Battle Royale: Battle Royale Ultimate Edition Volume 5 (v. 5) [Hardcover]

Product Details

Hardcover: 612 pages
Publisher: TokyoPop; Ultimate ed edition (February 10, 2009)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1427807574
ISBN-13: 978-1427807571
Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.1 x 2 inches
Shipping Weight: 2 pounds

Battle Royale Ultimate Edition Volume 5 (v. 5) [Hardcover]

Client Reviews

I have in no way read manga before. I picked this up after researching for new comics to read. I thoroughly enjoyed this series and very recommend it. It is gripping and intense...not for the faint heated. I agree with most of what the initially reviewer here stated, so I won't rehash the plot.
I will first just point out the parts I disliked. There is a lot of repetition. I got tired of Shuuya stupidly yelling all the time and the numerous conversations and flashbacks that went over old ground. In spite of this, I read somewhere that these manga are initially printed in Japan in these brief chapters (yes?) along with other stories, so I am guessing the repetition was needed to get new readers up to date and to remind old readers of essential back story. Plus the flashbacks and dream bits preserve big players `alive' for the reader immediately after their deaths. So that is decent. The over the leading slobbering and crying were a bit considerably, I felt. I wish I knew what the Japanese writing across so various scenes meant. Kiriyama was just too tough to kill, had that hovering jacket, and the inner ki bit was my least preferred plot device. My suspension of disbelief goes only so far. The `extras' included in the Ultimate Edition did not appear worth it. I do not care about drawings of guns. Significant deal.
On the excellent side, the author and artist greatly impressed me with their ability to make 50+ characters all recognizable, have distinct personalities, and have believable foibles. They definitely come alive and many of their deaths produced me cry. I thought the ending plot twists quite very good, except the death of one particular character at the end who I felt should certainly have lived. That death was as well predictable. The maps and grayed out character lists had been very valuable. I liked the character profiles.
Summed up...? Especially significantly worth your time.

