The Spoiler-Free Part: Liar Game’s Appeal

The announcement of Liar Game’s anime adaptation by Madhouse was the first Anime announcement in quite a few years that got me truly excited. I don’t really keep up with the Anime scene but back when I still did,^[1] Kaitani Shinobu’s manga was immensely well regarded. Its influence is still felt today in the genre of survival game Manga and even shows like Squid Game.

The Manga’s original run started in 2004 when Death Note was taking off and had manga readers craving high stakes battles of wit. What set Liar Game apart was its sense of focus. The story had no supernatural gimmick and neither would it rely on spectacle or shock value.^[2] Instead, the manga was 100% committed to strategic mind games and lateral thinking during a series of more or less abstract games hosted by the “Liar Game Tournament Office”. The LGT Office is a shady organization that seems to specialize into tricking people into going into massive debt and offering them the chance to win their money back by participating in the eponymous Liar Game. Of course, the losers take on even more debt and if completely eliminated from the tournament, the organization will reclaim the money “using any means necessary”. That’s one hell of a premise but for manga standards it’s all fairly grounded. The same idea applies to the art, there’s nothing flashy going on but the linework is clean with expressive faces and mostly realistic designs.

All in all, Liar Game was the manga to read if you enjoyed logic puzzles or reading up on game theory and Kaitani Shinobu really knows how to make this stuff exciting. The fun part about classical game theory is that if the premise of people acting as rational agents acting for their own benefit is taken far enough you end up with optimal strategies that are increasingly counterintuitive and not really something any normal person would think of. Liar Game presents us with several characters like the deuteragonist Akiyama who do think ahead to ridiculous extends and come up with complex strategies but the story also challenges the expectation of selfishness inherent in this vision of “optimal” strategies. That’s where the main protagonist Kanzaki Nao comes in, an incredibly good-hearted college student, honest to a fault. Her role is to go against the Zero-Sum nature of many the games by acting selflessly, insisting on collaboration and fair distribution of prizes, and so on. This allows the manga to examine how the presence of even such a person changes the playing field for everyone else involved, although it seems that quite a few readers would have preferred a story purely about ruthless scheming.

Like many manga crazed teenagers in the mid 2010s, I was absolutely enthralled by Liar Game while it was publishing. I devoured the first half but put the manga on-hold at some point before the last third for reasons that didn’t have much to do with the work directly. I stopped because the scanlations were quite frankly trash. The low resolution, overfiltered abominations riddled with grammatical errors and typeset in comic sans were too much too handle. I figured a manga of this caliber deserved better, so I would just wait. I can be very patient.

It was the announcement of the Anime that finally motivated me to re-read and finish the manga. So imagine my initial surprise to find out that in the year 2026 the scanlations were as garbage as ever; No group ever re-scanned the chapters with proper QC and Tankobon raws and there was no licensed digital release either of course.^[3] Too bad, but this time I powered through. And I soon discovered the likely reason for the decline in interest during the intervening years. The Manga dropped off. Badly. The last third or so really can’t keep up the quality displayed in earlier arcs and the ending is best described as cheap and half-hearted. At least to me this was one of the bigger disappointments in quite some time, especially contrasted to the expectations the manga managed to generate. Was it better or worse than the second half of Death Note struggling to reach the highs of the first or the last Arcs of Attack On Titan choking on ideology? It’s hard to tell, but the feeling that you’re reading an actual masterpiece certainly faded.

The big question is: could and should the anime adaptation could fix the ending? In my opinion they should at least try, although how much would need to be rewritten is certainly up for debate. Not to mention that there’s a actually a sequel manga publishing right now,^[4] which clearly follows the manga ending, so if the anime changes things too drastically, it might get in the way of adapting the sequel at all (that is, if there’s any plans for that in the first place).

