Battle Royale is the rare work of Live Action Japanese cinema that truly needs no introduction.
It’s been cited as a major influence by Quentin Tarantino, Edgar Wright, and many
other visionary directors, it inspired, directly or indirectly, an entire wave of mediocre
YA novels and hollywood movies; and in recent times it’s gone on to be the namesake of
the most presently popular genre of online shooters.
That influence is well-earned. Battle Royale’s modern take on lord of the flies combines
visceral action and drama with thoughtful commentary on Japan’s strict, ultracompetitive
school system, the viciousness with which some teachers tacitly encourage teens to treat
each other, and the callous, inhuman way japan’s larger systems handle those who can’t, for
whatever reason, make the grade. Naturally, the rotten old men that the film
– and original novel – were criticizing didn’t take too kindly to that, and, either
ignoring or intentionally misrepresenting its themes, many of the day’s conservative
politicians decried it as a piece of mindless, sensationalized murder porn that would destroy
society. This, just as naturally, lead to major countercultural pushback, cementing
the film’s status as a bona fide classic and cinematic touchstone.
But the dismissive narrative that people were just getting their sicko kicks from lurid
depictions of teen on teen ultraviolence persisted, and, as anime, manga and games began riffing
on the concepts Battle Royale helped popularize – as Japan’s entertainment industries
do – there would come a franchise that absolutely and categorically proved them… at least
partly right. Mirai Nikki: Future Diary is one of those
anime that only gets harder to understand the more you think about it. I mean, the god
running the central survival game to select his own replacement is literally named “Deus
Ex Machina,” which should immediately tell you everything you need to know about the
level of writing we’re dealing with here. But that god is also voiced by Norio Wakamoto,
which should likewise tell you everything you need to know about the level of fun that
was had turning the original manga into an anime.
It’s not a smart show. It’s not a good one, either. There are many points where it
attempts to unpack extremely sensitive subject matter with all the tact and grace of a bear
going at your garbage cans, and even if that doesn’t bug you, on some level, the borderline
suicidal stupidity of its lead will. Not to mention its ending. None of this stops it
from being an absolute blast to watch in the moment, however, thanks to its great voice
cast, music, and the directing talents of Naoto Hosoda, who has a knack for finding
the fun in any project – even a low-rent gacha anime like Magatsu Wahrheit Zuerst.
Despite being the poster child of edgy anime, Mirai Nikki actually sands down the harshest
– or least marketable – edges of Battle Royale’s conceit, by expanding the death
game roster to include a variety of colorful adult psychopaths, on top of a handful of
students, thus creating a sense of zany variety that both heightens the fun and undercuts
most potential controversy. Okay, a literal child does get merc’d at one point, but
he’s a serial killer child, like that baby from Jojo’s, so it’s okay. This inoffensively
offensive tone has earned Mirai Nikki a great deal of success.
And that, of course, means, in the decade since it debuted, as many other anime and
manga have followed in its bloody stupid footsteps as Battle Royale’s. Which, not gonna lie,
I kinda love. Look, I’ll never stop singing the praises
of high-minded intellectual Odd Taxi type anime, but I wouldn’t be in this business
if I didn’t want to have some silly, over the top fun. And nothing says “silly, over
the top fun” quite like a big dumb battle royale.
The genre’s premise promises to deliver both the catharsis of watching unpleasant
things happen to unpleasant people, and the thrill of seeing somewhat likeable characters
to whom the target demo can relate beat overwhelmingly deadly odds; Not unlike the teen slasher flicks
that proved so popular in America through the late 70s and 80s!
But in Battle Royales and Survival Games, there’s never just the one slasher – every
competitor is a potential killer, including the almost invariably wussy dork protagonist,
who will just as invariably take some non-elective badass lessons from the school of hard knocks
in the first act, joining the Freddy vs Jason tournament arc as a major player by the story’s
midpoint. Usually after losing a few of their saner, kinder friends. Like slasher movies,
these stories rely heavily on formula, much of it derived from the successes of Mirai
Nikki. Though in this trope’s case, I think it’s
more a product of that show and manga’s most notorious failing. Yukiteru Amano is
like Shinji from Evangelion, only worse, and without a good story to excuse his actions.
He spends almost the entirety of the show letting his psycho stalker classmate drag
him around and slaughter dozens in his name, partly because he’s terrified, and partly
because he’s horny. Then, when he’s finally ready to maybe make his own choice and do
something good for once, he immediately gets tricked in the most agonizingly obvious way
into making everything worse for everyone. Fuck Yuki. All my homies hate Yuki. Just about
everyone who ever watched Mirai Nikki hates Yuki. Which is why every death game since
has strived to make their hero the anti-Yuki, at least in the back half. A little bit of
initial wussing about and hesitancy toward “playing” is almost always necessary on
a protag’s part to avoid painting them as a psychopath. But we wanna see our heroes
do more than cower in a corner while their fuckbuddies fight their battles for them,
so eventually, in the process of running away screaming, they’ll discover some innate
survival instinct or whatever that lets them excel in the game.
