It had to be a bit rubbish. That's what I always thought to myself when I saw Battle Royale mentioned. I assumed this because it doesn't have an anime adaptation. What I didn't know back then was the reason for this -- I thought it was because the series wasn't that interesting. I never suspected it was because what's included in the story is so extreme that it would have to be butchered to make the jump from manga to anime. There's just no way a series that involves someone getting raped whilst dying by a psychotic girl, with flashbacks to her being abused by her stepfather as a child appearing during what was happening, could ever be faithfully adapted into an anime. Once I actually read a description of the story and saw its high ratings I was sold -- it sounded like something different, and it most certainly is different from anything else I've encountered.

Battle Royale was everything I expected it be prior to buying it. Nothing was held back, everything was shown in graphic detail, there was lots of death and the situation the characters found themselves in is the kind that no-one would want to be in... but it's also a situation everyone is interested in from a voyeuristic perspective. A 1 in 42 chance of survival, where survival is only possible if you kill people you once thought of as friends... I wouldn't want to be in that situation, and I don't know how I'd handle it if I was. The story painted a bleak (and accurate) picture of how humans act when there are no laws and only fear and lust governing their actions. I read manga to see what's too extreme or not moe enough for anime, so in many ways Battle Royale was perfect for me.

The story starts with 42 students, all aged 14-15, on a bus. The students think they're going on a school trip. They talk, laugh and act like teenagers do. Then they all start falling asleep, only realizing when it was too late that the bus driver had put a gas mask on and gas was being pumped onto the bus. They then wake up in a classroom, sat at their desks, with some kind of ring around their necks. Once everyone starts to wake up, a person who introduces himself as their new teacher walks into the room, calling himself Mr. Kamon. After pausing to distress the confused students a little more, he reveals to them that their class has been chosen for The Program -- an event that takes place every year (and has done since 1947 in the Battle Royale universe) where a random 9th grade class is selected for an 'educational' battle to the death at a deserted location (the story of Battle Royale takes place on a small island). Smiling, he tells them that if they don't kill they'll be killed, either by their classmates or by the ring around their neck that will explode if there's more than one person left by the deadline.

Kamon is a truly great bad guy. He looks more evil than any other character I've seen. He's the sort of character that readers will want to see die as painfully as humanly possible. If I was to describe his looks, I'd say he looks inhuman, like he was modeled from clay, and that suits him perfectly. This guy enjoyed seeing the suffering caused by strangers being put in a truly hopeless situation, joking about how seeing the daughter of a famous person get raped on live television would increase the ratings and even going as far as to push the kids into attacking him during the first few chapters. With an evil grin and perverted tongue movement, he was happy to inform one of the kids that, after the woman in charge of the orphanage he was staying at argued against he and his friend being taken, he gave her "tough love" that she was only too happy to provide after "proper persuasion." He got kicks out of watching him get so angry he cried, and then blew his face off after, fueled by pure hate, he charged at him. It's too bad he appeared very little after the start of the story, only speaking when giving updates every six hours...

The first volume was fantastic just because of Kamon. He explained the rules of the game to the class of 42 with a smile and happy tone, showing a dead body of a teacher (he was on the bus with the students at the start) who was against them taking part in The Program and killing a female student who was speaking while he was explaining the rules as an example of how little he valued their lives. He then sent them off alone, one by one, onto the island to kill each other. They were sent out with the belongings they had with them on the bus and another bag, which contained a random weapon, map, watch, compass, water and bread. He made it clear that there would be no escape because the ring around their necks would explode if they tried to take it off and, if they still tried to escape knowing their head would be blown off eventually for doing so, then the ships around the island would shoot them in the water. He gave them no time to think, throwing them out into the wilderness with the knowledge that they'd die in a few days if they weren't the last student alive on the island.

Trust is hard to come by once you're given the task of killing everyone else to ensure your own survival. If you were in a class with 41 other people then you'd only be friends with a small percentage, and out of those few how many would you truly be able to trust? Most likely only a few. In that sort of situation the fear alone would cause many to kill -- people would become too paranoid to trust even the friends they'd spoke to daily at school. When a person is presented with a choice between death and friendship, the real person, who had put on an act in the past in order to get on in the world, comes out. It's horrible to think what fear and paranoia can cause a person to do, isn't it?