It had to be a bit rubbish. That's what I always thought to myself when I saw Battle Royale talked about. I assumed this for the reason that it does not have an anime adaptation. What I did not know back then was the cause for this -- I thought it was simply because the series wasn't that interesting. I in no way suspected it was considering that what is included in the story is so extreme that it would have to be butchered to make the jump from manga to anime. There is just no way a series that requires somebody having raped while dying by a psychotic girl, with flashbacks to her becoming abused by her stepfather as a youngster appearing in the course of what was happening, could ever be faithfully adapted into an anime. As soon as I in fact read a description of the story and saw its high ratings I was sold -- it sounded like one thing diverse, and it most unquestionably is various from anything else I've encountered.
Battle Royale was almost everything I expected it be prior to buying it. Nothing was held back, almost everything was shown in graphic detail, there was lots of death and the situation the characters located themselves in is the type that no-one particular would want to be in...but it is also a scenario everyone is interested in from a voyeuristic perspective. A 1 in 42 chance of survival, where survival is only achievable if you kill many people you once believed of as friends... I wouldn't want to be in that situation, and I don't know how I'd deal with it if I was. The story painted a bleak (and accurate) picture of how humans act when there are no laws and only fear and lust governing their actions. I read manga to see what is as well extreme or not moe adequate for anime, so in lots of ways Battle Royale was best for me.
The story starts with 42 students, all aged 14-15, on a bus. The students believe they are going on a school trip. They talk, laugh and act like teenagers do. Then they all start falling asleep, only realizing when it was as well late that the bus driver had put a gas mask on and gas was becoming pumped onto the bus. They then wake up in a classroom, sat at their desks, with some kind of ring around their necks. The moment absolutely everyone starts to wake up, a individual who introduces himself as their new teacher walks into the space, calling himself Mr. Kamon. Following pausing to distress the confused students a little additional, he reveals to them that their class has been chosen for The Plan -- an event that takes location just about every year (and has done given that 1947 in the Battle Royale universe) exactly where a random 9th grade class is selected for an 'educational' battle to the death at a deserted place (the story of Battle Royale takes spot on a little island). Smiling, he tells them that if they do not kill they'll be killed, either by their classmates or by the ring around their neck that will explode if there is more than one particular individual left by the deadline.
Kamon is absolutely outstanding negative guy. He looks far more evil than any other character I've observed. He's the sort of character that readers will want to see die as painfully as humanly doable. If I were to describe his looks, I'd say he looks inhuman, like he was modeled from clay, and that suits him perfectly. This guy enjoyed seeing the suffering caused by strangers being place in a certainly hopeless circumstance, joking about how seeing the daughter of a renowned person get raped on reside television would increase the ratings and even going as far as to push the children into attacking him during the very first couple of chapters. With an evil grin and perverted tongue movement, he was pleased to inform one particular of the kids that, soon after the woman in charge of the orphanage he was staying at argued against he and his buddy getting taken, he gave her "hard adore" that she was only as well happy to supply immediately after "accurate persuasion." He got kicks out of watching him get so angry he cried, then blew his face off right after, fueled by pure hate, he charged at him. It's as well bad he appeared very small after the get started of the story, only speaking when giving updates just about every six hours...
The first volume was fantastic just because of Kamon. He explained the guidelines of the game to the class of 42 with a smile and content tone, showing a dead physique of a teacher (he was on the bus with the students at the start) who was against them taking element in The Program and killing a female student who was speaking whilst he was explaining the rules as an example of how little he valued their lives. He then sent them off alone, one particular by a single, onto the island to kill each and every other. They had been sent out with the belongings they had with them on the bus and one more bag, which contained a random weapon, map, watch, compass, water and bread. He created it clear that there would be no escape since the ring around their necks would explode if they tried to take it off and, if they nonetheless tried to escape understanding their head would be blown off at some point for undertaking so, then the ships around the island would shoot them in the water. He gave them no time to assume, throwing them out into the wilderness with the knowledge that they'd die in a couple of days if they weren't the last student alive on the island.
Trust is tough to come by when you are given the process of killing everyone else to assure your personal survival. If you had been in a class with 41 other individuals then you'd only be friends with a modest percentage, and out of these few how a lot of would you genuinely be in a position to trust? Most probably only a few. In that sort of circumstance the worry alone would trigger a number of to kill -- persons would become as well paranoid to trust even the friends they'd spoke to everyday at school. When a individual is presented with a option among death and friendship, the actual individual, who had place on an act in the past in order to get on in the globe, comes out. It is horrible to feel what worry and paranoia can result in a individual to do, is not it?
If there is one particular issue Battle Royale is then it's over the best. When people go crazy in this they have saliva coming from their mouths, their eyes are as wide as possible, they do the 'zombie walk', with their feet twisted inwards and their knees bent, and they act significantly more like animals than humans. The potential the artist has at depicting extreme emotions is a tremendous plus in a series like this, where the circumstance is hopeless and death seems all but inevitable, but he goes too far at instances, frequently showing brains, guts, breasts, dicks and every little thing else essential to make it close to impossible to adapt into an anime. Personally, I would've liked to see a much more realistic and much less exploitive art. But, on the plus side, the art is incredibly clear and almost all of the action sequences had been quick for me to stick to, which is not a thing I can say about a lot of the series I've read to date -- I frequently have to go over panels numerous times in order to know how a single panel flows from the next.
The over the leading comment also goes for the story at instances. At this point I can't say if it was anywhere close to as silly in the novel given that I haven't read up to that point but, though the novel has come across as somewhat much less insane so far, but there is a component of the story in the manga that was impossible for me to take seriously. I am referring to a scene where a guy runs away from an additional guy (a sociopath/terminator wannabee called Kazuo) just after getting shot, with his stomach hanging out, running into a warehouse. In the warehouse he has time to set the bomb he was developing before Kazuo enters, as nicely as the time to wrap duct tape about his stomach, and he then manages to kick the bomb at Kazuo AND jump out of the window as he entered the warehouse, with no obtaining shot. A truck then flies out of the warehouse as a result of the bomb blast, over the head of the guy who escaped by means of the window, and that is followed by Kazuo appearing out of the truck, unharmed. Kazuo then unloaded his machine gun on the guy who jumped through the window. And, as if to make it all a little alot more silly, the guy who had just had countless bullets inserted into him nevertheless had the strength to choose up his handgun in a single last try, soon after playing dead, at killing Kazuo. Right after all that, I wasn't confident whether to praise Battle Royale for getting a bit as well considerably or attack it for its distance from reality!
There are some other problems I have. Shuuya, the primary character of Battle Royale, is the most important difficulty. The manga artist had the annoying habit of turning Battle Royale into anything of a soap opera at times, showing needless flashbacks involving Naruto 2...err, Shuuya being a goodie-goodie, acting on his feelings rather of his brain, and helping his close friends back when he was at school (he got to know just about just about every very important character at school following helping them in some way). The artist was determined to highlight the fact that close to sufficient the complete cast liked Shuuya for acting brainless, just like in shounen stories where the key character does stupid points and gets loved for it. The flashbacks involving Shuuya saving the day did cease the moment all the characters had been introduced...then again, they were replaced with (normally chapter lengthy) dream sequences that showed Shuuya obtaining support from his deceased buddies. I hate it in anime when the plot advances via dreams/visualizations, and I hate it even far more when characters are shown speaking to individuals extended dead in an attempt to add character improvement... Would it have been so hard to just have Shuuya believe for a handful of panels as an alternative? There was no have to have for a large quantity of chapters, several reusing the identical art, to be implemented for repetitive conversations with the dead. I disliked Shuuya's character because, as nicely as becoming an idiot, the exceptionally existence of his character resulted in the story lasting ten+ chapters longer than it needed to.
Continuing on from what I mentioned in the above paragraph, the pacing wasn't perfect. The story of Battle Royale takes spot more than the course of a couple of days, and it lasts for 15 volumes. If you do the math then you will see the predicament currently -- a lot of chapters were designed but not a... Read more›