Imagine a situation when you finally arrive at home after a hard day at work. You are tired and the only thing you wanna do right now is to eat something, take a bath and lie down on a sofa all evening watching TV. You cross the doorstep and you see a huge amount of money, around 1 milion USD and a card saying that you have to participate in the game where you have to either steal 1 milion form an appointed person or lose yours and fall in a huge debt. What would you do? The answer is obvious, go to the authorities and report a scam. Well, that what our protagonist did. Kanzaki Nao, a super honest girl, went to a lawyer and got herself fooled into playing a game she wanted to avoid. Fortunately in this deadly game she has a really powerful ally, an inteligent ex-con Akiyama Shinichi.

"Liar Game" is a psychological manga written and ilustrated by Shinobu Kaitani the author of "One Outs". That's why the manga has a peculiar style, which not everyone might like. I personally enjoyed his drawings and can't imagine this work with a diffrent art. There are moments where characters have really odd expression and I don't think that is purposeful though.

In LG you will meet various characters and many of them have their own motives, and well-written background. We got a trap, a con artist, a foolishly honest girl and even cult members. They are gonna participate in a game divided into stages. In every stage there will be a different game and every one of them is going to be harder and will require more and more effort. You would't even think how complicated could be a game of musical chairs or a minority rule (no, not a majority rule). The comic shows us how people behave in stressful situations and when the plan is not going how it was supposed to be. I think that the main goal of this manga is to show people how they should behave in a tough situations. How greedy people are and what could they achieve by trust and teamwork.

Liar Game is without a doubt the best manga I have ever read. The variety of characters, the complexity of games and the hidden agenda makes the manga attractive for everyone who likes psychological wars.

I hope I encouraged you to take a look at LG. I also hope that there are not many mistakes in the text cause Im not a native speaker and still learning a language.

To preface this review, there will be some small spoilers for Liar Game.

Going into Liar Game I had heard some good things, and considering how much I love Kaiji and how I enjoyed watching One Outs, I thought I'd enjoy it. Frankly, I was disappointed. In every area gambling manga should excel, such as conveying strong emotions in art, creative gambles, understandable characters, and unpredictability, Liar Game feels relatively average.

Plot:
The plot of Liar Game is relatively straightforward. Basically, people randomly get selected to take part in the "Liar Game", in which the goal is to lie and swindle people out of large sums of money. People enter the game through receiving a package in the mail, and as soon as they open it they have started the first game. However our protagonist, Nao Kanzaki, has complete trust in everyone and doesn't like to deceive people. It's pretty obvious how Kanzaki's personal philosophy goes against the point of the game, so there needs to be another main character to help her out. Enter Shinichi Akiyama, a man who was recently released from prison because he took down a multi-level marketing scam. With the help of Akiyama, Kanzaki progresses through the various challenges of the game while trying to save as many people as possible, even if it means taking on a massive debt of their own.

A big issue with Liar Game is how it focuses on making creative challenges instead of making creative solutions to those challenges. There'll be a really long explanation for a game which seems like it should be setting up for a creative solution, yet the payoff never happens. For example, at one point Akiyama is playing against a man at a game of poker with special rules. However, the other man can see the cards while the dealer is shuffling, so he always knows where to cut the deck to ensure he gets the best hand. What's Akiyama's solution to this dilemma? He just counts cards and wins. Everything feels so mundane and I just expect so much more. Both the man watching the cards being shuffled and Akiyama counting cards feel like the most obvious answer to what's going on, making it feel so predictable at times.

Characters:
There are some important side characters in the manga but for the most part I'm going to focus on the two main ones, Kanzaki and Akiyama.
Kanzaki seems like she could be a good character because of how her beliefs contradict everyone else, since most people are only in this game to earn money, but she feels so stale a lot of the time. The author never really does anything with her character, he just presents her as she is. We never see why Kanzaki is so selfless and is willing to put herself in hundreds of millions of yen in debt just to save some people she's never met, we're just supposed to believe that she does that because she's nice. Even after constantly getting betrayed again and again, she still feels the need to believe everyone completely, which I know is the point of her character but it just makes her look so stupid and it's frustrating to read most of the time. She has her moments, like how in the game of roulette she actually deceived someone, but these moments are few and far in between.
Akiyama is exactly the type of character that I can't stand. Nothing he does makes any sense and he always just seems to know everything. He helps Kanzaki out because...? They make a point at how Kanzaki reminds him of his mom and how she was too trusting and therefore he wants to help her, but is that really enough of a reason to risk millions of dollars on? Clearly as seen with Akiyama taking down an MLM scam and how he swindles people out of money during the Liar Game constantly, he doesn't seem to have many qualms about putting people in debt, so what reason does he have to help Kanzaki, who's a total stranger to him at the beginning of the series. Basically everyone he encountered in the Liar Game would be ruined if it wasn't for Kanzaki being the reincarnation of Jesus Christ that she is. When it comes to Akiyama's intelligence, he just knows way too much than he should. He'll make his "I have a keikaku" face and then setup a plan revolving around guessing what people will do. And as I touched on earlier, these plans aren't very interesting either. During the game of musical chairs he just knows that the observers will form a wall around one of the contestants so they can't reach their chair. It's not really a creative solution and he relied on that for winning the game. So what explanation do they give as to why Akiyama can know so much? Oh, he's a psych major. It's pretty laughable how far they push this psych major narrative, because as far as I know, being a psych major doesn't grant you the answers to the world's secrets.