But that is all already assuming that the current season of the Liar Game anime will be a success. For now we’re in “safe” territory as far the quality of the story is concerned,^[5] but a manga like Liar Game could turn out to be quite tricky to adapt and there is a chance that the Liar Game anime straight up won’t work. many of the games featured in the manga are very dense in terms of information, often involving pages up schematics and calculations, and I could see an anime struggling with that. Spend too much time on the abstract stuff and parts of the episode could devolve into unengaging PowerPoint presentation, but skipping or simplifying details could go diminish the games’ appeal or render strategies unintelligible. It’s going to be a challenge but as things stand I’m fairly optimistic and the anime is definitely worth following in any case. 

The Spoiler Part: A Game-By-Game Critique

With my general impressions out of the way, I’d like to take some time and piece together a general overview of Liar Game’s rise and fall, especially the parts in which the struggle to retain the momentum the story has built up.

Explaining the rules and specific strategies used for each round would necessitate regurgitating half the manga, and since this is spoiler territory in any case, I’ll assume the reader’s familiarity instead, limiting myself to pointing out the most significant aspects of each game. And while I am aware that the story could be analyzed with a stronger focus on the characters and their individual motivations and journeys, it’s a part of the manga that I’ve always viewed as secondary to the games themselves.

Round 1

I would be lying if I said that the manga starts off with a bang. Due to the lack of formal rules in the initial “game” and a reliance on slightly questionable coincidences, the first few chapters are not exactly tightly executed. Akiyama’s overall tactic of employing psychological pressure and manipulation through fake letters works well, but what doesn’t is his’s final disguise. Are we truly meant to believe he can just freely alter the shape of his face or casually put on Hollywood-grade make-up to fool someone who already knows what he looks like? It’s too much to be believable, but luckily it seems the author seems to recognize this …because Akiyama being “a master of disguise” is never mentioned again.

Round 2: Minority Rule

This is where the manga really takes off. Kaitani’s style of creating elaborate schemes and strategies shines in elaborate, controlled environments rather than free improvisation and the Minority Rule game gives us a nice first taste of all that is to come. It’s not Liar Game unless you need a visual schematic to understand the strategies. But importantly, it’s not simply Akiyama steamrolling everyone, the emergence of different teams and the search for “Player X” always manages to keep the situation from becoming too predictable.

First Revival Round: Downsizing Game

A great game featuring several interesting twists and reversals but marred by the fact that the development that initially gets the game into the disadvantaged state for our protagonist is exemplary stupid. I usually don’t mind Nao being very trusting but blindly believing Fukunaga in particular who was deceiving and double crossing left and right during the first round is going too far even for me. When working out an agreement about putting down specific votes it would be an incredibly basic and reasonable request to fill out the L-Tickets together to make sure that everyone writes down the votes they are supposed to and Fukunaga would be unable to deny such a simple request without raising suspicions of foul play.

Aside from this early blunder, Akiyama’s ploy to turn the game around, which relied on “spending” more money than Nao has by delaying the Payment until a later point at which she will have enough, and manipulating the ensuing chaos of everyone trying to buy their votes back, was all quite well executed, even if it feels slightly off that no one would view the “don’t talk about our deal” stipulation at least a bit suspicious.

Round 3: Contraband Game

This game is in my opinion the pinnacle of the Manga, an impressively complex scenario in which Kaitani builds up several layers of tension and strategy that come together beautifully.

Not to mention the debut of an antagonist who can actually match Akiyama’s planning skills, but with a much more ruthless style. Yokoya might seem a bit too cartoonishly evil compared to the story’s usual tone but there’s real value of having someone so immediately slimy and hateable around, it does wonders for the emotional payoff when a plan succeeds.

What sets this game apart on a technical level, and what so many others fail to replicate later, is how many conflicts take place on different scales. Even if one doesn’t keep up with the big picture standing of how much money is in which countries’ bank account(s), there are still effective stakes and potential for interesting tactics in the individual showdowns between smugglers and inspectors, in subverting Yokoya’s dictatorship, in flushing out spies, etc. Every interaction feels like it has direct consequences, the amount of implicit rule interactions that are exploited during the game about how the ATMs and cards work is insane and really turns the way the game is played on its head even more elegantly than in the previous rounds. In summary, pretty much perfect.

