter expert for today’s topic, and she can’t wait to dig into it alongside us. Ah, here she is now.

Lucas

Steve, let me tell you, Hawai’i was an absolute delight! It was full of great food, daily beach trips, and so many interesting characters!

(Disclaimer: Hawai’i is nothing like Danganronpa and deserves\ its independence)
While on this tropical getaway, I had plenty of time to read, including some titles for ANN’s upcoming Manga Preview Guide! One of these releases was GANTZ:G and, while I’ll save my perspective on that work for the preview guide, reading it made me realize that I don’t think I’ve ever talked publicly about the death game genre!

lucas_02 — © 2015 by Hiroya Oku, Tomohito Ohsaki, Keita Iizuka.

So what do you say, Steve? Care to channel your inner Darumi and indulge me in this trashy micro-genre???

Absolutely! Death games. Killing games. Battles Royale. Whatever you want to call them, they’ve captured the animanga imagination for at least a quarter century at this point. Plenty of examples. Plenty of formats. Plenty of grist for the mill. But I do believe they have a genuinely fascinating edge buried underneath those piles of gore and schlock.

To start from the beginning, we likely wouldn’t have titles like Hundred Line, Danganronpa, or any version of Gantz if not for Koushun Takami‘s Battle Royal novel.
Crystalizing the idea of young people competing in violent games for their own benefit, the work was deeply controversial for its time and still hits pretty hard today! Not every element of it holds up, but it’s still a deeply socially insightful and overtly anti-fascist text.

We should neither ignore nor forget how explicitly political Battle Royale is from the moment of its inception. The movie adaptation begins with a voiceover explaining in plain language that the “battle royale” act is a product of Japan’s economic downturn in the ’90s, as well as a reactionary response from an older generation that hates and fears the younger one.

© 2000 Battle Royale Production Committee © 2003 Toei Company, Ltd.	© 2000 Battle Royale Production Committee © 2003 Toei Company, Ltd.
© 2000 Battle Royale Production Committee © 2003 Toei Company, Ltd.	© 2000 Battle Royale Production Committee © 2003 Toei Company, Ltd.

Good thing those conditions have no parallels to the modern day, am I right???

If Americans didn’t have several violent sports to distract us from gestures at everything going on in America right now we’d probably have invented our own battle royale a couple times over by now.

lucas_03 — © 1996 by Kazuki Takahashi/SHUEISHA Inc.

Though the political aspects of the genre aren’t what drew me to it initially. My love of death games kicked off before I was old enough to pick up on these themes, and instead, I was drawn to the moodier atmospheres and the drama of games that I could just barely wrap my head around, having impossibly high stakes.
That’s right. I, like a lot of people around my age, gained my affinity for death games thanks to Yu-Gi-Oh!.

I’ve actually never thought of Yu-Gi-Oh! in that way, but now that you mention it, that is a good PG-rated gateway anime into the genre. And I think it also gets at what makes the post-Battle Royale incarnation of that genre so special. Battle Royale certainly didn’t invent its flavor of dystopian satire. The Running Man, for example, has a similar premise with an explicit game show veneer, and that, too, remains relevant enough to warrant a remake arriving soon.

steve06 — © 1987 Taft Entertainment Pictures / Keith Barish Productions

What set Battle Royale apart—and what made it so controversial—was that it had kids plotting and murdering the heck out of each other. And that, I believe, is the cultural lightning rod that connects it to its descendants.

Battle royales even became FOR kids at a certain point! I was in high school during peak Hunger Games fever, and it’s now my understanding that most social interactions between young people happen through social experience/battle royale games like Fortnite.

And, credit where it’s due, Suzanne Collins does make the anti-authoritarian politics inherent to the genre pretty overt in The Hunger Games; even if I found it a little too steeped in “Blue Collar vs Metropolitan” aesthetics and theming to enjoy it as much as my peers.

I can’t say I ever got on The Hunger Games train either. When those books were being published, I was immersed in erudite studies of another literary giant.

Reading the Future Diary manga was the first time I consciously interacted with the killing game genre. For better or worse.

Hey, the birthplace of the yandere archetype as we know it today is as good an onramp for the death game genre as any other! Is it the best the genre has to offer? No, but I still see characters making this expression in new anime today, so clearly it had an impact!

lucas_05 — © Sakae ESUNO・KADOKAWA SHOTEN CO

It definitely sets the tone and structure for many of its followers. Whereas Battle Royale had fairly grounded high school students, Future Diary has a cast stuffed with cartoon characters. Their designs and personality traits are all over the place, and that’s before we get into the unique diary powers each one of them has. It’s a setup built for interesting and over-the-top clashes, akin to Stand battles from JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure. Sakae Esuno may not be the most graceful writer, but he found some good nuggets here.

Agreed! And I think those over-the-top elements critically inform the franchise that most young people associate with death games today, Danganronpa.

