LIAR GAME

MANGA

STATUS
COMPLETE
VOLUMES
19
RELEASE
January 22, 2015
CHAPTERS
201

DESCRIPTION

Wishing she would live up to the ideal, Kanzaki Nao's father named her thusly for “honesty”. Nao has more than lived up to her father's wishes--even exceeding them and earning the label of "a foolishly honest girl". This makes Nao the least qualified candidate for the high stakes 'Liar Game', where winning requires deceiving the opponent out of their money and losing means receiving massive debt. However, that doesn't stop a box containing a hundred million yen in cash and a card informing her of her participation in the game from arriving at her doorstep, nor does it stop her from being promptly tricked out of the entire sum of money. Upon hearing that a genius swindler, responsible for the bankruptcy of a major corporation, is being released from jail, Nao goes to the swindler, Shinichi Akiyama, to enlist his help. With that, the two are drawn into the dark, greed-filled, and deceptive world of the Liar Game.

CAST

Shinichi Akiyama
Nao Kanzaki
Norihiko Yokoya
Yuuji Fukunaga
Kouta Akagi
Leronira
Takayoshi Miura
Takashi Harimoto
Kei Kimura
Artier
Mika Mikamoto
Solario
Forli
Silien
Kikuchi Shou
Alsab
Yukiyo Abe
Teruo Tanimura
Kurifuji
Rabelais
Takahiro Kikuzawa
Nearco

CHAPTERS

RELATED TO LIAR GAME

Cover Art for LIAR GAME roots of A: Kaitani Shinobu Tanpenshuu

MANGA MysteryLIAR GAME roots of A: Kaitani Shinobu Tanpenshuu

REVIEWS

Stanczyk
100/100
A great piece of work
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.
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dede
50/100
With how exciting and creative gambling manga can be, Liar Game feels bland in comparison
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.
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whathesaid
82/100
Good setting and charming characters let down by a few flaws.
As an avid fan of death game-esque media, I went into Liar Game with big expectations.
[Minor spoilers ahead]
The setting is simple: Young and naive Kanzaki Nao gets caught in a trap that could leave her in a situation worse than death. The only way for her to survive is to win. But winning implies that everyone else will lose, and that is the last thing that Nao wants. Luckily for her, she meets ex-convict Akiyama who goes on to accompany her in the game. Her seemingly foolish but unbreakable resolve compliments Akiyama’s cool-headed wits, and the two work together to get what they want and win.

They go from round to round battling against various personalities in games that combine the traditional and the modern. Every game is something we’ve all seen before, like poker or musical chairs, but the mangaka adds a twist to them that keeps them fresh and innovative. And no matter how complicated the rules or the mind games get, the mangaka makes it a point to make it easy for the reader to follow by adding summaries or detailed explanations during and after the chapters.

And underneath it all lays a veil of mystery that covers the entire narrative until everything clicks into place. The pieces come together periodically until the reader is left with a worthy conclusion.
[Major spoilers ahead]
If you are looking for a manga with a strong female lead, Liar Game might be a questionable choice. Kanzaki Nao is a dynamic character but she develops slowly. She starts off the manga, for a lack of better word, incompetent. She needs Akiyama to advance. As the manga progresses so does she, getting moments where she makes a change in the game and resolves problems on her own. These moments, however, are few and infrequent and therefore she never outshines Akiyama. The recurring exclusion of Nao in the important battles of the manga is a weakness of Liar Game.

To trust people is to doubt them.

Akiyama is, in animanga terms, overpowered and that is the point. He beats his opponents using impressive mental gymnastics but the downside to that is that he frequently takes the spotlight away from the lead and the side characters. Nonetheless he is a major factor in providing the page-turning solutions that keep the reader wanting more.

The other major factor in keeping the intrigue of the story are the antagonists. Liar Game has three main antagonists: cunning bombshell Fukunaga, manipulative cult leader Harimoto, and father-issues having Yokoya. And the antagonists is where the manga truly shines. The mangaka takes his time developing each antagonist by giving them a clear objective, an intimidating skillset, and a unique storyline. The antagonists provide the main reason why Akiyama’s victories seem that impressive: because he got those victories against them.

With such an intricate setting and a cast of three dimensional characters, there is only one place where the mangaka could go wrong: the pacing.

The pacing is Liar Game’s weak point. Having three main antagonists in a 19 volume manga means that the story progresses very slowly, sometimes too slowly for it’s own good. The beginning is executed well, with the battles against Nao’s homeroom teacher and against Fukunaga resolving quickly. Once Yokoya gets introduced, he is the antagonist even in the rounds he doesn’t participate in. This makes a couple of rounds seem like filler because the only thing Nao and Akiyama do is anticipate Yokoya, brushing off the opponents they are currently facing. Fortunately, the manga picks itself back up with the round(s) of musical chairs and the three-way battle between Akiyama, Yokoya, and Harimoto. Once the pacing recovers, it keeps the momentum all the way to the end.

The art of Liar Game is flavorless. The composition is average and the backgrounds are bland. The characters from afar (which is 70% of the time) are often drawn sloppily, but the close-ups are much more attractive. Another one of the mangaka’s strong points when it comes to the art is his ability to portray emotions, as shown below.

a character looking both bland and impressive in consecutive panels

the mangaka depicting shock

Liar Game is a rollercoaster through and through. But if you like what you see, I urge you to extend a hopeful hand to it, for it will grab it, take you along for a wild ride and leave you feeling satisfied.
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