Second Revival Round

Out of all arcs in the manga, this two volume revival round is the one that feels the most like filler. The decent, entertaining kind of filler however. The games are short and relatively simple. Our protagonists don’t get too badly cornered, and all opponents are one-off characters that exit the story completely after this round. Given these circumstances, it’s unsurprising that nothing here comes close to the intensity of the Contraband Game. Overall the round works fairly well for what it is, but struggles a bit in the end.

24-Round Russian Roulette

A decent game that highlights how much of a fun character Fukunaga is. Estimating the location of the bullets in the revolver by figuring out a cue for the cylinder’s weight distribution puts the solution more into the realm of generally thinking outside the box rather than complex tactics, but since the round basically acts as a breather after the sheer complexity of the Contraband game, I’m not complaining. Besides, it’s simply fun to watch Fukunaga’s not very bright opponent get absolutely clowned on.

17-Card Poker

Fun, but has a lot stuff going on that’s just a bit to convenient. Kikuchi just learns to follow the ace perfectly within a few minutes, even with a great reaction time, that’s a bit much. The dealer always does a perfect shuffle every time without messing up once, which could have ruined Akiyama’s strategy and doing so couldn’t even be called cheating on the part of the dealer since it would still be a proper shuffle, a fairer one even. So the scenario didn’t fully convince me, unless the deterministic order of the cards was an intended feature of the game that the LGT office implemented to make it not actually about chance. But we don’t know if that’s the case; Because the games were rather simple they were not accompanied by the usual constant Greek Chorus commentary by the hosts, so we got no hint about what was intentional and what wasn’t.

Stationary Roulette

If I had to pick the moment in which I started to worry that the story could run out of steam, it would have to be this game. The rules were very simplistic and the tactics employed disappointing. A strategy as basic and immediately predictable as pretending to have an obvious tell when lying has no business being the dramatic conclusion of an entire round at this stage in the story. It’s the kind of elementary double cross that feels out of place at any point past the first arc or so, even if it was meant to reflect Nao’s evolution as a character.

Round 4

Preliminary: Pandemic Game

The feeling I had when reading this game, was that the author planned out the ending of physically blocking the examination rooms, which was indeed a neat twist, and then had a hard time filling the rest of the time with anything actually clever.

It starts with Yokoya steamrolling the practice round in a way that seemed entirely preventable, if anyone bothered to check their status at any point. Sure, the round was quite short, but even with only a few minutes to go it’s not like using the examination rooms takes more than a few seconds. It’s that odd dichotomy where characters are either completely trusting or completely paranoid. Barely anyone agrees to a deal and then double checks all the steps just to be sure, even though there’s almost always some catch. As the Rounds go on, these sort of tricks not only get repetitive from a narrative standpoint they also get ever harder to swallow when (unlike in the first revival round) all participants involved have made it through several other games as well. Similarly, Akiyama’s balls-on-a-stick trick was almost insultingly shallow. Even with all the “psychological setups” no one suspects that he could just be… slightly moving the stick? It’s the sort of magic trick that baffles a 10 year old and it feels inconsistent that we are sometimes meant to believe that the secondary characters are smart enough to follow along with Akiyama’s strategies and reliably execute their parts in the scheme, while at other points they are dumb as rocks.

The other disappointment with the strategies for the Pandemic Game is that no one ever managed to figure out a way to contact secretly. Akiyama simply states “the watches emit a bright light” at one point and then no one even tries to figure out a way around this. I don’t buy that. It’s just a light on a watch after all, simply covering it with your other hand, wrapping it up in a sleeve or other kind of cloth,^[6] should definitely dim the light enough to be worth attempting. This is a fairly obvious lapse that the audience is simply meant to ignore, a big step down for a Manga which previously featured strategies like disassembling a speaker to use its magnet to mess with a credit card.

