Summer 2021 First Impressions – Battle Game in 5 Seconds

Streaming: Crunchyroll

Episodes: TBA

Source: Manga

Episode Summary: Akira Shiroyanagi has become bored with life. He excels in both school and gaming to the point that he no longer feels the thrill of being challenged. That all changes when, while on his way to school one morning, he’s randomly attacked by a rather frightening man with animal-like reflexes and strength. Using some clever manipulation, Akira lures the attacker to an environment that allows him to rig up a trap and defeat him. But his victory is short-lived, as he’s approached by a purple-haired cat girl named Mion and shot on sight.

Akira awakens in an unfamiliar location, where he several other people are informed by Mion that they’ve been randomly-selected to participate in an experiment. To society, they’re good as dead. Now they’re ordered to serve as a focus group to test the various special abilities that they’ve been granted. Akira is granted a particularly odd ability, where his power is whatever he can get his opponent to believe it is. It’s something that’s incredibly difficult to use, but if anyone can make use of it, Akira can.

Impressions: The title of this series refers to the fact that the participants in the titular battle game are given only about 5 seconds of warning before their special handcuffs are released and they’re forced to fight an opponent. This twist on the death game format implies a very stressful, tense scenario in which anything could happen at any moment. In practice, however, this first episode mostly serves as a showcase of Akira’s singularly-focused personality and anti-social attitude, which unfortunately doesn’t hold a lot of appeal for me.

I’m honestly not very taken by the whole “death game” genre to begin with. While I can step back and see the value of examining how the best and worst parts of human nature tend to manifest in these types of scenarios, I find that most examples of death game stories don’t seem all that interested in seriously talking about the human implications of what’s occurring between the characters. There’s instead a focus on abject cruelty, violence, and the appeal of not having to take responsibility or face real-world consequences for killing or hurting people. I don’t condemn that kind of entertainment (I’ve played my share of violent video games in my time), but I’m at the point in my life where I don’t personally see the appeal in bloodletting for no concrete reason.

Unfortunately, taking away the traits that make the genre what it is doesn’t leave one with very much to talk about. Akira’s hyperfocus on gaming (and in a related sense, treating his life and schoolwork as a game he’s already too good at to care about) doesn’t necessarily help him appear interesting or endearing (and this is coming from someone with the tendency to hyper-focus and put hobbies above other interactions). I think this show is just not for me.

Pros: I like that the various experimental subjects seem to be drawn from many different walks of life. I think in survival situations, you can never quite assume who’ll be the competent ones simply by examining their different occupations.

I had a discussion with some friends a while back about Snow White With the Red Hair, during which a criticism one of them had was that Shirayuki, the heroine, seemed relatively helpless throughout the second half of the series. I’ve personally gotten pretty passionate about my defense of this point in particular, because despite getting into several scrapes that she can’t work her way out of entirely on her own, I’d argue that she’s not helpless, she’s just differently-skilled in the first place and one of the things she needs to learn is to rely on others. She’s not trained in swordplay (or ninja skills, in Obi’s case) like the other characters. Her strength is as an apothecary and someone with high emotional intelligence, which manifests and proves helpful in various other ways throughout the series. Speaking as someone with very little physical strength or prowess, but also as someone who deeply cares about others, I’d like to think that people I know would see me as worth having around during the zombie apocalypse even if I were only knitting them a sweater instead of constantly lopping heads off.

The different people we see during this episode seem to visually run the gamut – strongmen, delinquents, students, sex workers – and while having a handle on swordplay or manifesting an arm cannon might seem like clear advantages, physical power isn’t the only form of power around. In that sense, I like the (possibly inadvertent) message the series is reflecting. I just wish it weren’t in the service of people simply fighting one another.

Cons: While I’m admittedly a fan of kemonomimi, that comes with the caveat that those sorts of characters have to have a tolerable personality for me to like them. Mion is not one of those likeable characters.

Unfortunately that’s a criticism I have of all the characters we’ve met so far as well – they feel either very one-note (not the most elegant critique since we’re pretty early on in the story), or come across as already maladjusted people who might benefit too much from the no-consequences nature of this violent scenario.

Content Warnings: General violence, with some blood and gore (this includes a character being stabbed with a metal pipe, and other characters being shot so hard that chunks of their bodies fly off).

Would I Watch More? – As I said above, I don’t this this is for me. I’m open to watching a “death game” series if it hits me right, but I think the genre itself has problems to work out (though I suppose if those traits appeal to some viewers, then they might not really be problems).