Anthile
Steel marks flesh
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- Joined
- Jan 10, 2009
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After the great success of my last manga presentation, I decided that this time I will give you riffraff lovely INTPs something that is somewhat more appealing. As may have guessed already, the name's Liar Game. To quote the plot synopsis from wikipedia:
People often compare it with Death Note and sometimes even outright call it "Death Note with con artists" because both series focus on intricate schemes and battle of wits. This is misleading in several ways. Death Note is a shounen (teenager) series, Liar Game is a seinen (adult) series. It's a lot more down-to-earth than Death Note. There are no supernatural elements, no ridiculous fight scenes, no implausible hair styles and no gratuitous violence or fanservice. Liar Game is primarily dialogue-driven and there is next to no physical action. As it is based on people outsmarting each other, it references a lot of game theory, social psychology and mathematics. Not to mention that it excels in another area in which Death Note fails: character development. Especially Nao gets a lot of it. It's just a ton of fun to see her and Akiyama doing stuff. It's a nice change to see characters I can relate to because they act like actual human beings (by Japanese standards, anyway) and not like some escapees from a bizarro universe where logic and common sense do not apply like in most other Japanese stuff. It's almost subversive in that.
Anyway, the manga starts a bit slow. While the beginning is by no means bad, it takes about 20 chapters until it gets really good.
The manga is still running. You can read it here: http://www.mangafox.com/manga/liar_game/v01/c001/
A typical page looks like this (Akiyama and Nao in action):
People often compare it with Death Note and sometimes even outright call it "Death Note with con artists" because both series focus on intricate schemes and battle of wits. This is misleading in several ways. Death Note is a shounen (teenager) series, Liar Game is a seinen (adult) series. It's a lot more down-to-earth than Death Note. There are no supernatural elements, no ridiculous fight scenes, no implausible hair styles and no gratuitous violence or fanservice. Liar Game is primarily dialogue-driven and there is next to no physical action. As it is based on people outsmarting each other, it references a lot of game theory, social psychology and mathematics. Not to mention that it excels in another area in which Death Note fails: character development. Especially Nao gets a lot of it. It's just a ton of fun to see her and Akiyama doing stuff. It's a nice change to see characters I can relate to because they act like actual human beings (by Japanese standards, anyway) and not like some escapees from a bizarro universe where logic and common sense do not apply like in most other Japanese stuff. It's almost subversive in that.
Anyway, the manga starts a bit slow. While the beginning is by no means bad, it takes about 20 chapters until it gets really good.
The manga is still running. You can read it here: http://www.mangafox.com/manga/liar_game/v01/c001/
A typical page looks like this (Akiyama and Nao in action):