If there's one thing Battle Royale is then it's over the top. When people go crazy in this they have saliva coming from their mouths, their eyes are as wide as possible, they do the 'zombie walk', with their feet twisted inwards and their knees bent, and they act more like animals than humans. The ability the artist has at depicting extreme emotions is a huge plus in a series like this, where the situation is hopeless and death seems all but inevitable, but he goes too far at times, often showing brains, guts, breasts, dicks and everything else needed to make it near impossible to adapt into an anime. Personally, I would've liked to see a more realistic and less exploitive art. But, on the plus side, the art is very clear and nearly all of the action sequences were easy for me to follow, which isn't something I can say about a lot of the series I've read to date -- I usually have to go over panels numerous times in order to understand how one panel flows from the next.

The over the top comment also goes for the story at times. At this point I can't say if it was anywhere near as silly in the novel because I haven't read up to that point yet, though the novel has come across as somewhat less insane so far, but there's a part of the story in the manga that was impossible for me to take seriously. I'm referring to a scene where a guy runs away from another guy (a sociopath/terminator wannabe called Kazuo) after being shot, with his stomach hanging out, running into a warehouse. In the warehouse he has time to set the bomb he was building before Kazuo enters, as well as the time to wrap duct tape around his stomach, and he then manages to kick the bomb at Kazuo AND jump out of the window as he entered the warehouse, without getting shot. A truck then flies out of the warehouse as a result of the bomb blast, over the head of the guy who escaped through the window, and that's followed by Kazuo appearing out of the truck, unharmed. Kazuo then unloaded his machine gun on the guy who jumped through the window. And, as if to make it all a little more silly, the guy who had just had many bullets inserted into him still had the strength to pick up his handgun in one last attempt, after playing dead, at killing Kazuo. After all that, I wasn't sure whether to praise Battle Royale for being a bit too much or attack it for its distance from reality!

There are some other issues I have. Shuuya, the main character of Battle Royale, is the main problem. The manga artist had the annoying habit of turning Battle Royale into something of a soap opera at times, showing needless flashbacks involving Naruto 2...err, Shuuya being a goodie-goodie, acting on his feelings instead of his brain, and helping his friends back when he was at school (he got to know just about every important character at school after helping them in some way). The artist was determined to highlight the fact that near enough the entire cast liked Shuuya for acting brainless, just like in shounen stories where the main character does stupid things and gets loved for it. The flashbacks involving Shuuya saving the day did stop once all the characters had been introduced... however, they were replaced with (often chapter long) dream sequences that showed Shuuya getting support from his deceased friends. I hate it in anime when the plot advances through dreams/visualizations, and I hate it even more when characters are shown speaking to people long dead in an attempt to add character development... Would it have been so hard to just have Shuuya think for a few panels instead? There was no need for a large amount of chapters, many reusing the same art, to be used for repetitive conversations with the dead. I disliked Shuuya's character because, as well as being an idiot, the very existence of his character resulted in the story lasting 10+ chapters longer than it needed to.

Continuing on from what I said in the above paragraph, the pacing wasn't perfect. The story of Battle Royale takes place over the course of a few days, and it lasts for 15 volumes. If you do the math then you'll see the problem already -- a lot of chapters were created but not a lot of time passed. It's understandable when you consider how many characters are in the series but I must confess to often feeling that the story was dragged out and could've ended sooner. I didn't mind most of the flashbacks, which every main character had in order for them to be fleshed out before their deaths, but it became tiresome when dialogue was repeated time and again for no real reason. Kawada, an experienced character who joins up with and helps Shuuya and his female friend, Noriko, seemed to be pointing out in every conversation that Shuuya needed to kill to survive, no matter if he wanted to play the game or not. If Shuuya didn't get it then I certainly did, and I quickly became bored of seeing it being said. And, sadly, lots of the dialogue was like that, and it wasn't unusual to see panels used to repeat what another character had said in the past. But don't get me wrong: the pacing wasn't awful, it's just that I feel the story could've progressed quicker and, in my opinion, it would've been far more enjoyable if it had. If the pacing had been truly bad then I would've struggled to read 15 volumes in 3 days.

