Btooom!

This review contains light spoilers. BTOOOM! has been a really wild ride. Admittedly it has its problems but you can get over them if you just suspense your disbelief for some of the things happening. I know its not important to the review but I really want to mention that I had to wait two years for every chapter to come out then I looked for this manga everywhere and I almost thought it was lost media, but thanks to the (for now) only other reviewer of the btooom manga I found it. Note that those circumstances may make me biased toward liking it. Art 8/10 An Interestingthing about this author is that he likes to draw faces really round to the point that they look like melons, but still I think he has skill. The backgrounds are outstanding, I really like how by the end of the last chapters the mangaka tells us about all the places he has been to to take reference photos. The guy has traveled half of the world just for the sake of making backgrounds. Absolute madman. Characters 9/10 I like it how in this manga almost every character on the island gets a backstory. Exploring the reasons of why they were sent there, their motivation and resolve really adds to the depth of the whole story. The only slightly annoying thing is Ryota's edgy phase (I won't go into detail and will refrain from spoiling you) but by the end of it I sympathized mainly to Himiko, because she did nothing wrong to deserve to be sent to the island and even her actions on the island were not criminal in any way. Story 7/10 The things that happen are pretty wild but sometimes come out as plain silly and that makes you a bit less invested in the story but still I think its really fascinating. The author tries really hard to redeem the characters and make us forgive them for the things they have done, which may come as annoying to some people but I still think he did a good job. Again use your suspense of disbelief because there are quite a few supernatural things happening. I don't know if the author is a fan of conspiracy theories or if its just a meme but I have never seen a manga or anime in which politics play such an important role to the story. So BTOOOM takes an original turn and has two endings, as the author puts it at the end of each ending, one is to pander to the readers and the other is the actual ending he wanted. I think the ending he wanted is more well thought out and feels like the real ending to the story but unless you are a heartless person you will feel really bitter reading only that, so... There is the another ending, I recommend reading this one last to feel better. Its not as well thought out but it makes you feel good which I think is more important. Moral of the story: Death to capitalists!!! The working class will rise up!!! Maybe I am redundant but I still want to say that it has been a wild ride. I get this feeling of sadness that the manga has ended and I no longer will be part of Ryota and Himiko's wild story of fighting for their survival with everything they've got. Miss you guys. 10/10

tl;dr: A manga with really good action, a messy but interesting cast, and really good art, though a really weak overarching story tying things together. This manga is one primarily centered around people playing a combat-oriented game in real life, and the manga does a good job at using that for really good action. Everything literally being a game allows for the implementation of various game like mechanics to spice things up. The bombs used as weapons are clearly designed to have their own strengths and weaknesses. There’s a radar like system that can track players that has intentional limits placed on it for the sakeof more exciting combat. And the game masters change up the rules on the fly at times, which changes things up and keeps things interesting. Since the plot is straight up that everything is being set up for interesting fights, it should be no surprise that as a result the fights were all interesting. They’re really thrilling with a lot of variety to them and a lot of interesting tactics. How the mechanics in play keep changing also results in the action never feeling like it’s getting repetitive or dull either and thus the pacing is great too. Furthermore, the cast of players in the game are mostly all interesting and add another layer to the action. The players in the game weren’t chosen at random, but rather the group chosen was one that especially had a lot of emotional and psychological baggage. There are also cases where players know each other. All of that effects how they participate in the game, and the manga does a good job of fleshing out their background and how it’s effecting their actions in the game. With that said, the cast of characters themselves and their stories independent of how it affected the action was a mixed bag. The protagonist Sakamoto and the heroine Himiko were pretty great characters. Sakamoto is somewhat of a mess, but a believable mess for the most part. Him being an action hero isn’t really all that realistic, but how the manga portrays his mental state and how he essentially suffers from and recovers from a mental breakdown as a result of everything going on on the island and grows a lot as a result felt pretty well written, even if it was intentionally ridiculous a lot of the time. While he has his issues, he’s also pretty reliable when it counts, and is thus overall pretty likable. Himiko’s character arc is centered pretty much entirely around her relationship with Sakamoto in her finding something to live and fight for. But the romantic development between the two felt pretty strong so that felt enough to make her a pretty decently developed and likable character. Everyone outside that was a mess. As mentioned, everyone on the island has issues and many have both done terrible things and do terrible things over the course of the manga. But it really doesn’t do a good job of tackling that at all most of the time. As a result, how characters are treated by other characters and by the story itself feels pretty inconsistent at times, especially towards the end. It was also really weird how a single character just had supernatural powers as there was nothing else supernatural in the manga at all. In terms of the overarching story regarding why they’re on the island playing the game in the first place, that was just all around pretty stupid. Writing a good and complex story for why a bunch of people were thrown into a death game isn’t all that easy so I am especially fond of when it is done well. This was not done well. It seems to try to be overly complicated and say things about society and such, but none of it really works at all. It works well in terms of justifying the various twists and changes that occur on the island that change up the game, but beyond that I didn’t find it all that interesting or enjoyable to read about at all. As a result, I suppose it shouldn’t be surprising that the ending, or rather endings, were pretty weak. This manga does something pretty rare in that it has two endings, Light and Dark, wherein they represent a good end and bad end respectively. Unfortunately, both felt pretty lacking, though strangely enough each felt lacking in different ways. Thus, even though I don’t think it was really all that possible to give this manga great ending, I think if it took the best of each ending it may well have been possible to produce one that was satisfying. As is, the ending was wholly unsatisfying either way. Still, the ride through was interesting and enjoyable enough, and this felt like a manga that’s much more about the journey than destination anyway so the lack of a solid ending didn’t detract from the manga all that much. The art was incredibly high quality from beginning to end with a good art style that showed off the action and character’s quite well. It also managed to have a couple really good character designs despite its setting not really allowing for all that much creativity.