Musical Chairs

The longest game in the manga, lasting over three volumes. It seems this arc is still fairly well regarded but while it was still entertaining with some smart developments, I’d argue the cracks were definitely starting to show at this point. There were some good ideas here, but it overall dragged a bit. Firstly, I think the author put too much stock in the initial “twist” that the game appeared to rely on strength and athleticism… but it mostly didn’t. I doubt anyone fell for it, this is Liar Game after all, and it wouldn’t be on-brand to have the solution be “gotta go fast”.

A promising highlight of the arc is the introduction of our next antagonist, Takashi Harimoto the cult leader. Previous games have shown just how powerful collaboration between even just a few players can be, and Harimoto’s cult providing him with an immediate 4 player alliance with near zero risk of betrayal was an incredibly effective way of putting all other players at a meaningful disadvantage.

The main issue that I had with the rules of the game is that the game did not have potential for big swings in momentum. The only way to get disqualified is by not having a chair. Only one chair is removed per round, a constant and steady process. Compared to the downsizing game where dozens of critical votes could shift in a single turn, or the Contraband game where, even though smuggling itself was limited to 100.000 yen per turn, in reality billions could change hands within a short amount of time, Musical Chairs mostly lacks the potential for such volatile changes. Sure, you can take control of the voting process but no matter how strong your alliance is the only resource anyone actually cares about (chairs) can only be diminished one at a time, which is a very limited amount of pressure to exert.^[7] If we take into account that even disqualified players can still influence the game and execute strategies while acting as Extras, the stakes start to feel fairly low, especially since most characters we care about are explicitly not invested in becoming the last man standing themselves. 

All these factors combined lead to a game where there was a lot of scheming and vote manipulation going on, often with quite clever developments, but with very few tactics and twists seeming immediately pivotal or decisive until the very end of the game when teams start actually running out of chairs completely, but that’s a little bit too late for such a long game.

Another weakness was unfortunately Yokoya. At this point in the story he completely lacked the threatening presence he had during Contraband. No one believes he’s an invincible genius anymore, he doesn’t play any sort of twisted psychological games with his teammates, he’s just guy who can think ahead No.3. He still works as an Antagonist, he’s just not an especially interesting one.

Which brings us to the conclusion of the round, and yes, pivoting back to deciding the game on physical strength, after mostly dismissing it during the start was an truly unexpected and nicely dramatic development. The downside of winning by physically blocking Yokoya from where he wants to go is that this is the second game that is mainly won by physically blocking Yokoya and that just felt a bit repetitive and lead to the ending being not nearly as cathartic as it could be, even though Abe’s little arc was fairly satisfying.

Third Revival Round: Bid Poker

The overall game is fine, it did not particularly resonate with me but that’s just because I’m not that deeply into Poker. It’s probably much more engaging if you have a better sense of who could strengthen his hand using which cards beyond what the characters point out. But the problems lie more with the character drama than with the game progression. Revealing Kimura as the true mastermind behind Harimoto’s cult honestly feels like a twist for the sake of having a twist and doesn’t actually benefit the story at all, while also sidelining Abe’s development. I suspect that the author decided that a complete betrayal by Abe would be too predictable at this point, but Harimoto just changing his mind and dropping out was cheap and uninspired.

I guess more than the game the most disappointing part of the Bid Poker arc is the state it leaves the story in. Harimoto is simply gone without having ever really reached the potential he initially promised. Fukunaga is thrown out of the game off-screen and is indeed completely written out until the final chapter. That Yokoya knew what game was going to be played does generate some intrigue but it also comes off as being close to him straight up cheating. Overall that’s not a good look for where the story is heading.

Final Round

Now we reach the final part of the manga, where things really go south. I’m going to skip “Collective Ghost Leg Lottery” to determine the lot order for the human auction despite it technically being a game, as it’s just too simple and short to really matter.