Whether that’s a Darwin’s Game, a Magical Girl Raising Project, or a Btoom!
Usually this comes paired with some sort of drastic shift in their mental state– Btoom’s
Sakamoto has a head injury that periodically sends him into a fugue state where he believes
he’s still playing the bomberman-meets-Halo video game that the real life death game is
based on, thus allowing him to fully unleash his elite skillz. In most cases the hero will
just become increasingly jaded and willing to kill in self-defense as they accept the
horrible reality around them, with the caveat that their motivation is to ultimately defeat
the people running the game and end it with as few casualties as possible, while holding
on to what they value most. Y’know “Despite everything, it’s still
you.” In some cases, the attempts to cling to normalcy
can come off as… strange, given the circumstances. High Rise Invasion’s Yuri Honjo and her
lesbian battle buddy Mayuko fend off dozens of colourful, smiley not-ghostfaces on their
way through the empty office blocks and precarious rope bridges of the series’ strange pocket
dimension, eventually acquiring the power of LITERALLY GOD and an Angel, respectively.
Yet Yuri’s chief motivation – above even ending the sick game in which they’re trapped
– remains constant: to reunite with her precious, cool Oniisama and show him what
a good Imouto she is. At least that’s consistent with the series’
general level of camp, though. “Who the hell is that? When did they show
up?” “But how… who is that?” “!!! Those Panties!”
Would you believe that’s an upgrade to the typical standard of writing for women in these
anime?
See, Mirai Nikki’s other most notable character was… do I even have to tell ya? There’s
a 99.9% chance that you clicked on this video because Yuno Gasai is in the thumbnail. Even
if you don’t know who she is, you know THE YANDERE POSE in THE YANDERE LIGHTING – she’s
a franchise-transcending whole-show-carrying icon. A little flat in terms of personality
– all her depth, if you can even call it that, is rooted in a childhood of endless
abuse – but that works for the waifu Norman Bates thing she’s got going on.
The real problem is that almost every anime and manga that tries to be the next Mirai
Nikki also wants to have the next Yuno. which has lead to an obnoxious trend of hack
writers thinking that waifu design plus trauma equals compelling drama, and that the more
traumatizedier a murderwaifu is, the more moe she’ll be. Sometimes, this trauma will
be related to the death game and thus help to drive the plot forward – Shuka in Darwin’s
Game is ruthless to a point bordering on insanity due to her obsession with ending the game
that killed her parents, for instance – but in most cases it’s just an excuse to cram
cheap, exploitative depictions of child abuse and a thing that rhymes with vape into flashbacks.
“Battle Game in 5 Seconds of Meeting” takes this, along with most of the genre’s
other tropes, to a positively ridiculous extreme with its leading lady Yuuri Amakage. Her tragic
backstory doesn’t involve the R word, but does involve an abusive mother who hates her
hooking up with an abusive single dad who hates his daughter even more, and while Yuuri’s
busy taking care of that little sister she never asked for, she also has to deal with
a psycho stalker who eventually gets her dead. Or isekai’d. Or whatever’s happening here.
This has filled her with a righteous sense of rage and honed her survival instincts to
a razor point, which, coupled with a special power that amplifies all of her physical abilities,
turns her into a killing machine. A talent she first demonstrates in a battle that…
almost does involve the R-word – against a roided-up ugly bastard who… at least gets
what’s coming to him immediately? Well, I say “at least,” but one of the
two main goals of this formula, is to set up moments like that. Not the specifically
creepy part – usually – but the general extreme circumstances that give secret monsters
license to put their true selves into the open… where they can then be sliced up,
blasted, or slammed into the concrete wall of a parking garage at mach 3. And you can
just sit back, point, and laugh, confident that guy deserved that, on account of how
the show told you he did. Typically, the battle royale participants
who aren’t everyboy and murdergirl will fit into 2 categories. On the one hand, you’ll
almost always have some criminals and social deviants, brought by the shadowy organizers
in to ensure that cooler heads don’t prevail and the killing commences as planned. Most
of these will be jobbers who menace the heroes in the very early stages of the show before
they can grow and give them their comeuppance. But there will also be a few psychos and organized
criminal types who stick around to provide longer-lasting threats and bridge the gap
between that awkward beginning and the final confrontation with the true mastermind.