Art:
The art was fine for the most part, but like most other things in this manga, it was bland.
There really isn't much emotion behind these drawings, and considering that people are basically gambling for there lives here, they really should be. Compare this to a moment in Kaiji, where at this point he's only gambling with 3 million yen instead of 300 million.
The heavy inking and close up on his face really emphasizes the sweat and expression on his face, making it so much more impactful.
Liar Game also occasionally has some awful paneling that makes no sense.
Here you can see Akiyama saying the exact same thing on back to back pages, yet the reaction it gets is completely different. I'm assuming he says the same thing twice to act as a summary, since the page on the right is the end of a chapter and the left is a start of a new one, but then it doesn't make any sense as to why the reactions of the crowd are so drastically different. It completely messes up the flow of the manga, because one of those pages is pointless as they convey the same information, Akiyama has a plan. The reactions being different is just the icing on the awful flow cake because now we don't know which reaction is the one that actually happened, and the reactions are different enough to where they most definitely did not happen simultaneously.

Conclusion:
Obviously, I'm not really a fan of this manga, but I don't particularly hate it either. Most of my review is harping down on the negative side because I was quite disappointed, but it's not to say I didn't get any enjoyment. If you're really curious and you still think you might really like this manga, go check it out, but if you're having doubts after reading my review, I recommend staying away.

Liar Game is a battle manga that features the unlikely partnership of Kanzaki, a woman who is extremely honest to a fault, and Akiyama, a genius who thwarted a corrupt MLM scheme on his own. The two of them participate in the "Liar Game," a series of competitions against others where the goal is to win as much money as possible while sinking the competitors into debt as a result.

Spoiler Free Review

Plot: 8/10
The main selling point of Liar Game is, of course, the battle of wits that occurs between the duo of protagonists and the varying antagonists. However, it's important to realize that these battles are a lot more realistic and tamer than what you may be expecting. If you want a thriller manga with intellectual duels on the level of something like Death Note or Akagi, you won't find it here. The plots and plans may not be what you thought of, but you'll never have your socks blown off or anything. What you will find though is incredibly realistic plans that match the personality of the character who schemed it up, making for an interesting dynamic where geniuses with their own individual flaws battle it out. I personally found that doing the battles in these ways could actually be just as interesting and dynamic as a battle where two super-geniuses continuously one-up each other for domination. I definitely feel as though each and every one of the battles within this manga were written well.

Characters: 9/10
As mentioned prior, much of the battles focus on what each character's specific personality brings to the table. Some characters specialize in emotional pandering, others in pure deduction skills, and the list goes on and on. The big thing to point out here is that all of these characters and their plans are believable. Another key factor that contributes to the high score here is character development. The main female lead starts out with many flaws and her transformation as a character is not fast, but the transformation does happen, and she does become quite formidable as the series progresses. Seeing Kanzaki go from zero to hero is one of the best parts of the manga, but it does take a long while to happen which isn't necessarily a bad thing, but I do know plenty of people who have dropped the manga because they can't tolerate the protagonist being as gullible and one dimensional as she is. If that is your reason for wanting to drop the manga, my advice to you is to at least wait until chapter 28 is finished before you go ahead and stop reading. I promise her development is worth it.

Ending: 6/10
Since this is spoiler free, I'll just say that the ending was fine. It answered the majority of the plot points and questions, and it overall felt like a satisfying conclusion to the story. I will say though that the ending wasn't life changing or mind blowing in any way, it was just a stock standard good ending.

Overall, Liar Game is a solid 8/10 manga, with the strong points being its character development and use of personalities and the only facets dragging it down being a lack of an amazing ending and a somewhat bland art style throughout. I'd heavily recommend this manga to most people.

Spoiler Add-ons

This is the last warning for anyone who does not want to be spoiled, as I plan on going through some of the character's decisions and the battles that take place. This section is for me to talk about some of the specific aspects of the manga that I really liked or didn't like.