While a little too silly for me, I am constantly shocked by this video game death game’s staying power! I was walking around the other day and saw a thirteen-year-old wearing a Danganronpa shirt, and was flabbergasted that someone younger than the game itself would be into the franchise.

I’d also be hard-pressed to give a simple explanation for Danganronpa‘s lasting appeal. This is a game I originally experienced as a Something Awful thread, yet even contorted to fit inside of a forum, Danganronpa transfixed me. I think, maybe, Danganronpa managed to take Future Diary‘s excesses and recontextualize them as pop art. Its style is weirder and more confidently executed. Its game design is bizarre and constantly in flux. Its characters are tropey while still human. And the story has twists that never leave you.
Danganronpa is also a franchise where I think every sequel does something unique and of merit. That doesn’t mean they’re all unilaterally successful, but they each cook in their own way.

No shade from my end either! Even if they’re not my cup of tea, clearly there’s something about Danganronpa that clicks for a lot of people, and it’s still overtly influencing the genre today.
Though my death game flavor of choice is a lot closer to Kōtarō Uchikoshi‘s 999: Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors. Far more serious in tone than Danganronpa and with over-the-top characters that don’t quite slip into parodies of themselves, I can’t recommend this game and Uchikoshi’s larger body of work enough!

Definitely a game worth playing on the DS, too, if you’re able to. Kōtarō Uchikoshi doesn’t exclusively work in the death game genre, but I’ve consistently enjoyed what he puts out.
On the other hand, Danganronpa‘s creator Kazutaka Kodaka can’t seem to get enough of battle royale. Even Akudama Drive, an anime he co-created, has tons of death game trappings, including explosive collars.

steve09 — © ぴえろ・TooKyoGames／アクダマドライブ製作委員会

I also want to say I respect the moxie of the Danganronpa 3 anime project. Weaving two plotlines together that aired simultaneously as separate arcs/seasons was a wild move that no subsequent show has bothered to replicate, death game or otherwise.

steve10 — © Spike Chunsoft Co., Ltd./希望ヶ峰学園第3映像部

Oh my god, Akudama Drive absolutely WHIPS and is the best anime of 2020 for my money! Even if it’s a little broad, what a great examination of criminality and how society defines it at a time when it was more relevant than ever.
And while I can’t personally speak to the quality of the Danganronpa 3 anime, I’ll give props to any work that keeps Junko Enoshima a top-tier cosplay character! That is not an easy fit to pull off, and I’m impressed every time I see someone rock it at an anime convention!

Character designs are a big deal in the death game genre! These stories need a large cast of disposable characters, many of whom might die before they receive adequate characterization. However, if their initial impression is strong enough, they can still leave a lasting impact on the audience. That may be the factor Danganronpa understood better than any of its competitors. It gave almost every character an equally memorable design, and—perhaps most importantly—it didn’t pull its punches when it came to killing them.

steve11 — © Spike Chunsoft Co., Ltd./希望ヶ峰学園第3映像部

Each one of those games had multiple characters I wish I could have spent more time with.

Oh, it is so interesting that you say that, because I hate pretty much every character in their introduction in my favorite death game media, Gantz.

While Hiroya Oku‘s manga has aged extremely problematically and is sophomorically horny in a way that feels skeezier by the year, I can’t help but love it. It’s clear from even just the opening chapter that Oku had a TERRIBLE time in high school, intimately understands how that experience can make certain kinds of young men terrible, and then spends the hundreds of chapters that follow pulling characters out of incel and extremist pipelines in between some of the most brutal death games in the genre.
I can’t even recommend Gantz to most of my friends, but I love it to bits, mostly because it’s largely about characters who suck finding ways to become better people.

Heck, that’s a very important flip side to the genre. Sometimes, the trashiest elements can speak the most profound truths. On the other hand, though, sometimes it’s enough for a death game to be pure garbage with no redeemable qualities. Big Order is one of my favorite examples of a bad anime. This was Sakae Esuno‘s spiritual follow-up to Future Diary, and it’s basically the same story and characters but worse in every conceivable way. And that makes it brilliant.

steve12 — © 2016 Sakae Esuno / Kadokawa / Big Order Production Committee

I…am not familiar with Big Order! Does he get her pregnant??? I feel like the writers wouldn’t make this character say that unless they were teeing up an impregnation later on.

So, bear with me, the short version is that he initially causes her to experience a phantom pregnancy by grabbing her bunny ears, then he says that line to assuage her, and then she later ties him to a bed and tries to breed him, but he can’t get it up because he is only attracted to his little sister.

steve13 — © 2016 Sakae Esuno / Kadokawa / Big Order Production Committee

That is just one of Big Order‘s multitudes.

I see.
I think Big Order is about to be the only thing I’m able to think about until I watch it, and we’ve got to find a way to bully Lynzee until letting us talk about this 2015 anime in a future column!!!

