Battle Royale is an intense death game manga that was thrilling from start to finish. This genre has by my time of finishing the manga in 2015 , become very popular due to works like the Hunger Games, Gantz, BTOOM! , Deadman Wonderland , Danganronpa, and many others. Except I think Battle Royale is the most well executed of any of those works I've approached.

In Battle Royale we follow an entire class of high school students who live in a kind of alternate world Japan where Japan is ruled by an overbearing dystopian communist regime who chooses one class of middle schoolers each year to participate in a death game in their setting of choice. The manga does a very good job in introducing these characters well in the first few chapters and you are just along for the ride like they are in what seems like a run of the mill middle school graduation trip. Then suddenly they find themselves in a schoolroom after getting gassed on the bus, and the journey starts in such an absolutely jarring fashion that I thought really sets the tone for the rest of the manga. The characters are issued a good variety of weapons to start the game, although I personally thought the fact that there were a few too many guns made it a little more predictable. There is all sorts of violence, blood, and sexual material which I thought was great and really does well to add to the realism to the manga, but at the same time prevents it from having a shot at getting adapted into an anime sadly. The manga mainly follows a trio of main protagonists but it also spends a lot of time on other characters.

The best aspect of this manga in my opinion is how fleshed out almost all the students in the middle school class are. You get very detailed backgrounds on a lot of characters so you actually care about what happens to them during the manga. The author never lets you forget that this isn't just some cobbled together group of people who don't know each other like many other death game works; in Battle Royale we follow a close knit group of kids many of whom care about the other students in one way or another. And their past relations with each other are often times a factor in life or death situations. You have characters that range from a seedy girl who uses feminine wiles to trick her opponents to death, karate masters, mob boss, idealists, realists, crazy psychopaths, amazing intellectuals, idiots, conniving narcissists, weak willed gullible people, they are all here I promise you. There is such a wide variety of different character personalities in this manga that you will more than likely find some one to start rooting for. What I found most striking is that a number of the characters are so very intelligent and its really fun to see how they navigate through different situations where one tiny oversight can get them killed. Even characters you think are simple to begin with show different sides to their personalities in different situations which was cool.

This manga goes to show you that this death game affects all the characters in very different ways. You get to see most of the kids who would be normally well functioning people in society , when they get thrown to the wolves they can become totally different people. The manga shows really well how huge of a factor fear and paranoia are, they can cause absolutely disastrous situations. It even shows you how the smallest misinterpretation in a pressure cooker of a situation can lead to death in a matter of seconds.

I thought that the main protagonist Shuuya Nanahara got on my nerves when I first started the manga. He's pretty much what you would call the ultimate idealist/ most optimistic guy in the whole manga which I found irritating as many of the other students actually adapted to the situation, Shuuya would continually make very boneheaded moves and could have died on many occasions thanks to his horribly stupid actions. He shows progress later in the manga but was still overall irritating to me.

I think what makes Shuuya much better is the second member of his three man team , the shotgun toting bad-ass Kawada Shougo. Shougo is a character that is probably the most well fleshed out and rational in the entire manga and almost any scene with him in it is a breath of fresh air , its great. And you are constantly guessing what his true motivations are for the whole damn manga which is another masterstroke by the author. He has great chemistry with Shuuya and the other member of their trio, Noriko. I think Shougo is one of the key characters that make this manga exceptional , some others being Mimura and Sugimura that you can't help but to root for once their backgrounds are fleshed out.

I thought the art was pretty good through the manga. The set pieces that are drawn are very enticing and suck you in to the moment. We get everything from some crazy ass gun fights, to martial arts matches, high speed car chases, bomb situations, battles of wits, wrestling, knife fights, I was surprised at how well these sequences were done.

I won't talk about the details of the plot considering much of the enjoyment you get from the manga will probably come from the unexpected events that occur.

The manga is not without its faults even though it does so many things well. Strangely enough my main grievance, besides my gripes with the mc Shuuya, with this manga only concerns one particular character. I won't elaborate that much in fear of spoilers, but damn did he practically almost single handedly ruin the ultra realistic elements of this manga , he has so many asspull moments that he infuriated me on multiple occasions. This is one great misstep by the author that if he handled this character better I think I raise my score of this manga a total 1 point. Don't let him discourage you from completing the manga, as I think the positives outway his negative element.

The good thing about this manga is it's only 119 chapters , so you can read in only a few days , well I'm a slow reader so it took me a couple weeks. I recommend this manga to anyone who is a fan of the death game genre .