As mentioned in the non-spoiler review, my favorite parts about the manga were the pacing and the characters, whereas my main issue with the manga was a lack of a compelling ending. Since I have scores and general thoughts in the non-spoiler review, I'll leave this section more for specific things I want to point out that made me decide on the score I went with.

Kanzaki never went back on her original intentions

For me, chapter 28 was one of the biggest moments in the entire story. The way I see it, there were a lot of different paths that could have been chosen here in regard to how Kanzaki's character could progress. The easy way out would have been for Fukunaga to take the L and have Akiyama and Kanzaki celebrate their victory. This could have led to a series where Kanzaki slowly becomes better and better at winning the games as the stakes get higher and the opponents get stronger. I was pleasantly surprised that the decision made was to stick to her guns and work to save everyone. For me, this was a tonal shift in the story that made the possibilities for the future a lot more interesting.

The power creep was handled perfectly

A lot of battle manga fall into a common trap where as the protagonist wins more fights, the enemies must become stronger in order to match. Take for example a series like Naruto or Dragon Ball. The main character is losing to the enemy, then the main character finds some crazy way to power up and win. In order to keep the series going, a new stronger enemy must come along that can beat what the protagonist's power up was. This creates a cycle where eventually a bullshit enemy must come up to then be beaten by a bullshit powerup of magnificent proportions that will eventually again be overpowered by another bullshit enemy and so on. There are a few good ways to avoid this kind of power creep. One Piece and Tower of God are great examples of this, and they use the same method of establishing the hierarchy beforehand. You know from the get-go who the strongest are and what they can do, and even when the main characters get stronger over time, there are constant reminders of just how large the gap is between them and the final boss. Liar Game uses a completely different way to handle the power creep issue, and it's an interesting way that I've never quite seen before. Instead of having the protagonist power up and utterly defeat the antagonist in order to introduce a bigger threat later, Yokoya, Fukunaga, and Harimoto are simply recurring characters that never actually get stronger or weaker, and are never actually completely overwhelmed by the protagonists. Fukunaga is shown from the start to be very smart and cunning, enough so that he can defeat the average players and Kanzaki, but never enough that he can beat Yokoya, Harimoto, or Akiyama. This dynamic never changes, and Fukunaga is given plenty of chances to show off that he's still just as smart at the end as he was in the beginning. In turn, Yokoya, Harimoto, and Akiyama are all presented as about equal, and it's shown as they continue to outwit each other over and over again. None of the three of them are unstoppable, but none of the three end up falling out of relevance at any point. By doing the battles this way, the focus shifts away from the power of the characters, and instead the new dynamic of each game. In my opinion, this was a perfect way to handle the power creep issue while still making every battle feel meaningful.

The ending felt a bit lackluster

If my understanding is correct, the result of the final battle is that Yokoya, despite having the power to "win" the game, chose to admit defeat because his philosophy of betrayal and domination was proven to be inferior to Kanzaki's philosophy of trust. On paper, I actually love this ending for a final battle. Yokoya even foreshadows his willingness to admit defeat with his references to Hitler's suicide being his biggest flaw, so it makes sense that Yokoya would be willing to admit defeat like that. I also found the explanation as to why this thought process occurred to be a good enough explanation that everything made sense. My big problem with the ending was the time that it took for this to happen. The entirety of this realization essentially occurs within 1 chapter, that being chapter 200. The final panel of chapter 199 is Yokoya refusing to admit defeat, and then he admits defeat by the middle of 200. I personally thought this was the one issue with the pacing, and I wish a little more had been done to make this ending as good as possible. Maybe a stronger showing of Kanzaki's influence leading towards nobody wanting to win through betrayal would have been nice, or Yokoya putting up one last show of defiance before admitting defeat. I also thought that a lot of the explanation of what the Liar Game actually is was a bit bland. It all made sense, but I found myself not really caring all that much. Rablais being Yokoya's father was a prime example of this. It's a cool reveal, but Rablais was never fleshed out enough, and neither was the dynamic between Yokoya and his father in my opinion, meaning that the reveal had very little impact for me personally. For something of that magnitude, I'd prefer to be completely taken aback instead of feeling indifferent. I also have the same complaint with the closing panels that reveal the Liar Game footage was taken off the internet. In theory, it's a great ending that shows how impossible it is to defeat the corrupt system that surrounds us. In practice, there was barely enough time given to build up enough tension for a decent payoff. I feel like if the last 2 chapters were expanded to 4 or 5 chapters, we could have gotten a great ending that defined the entire series. Instead what we got was a solid passable ending that I'll probably forget in a year or two.