I greatly enjoyed this series form beginning to end, and like other seinen manga like Gantz and Battle Royale, I found it to be great in all the ways I like. Very Good+ art (not Gantz great, but VG+), multiple engaging characters, huge complex storyline, just enough fan service, and a protagonist that starts off misguided but grows into a great character. I really liked Sakamoto and Himiko (I want figures!), and strangely identified with their conscience-driven nature throughout. The gaming parallels and adjustment to the real world made for some interesting commentary, and (almost) all the supporting characters had their stories fleshed out in waysthat I found interesting. 26+1 volumes of this and it was an emotional roller coaster ride that had very few catch your breath moments (I felt it slowed down a bit when Sakamoto first met Kaguya’s group), and I felt relieved and happy when it ended the way it did (in the light version). Yeah, it has two endings, and that’s ok too I guess - though some people seem to not much care for either way it ended. Complaints people have: 1. Kaguya’s abilities. Normally something like this would bother me in a storyline, but her full path to get to where she was and the part she plays in everything was just so well thought out. She didn’t give the characters she helped a ‘free pass’ from their past crimes - she gave them a new path to go in life (I.e. just because you make a horrendous mistake in life - even an unforgivable one - doesn’t mean you have to be a complete utter piece of shit for the rest of your life). They aren’t FREE of their past - yet they can now understand that they don’t have to continually repeat it. 2. The ending(s). Again, normally this sort of thing would bother me, and I would certainly prefer the ‘dark’ ending that he originally wanted, but I liked some of these characters so much I WANTED to see the light - preferred to see the light version. And I was very satisfied in the way Inoue tied all of the loose ends up. I don’t get the dislike for how it wrapped up - it was a very complex, multi-character storyline that seemed to tie everything up extremely well and in a way as to not leave too many questions. What happened AFTER is a different story. Personally, I would highly recommend this series. [Note] I DO like the Dark version ending as well.. it's actually more powerful. It's amazing that I can walk away from a series like this and appreciate either way it could've ended.

I wasn't invested in this manga at first, but as the story started to ramp up, I became interested. I was starting to enjoy myself. I would go as far as to give this a high 8 or even a 9. But then the ending happened, or, should I say, two endings. AND BOTH OF THEM ARE SO BAD I'm so conflicted, because the rest of the manga was good, but I cannot rate individual chapters, so I can't give this one a high grade Just like Death Note, this manga was very interesting, and had a lot of potential. But man did they fuck this up My advice? Readthis up to chapter 120 and then make up your own ending, because I swear to you, you can come up with a better ending than whatever the fuck the author did