The second category – which, in some cases, doesn’t appear at all, is ordinary Japanese
folk – many of whom will crack under the pressure and either off themselves or become
a liability; but a few, including protag kun, will prove to have unlikely skills that make
them valuable allies, like a business dude with a knack for diplomacy and strategy. Though
if they don’t give off shounen sidekick energy, that probably won’t end well for
them. A few ordinary people with unexpected talents
may also be driven to do bad things out of desperation, appearing at first blush to be
indistinguishable from the psychos and gangsters, until we learn their tragic backstories, at
which point they’ll either join the heroes, sacrifice themselves, or both. There’ll
also generally be one or two normal people, usually popular, charismatic types, who prove
to have an even greater capacity for evil than any obvious villain, born from a combination
of extreme stress and [insert aspect of society the author dislikes here].
Basically, the idea is to show us the darker side of humanity that gets brought to light
in trying times, as well as ideologies and selfish motivations that breed evil in all
times, contrasted against the bright, optimistic, cooperative spirit embodied by the protagonist.
And since almost every manga artist who actually understands people well enough to do that
concept justice is working in shoujo romance, adult drama, or chainsaw man, the end result
is usually “master aikawa supports the theory of eugenics!
He will eliminate all those who are incompetent! Only a superior few will survive!"
Not good. Not smart. But fun. Even grandiose anime speeches accompanied
by gratuitous anime violence can get boring a fashion without some variety in that violence.
But thankfully, that’s the other thing Big Dumb Battle Royale exist to justify! Mirai
Nikki’s titular future diaries introduced a fun strategic twist to the basic idea of
free-for-all murder contests, giving its characters something to worry about on top of guns and
knives and bombs and shit – something akin to a shounen battle power system – and every
show to follow in its footsteps has followed suit in some way.
In Killing Bites, for instance, the one with the sharpest fangs wins. And those fangs are
sharpened by hybridizing human beings with animals, to give them animal powers. How fun!
Darwin’s Game bestows each player with a “sigil” that can grant any number of powers,
from controlling trees to predicting the future, to unlimiting blade works. Magical Girl Raising
Project, true to its name, mixes the edgy death game trend with the edgy magical girl
trend, equipping its combatants with typical magical girl powers that they must use to
magical splash flare the everloving heck outta each other.
These twists don’t always take the form of an explicit power system – in Btoom,
for instance, victims are forced to take part in a real version of a popular online combat
game, where players must use 10 different kinds of bombs, along with a 3D radar system,
to outsmart their opponents. Each type of bomb has distinct advantages and disadvantages,
and the radar system has its own quirks that have to be accounted for, resulting in fights
with a distinctive high-level esports vibe. Now, I’ve made it… very clear, over the
years, how much I love anime fights, so perhaps its unsurprising that all these varied methods
of murder are the main thing keeping me coming back to this weird, mostly bad subgenre. And
despite the fact that that it’s one of the mostly baddest battle royales I’ve seen
in some time, I’ll admit I’ve been having fun with 5 second battle game for exactly
that reason. Its hero is also a pro-gamer whose chief strengths are strategizing and
analyzing, but it actually gives its combatants supernatural powers, and his … is to have
whatever power his enemy thinks he has. Which by itself opens up plenty of possibilities
for mind games, and when you add to that his propensity for analyzing others’ tactics
and abilities, lends the show a nice atmosphere of strategic tension. It’s not as smart
as it wants to be, but none of these are, and the fact that it cuts all but the most
basic gestures toward character development to get right into the action means it offers
a good amount of dumb fun per minute of screen time.
Though if I were actually seeking out a show like that to watch, instead of just I’d
probably settle for Juuni Taisen, as its crew of 12 mostly amoral mercenaries fuck around
even less before they start finding out, and the animated action, directed by… hey, Naoto
Hosoda is, at least in early episodes, the most fun and impressive in this entire genre!
It’s also based on a book by Nisioisin, who is very smart at writing dumb things,
so if you want to enjoy one of these UNironically, it’s likely your best bet.
I’d be remiss to end this without at least noting that battle royale elements often crop
up in shounen battle things, from One Piece to Naruto to Hero Aca to Hunter x Hunter.
There are also less dumb battle royale anime, games and manga, like Eden of the East, Revue
Starlight, Fate and Danganronpa, which actually do and say interesting things with the concept.
But I didn’t wanna talk about good anime today - we got too many of those this year.
Though I may use those in the future as a basis for discussing how this concept can
be done well. Also I didn’t bring up King’s Game because it’s not really a battle series,
and it really deserves its own in-depth roast. But, until then, I’m Geoff Thew, Professional
Shitbag, Signing out from my mother’s basement.