Preliminary: Human Auction

Surprisingly, what looked to be a rather simplistic game turned out to be fairly interesting due to how the different outcomes players wanted to achieve, like making specifically the richer players drop out whether they plan to or not. Yokoya managing to seperate Nao and Akiyama into different teams was nice for drama (too bad the payoff was somewhat underwhelming) and Akiyama using his bids to take control of the last phase by threatening to deny the other teams access to himself was a great reversal, and in hindsight a last glimpse of creativity in the tournament, as all of this was a prelude to an incredibly disappointing finale.^[8]

Records of the 4 Kingdoms

The final game of the manga is unfortunately an embarrassment. The game is extremely inflexible, there’s so little depth to the rules that the tactics are increasingly limited, which player acts as the boss or general really doesn’t seem to make much of a difference and the overall style feels extremely silly and gimmicky. There’s only one immediately obvious fact about the scenario: If the other teams gang up on you, it’s a loss no matter what you do. Cooperation being a key to victory is nothing new, so this is already an incredibly predictable tactic, but at least the games in earlier rounds were constructed in such a way that the rules did not make this obvious and discovering the exact manner of cooperation needed required some thought. No thought is needed for this game. Step 1: team up. Step 2: keep blasting. That’s all that happened, and there was just nothing to negotiate about besides “how about blasting someone else, maybe?”, no hidden tricks no alternate ways to use resources, everything fell completely flat (oh, who would have thought that Yokoya would figure out that Nao was communicating with Akiyama, what a “twist”…), even before the completely inane conclusion which brings us to the last section of this critique...

The Annoying Ending

So how could the final stage of the Liar Game Tournament end? I don’t think anyone would guess that it would end with the players finding a bizarrely obvious loophole in the rules that allows them to basically refuse to play, and then the boss of the LGT shows up and tells them “Oopsie, you sure got us! Liar Game is cancelled, everybody can go home now.” I sure didn’t. So the game ends and it turns out that Akiyama’s goal to take down the LGS office is superfluous because it turns out there was no shady organization in the first place but a benign and morally conscious social experiment that would be broadcasted on the internet, not for profit, but to make a political point about how people being capable of cooperation.

Even if this ending wasn’t just dumped onto the reader in a very sudden final chapter, it would not have worked. The general political messaging is shallow and self-important in the worst possible way and doesn’t even really make sense. Sure, there was an element of social commentary to the story from the start, but it worked best when integrated into the game itself, such as when the premise of the Contraband game was likened to South and North Korea and then the North Country actually does turn out to be an totalitarian hell. But when there’s nothing clever underpinning the message and it’s just the story preaching to the reader, it starts to feel a little condescending; We can’t make our minds about what we take away from the Liar Game, the “correct” interpretation is simply asserted. Not to mention that I’m not even convinced that the outcome of the Liar Game truly that much of an inspiring revelation. It’s not like anyone would refuse to believe that people like Nao exist, rather the question is what it would take for such a person to make a difference. And in this regard I’m not sure if the Liar Game Tournament paints an especially favorable picture, since in fact most of the participants did act selfishly, didn’t trust anyone else, and often had to be tricked into collaborating. That doesn’t seem like the sort of revolutionary takeaway that the oppressive powers-that-be would feel the need to hide at all costs, so the final “shock” that somehow the Liar Game got deleted off YouTube by some shadow organization comes off as pretty silly. Again, I am of the opinion that the adaptation could alter the ending, at the very least turn into something a bit more measured. But we’ll see what will end up happening.

In the meantime, Kaitani Shinobu’s other completeted long-running manga, One Outs, which seems to combine Liar Game-esque mind games with baseball of all things, looks like it could be worth a shot (I’ve not heard anything bad about its ending either). His other on-going manga Kamo no Negi ni wa Doku ga Aru - Kamo Kyouju no "Ningen" Keizagaku Kougi^[9] is also currently getting a translation and I expect the Liar Game adaptation to generate a fair amount of interest for these works.