Might be a difficult negotiation because Nick and I already did so back in 2020. But the beautiful thing about Big Order is that there’s always something else to talk about.
To reiterate my earlier point, this is what’s good about killing games. They can be vehicles for incisive political commentary, and they can be pulpy nonsense. Heck, they can be both at the same time!

Just scrolling through your and Nick’s past column, this is giving Future Diary meets Juni Taisen: Zodiac War and I am here for it! Genres are supposed to be versatile and I love that death games can skew from the more grounded and politically charged Kaiji: Ultimate Survivor to something as big and dumb as Big Order to reimagined death game like BLUE LOCK which is big and dumb in it’s own distinct way!

Unsurprisingly, it’s also a genre that plays well with others. As I recall it, Magical Girl Raising Project is one of the more decent post-Madoka series, blending “dark” magical girls into a death game plot. It also features an especially blatant Temu Monokuma as its mascot.

steve14 — © 2016 ASARI ENDOU/TAKARAJIMASHA/Magical Girl Raising Project partners

While I think we’ve had enough “dark magical girl” media to last a lifetime, this genre being pulpier does make it easy for writers to churn out new works quickly, with those works often being overtly iterative. Hell, Kakegurui is more or less just Kaiji but with horny teenagers, and that did well enough to get a live-action Netflix series!

I don’t know a single living human being who actually watched BET recreationally, but it’s still neat that it got made!

And you can’t have a conversation about killing games and Netflix without acknowledging Squid Game‘s phenomenal success. Well, the first season of it, anyway.

steve15 — © 2021 Netflix Worldwide Entertainment, LLC.

Although I think we can draw a meaningful distinction between series akin to Kaiji, i.e., desperate people (usually in debt) being thrown into deadly competitions, and those more like Danganronpa that feature a largely juvenile cast doing the mutual slaying. They’re similar, of course, but they have unique textures at play.

Oh Squid Game. I’ll forever love the series for popularizing the death game genre, and forever lament that most casual audiences didn’t explore much beyond this middle-of-the-road entry point.
And you raise a good point! I described death game fiction as a “micro-genre” at the top of this chat, but it’s probably more accurate to say that it’s a style of fiction with several distinct disciplines. Some works lean heavily on the “game” part of the genre with Squid Game and Kaiji, works that focus more on characters killing each other directly like Danganronpa and Future Diary, and then there are the works that get really conceptual like 999 and Gantz.
There’s a lot to love under this umbrella term and, thankfully, even the bad stuff is bad in a big enough way that it loops back to being a good time.

Now, that being said, just because the genre has a lot of variety, leeway, and popularity, that doesn’t mean everyone needs to participate. We can reserve a somewhat discerning eye. Platinum End, for instance, was the product of the Death Note duo, and while Obata and Ohba may have been able to craft a timeless cat-and-mouse thriller, their foray into killing games was shockingly dire.

No spoilers, but it has one of the worst endings I’ve ever seen.

Platinum End also features a character turning to the camera and espousing the writer’s overtly homophobic beliefs, which wasn’t great when it came out and has only aged like milk since then!

Lol, I had actually erased that from my memory. Or it just got blended up into the slurry of other things Platinum End totally botches. Either way, not exactly a ringing endorsement for the series.
But in fairness, Obata and Ohba aren’t the only renowned creators who couldn’t find success in this space. Yokō Tarō, creator of Drakengard and NieR, also gave us the original concept for KamiErabi GOD.app, and that’s one of the more universally reviled anime series from the past few years.

Admittedly, I still intend on watching the rest of it at some point, because I’m ride-or-die for Yokō Tarō, and I intuitively respect any series that begins with its protagonist jacking off in front of his crush.

I also got six episodes into God.app before realizing that Yokō Tarō phoned it in on this one!

Square Enix really needs to give that man enough money to make another actual video game because, while his forays into anime and live service games have the capacity to be interesting, none of these side projects have lived up to what the creator is capable of.

I still believe Drakengard 4 is coming. Someday…
Regardless, the death game genre certainly isn’t going anywhere. Kodaka and Uchikoshi’s ambitious collaboration, The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy, proved a critical and cultural success, and that game includes battle royale flavor from both of them. Not to mention that Necronomico and the Cosmic Horror Show just wrapped up airing.

I stand by my previous comments on Necronomico! If it were just a little bit better in every regard, I think people would view it as a great series, but as is, it’s still very distinctly itself, and I love that works can still feel so authored in the death game genre!

While these kinds of titles don’t drop at quite the clip that they used to in anime or video games, it’s clear from this chat that I have plenty I can catch up on before the next high-concept murder marathon comes along!

There’s always another killing game to sink your teeth into. Actually, now that I think about it, our other contributor has been unusually quiet this whole column. Let’s check back in with her.