Another issue I had, which also had something to do with the pacing, was the ending. Near enough every story ends in disappointing fashion. No matter how talented the writer, it seems they all struggle to finish their stories in style. Battle Royale was no different. The ending wasn't what I consider bad, and it had a few twists that kept it interesting, but it could've been better. The final battle was rather anti-climatic, with the most prominent bad guy in the series getting shot in the head (after a car chase) and still not dying, like some sort of monster, which took away from what was supposed to be a battle to the death between high school students. He'd shown himself to be near impossible to kill before that but still fighting after taking a bullet to the head took it a tad too far. And, as if to finish the fight in the most boring way possible, Shuuya spent something like 1.5 chapters getting pep talks from his dead friends (in his head, obviously) because he found it too difficult to finish off a guy who'd mercilessly killed most of his classmates. Things did improve for the last stretch once the battle ended and the final the twists started hitting, but I wasn't best pleased with what was a rather upbeat and forced ending to a mostly very, very, very depressing story. Going on the start I was expecting everyone to die, and I feel the story would've been better if not for the final twist.

One final flaw I need to mention isn't anything to do with the actual story -- it's the English translation. There were many occasions throughout where the translator missed a word out of sentences, making what was said not come out right, and there were also a few times where sentences quite simply didn't make sense. The 'F' word was also thrown around a bit too much, as if it was done just to make sure it got an 18+ rating. Seeing a friendly and polite character randomly say "F*** a duck" didn't sit right with me. And, although this is a plus or minus depending on how you look at it, some of the characters speak in an informal manner - like any public school kid would in all fairness - and what they say can be a little difficult to follow. The translation isn't a major problem that ruins the experience; it's just an annoyance, but I still expected better.

But, anyway, enough of the negative. There's far more good than there is bad on show. It's true that Battle Royale is over the top and it's also true that the pacing isn't great and the story is often overly dramatic because of the Shuuya flashbacks/dream sequences that slow down the story. However, Battle Royale is impossible to put down because of the realistic way many of the characters cope with being put in a hopeless situation. There are many different personalities in the series and most offer something the others don't, meaning there's at least one character the reader can connect with and feel for. Like the story itself, there are a few characters that are too far-fetched, but there are also those with believable backgrounds. I've always said that a story that's able to get the reader watery-eyed has great characters, and one of the early death scenes, where a female character died in the arms of her childhood friend, made me a little watery-eyed because of how beautifully it was handled. You'd have to be a pretty cold person not to feel anything as you watch her die after only just having seen her fight bravely against a guy trying to rape her AND seeing a flashback of her and her childhood friend together away from the island, back when they were normal high school students.

There are a number of other parts of the plot that will prove hard to forget, two of which I'll mention now as examples. The first is a scene at a lighthouse that involves 6 girls having a complete breakdown of trust and going from working together as a team to suspecting each other of having poisoned someone -- it captured what paranoia can cause in the type of situation the characters found themselves in amazingly well. The other is a showdown between Sugimara, the kindhearted martial artist who doesn't want to kill anyone, and Kazuo, the sociopath who feels nothing and would give the terminator a run for its money. The fight itself was great and the build-up, which involved around 3 chapters of Sugimaru and his girlfriend talking, showing what Sugimaru had to protect, was even better. Because Battle Royale has a huge amount of characters, there were many short stories like those I just mentioned, some one-shot and some lasting for a few chapters, so there wasn't any shortage of tragedy on show, and we all know that what gets the most emotional reactions out people is death. It's a great series to read if you, like me, enjoy seeing short stories that have a chance of pulling on the heart strings.

So, what are my overall thoughts? Well, I think the series was well worth the £30 I paid for it. You know you're dealing with something high quality when you spend time with *insert whatever here* and time seems to speed up. This happened when I read Battle Royale. I read 6 volumes on the day the books arrived, 4 on the following day and 5 on the day after, never having any trouble reading for lengthy periods. I'm not going to say it was a perfect series because it wasn't, its pacing and the insanity of it all often taking away from the experience a little, but as dark, depressing and involving reads go there aren't many better stories in existence. If you think the premise sounds interesting then give it a go -- you'll enjoy it a lot if you can handle lots of death.

Rating: 8.5/10