Liar Game

Despite the TLDR (or rating), I actually like this anime. I keep coming back every week, it has a great plot, and I even like a lot of the characters…except Nao. I hate Nao. She is the one thing about the entire show that I can’t stand. Don’t get me wrong, I understand her character is supposed to be honest to a fault, so in a situation where she’s forced to lie or be deceitful, she struggles and will ultimately choose the morally correct option. Nothing wrong with that. My issue with her is typically in-between games.

Situations like winning the prize money and then giving it away to the person who was willing to ruin your life and leave you in debt with your hospitalized father. Like. Come on. Also, at some point I feel like the father kinda disappeared. I wonder how he’s doing. Anyway, Nao also finds herself in situations where she’ll be perfectly fine as long as she doesn’t do one thing. Nao is guaranteed to do that one thing. Everytime! She was free and clear and was all “I’m gonna join the game anyway to help you even though I lost the other two games and you saved me last second”. How helpful do you think you’ll be when you’re 0-2?!

Aside from Nao aggravating my soul, Akiyama has been a pretty cool character. He’s like this mysterious, elite con man who seems to always have a plan to get out of every situation. It’s cool that he’s intelligent enough to bail himself or his team out of danger and I love trying to guess how he’ll be able to manipulate the rules to win. It’s one of the main reasons I keep coming back to this anime.

But you know what made Death Note so tense and dramatic? The fact that Light could make mistakes and get caught.

I don’t get a sense of that here. Even during this whole thing with the money smuggling game, we have Yokoya who seems to be an even match with Akiyama, but you just have this feeling that Akiyama is not going to lose. He doesn’t even appear concerned when his team makes mistakes. He just calmly moves to the next plan. I’m not expecting a full over-the-top, explosion like Fukunaga, but at least appear concerned that you might lose.

Anyway, this episode went about like every other game. Nao (and team in this case) appears to be losing and Akiyama pulls a magic trick and is all “ha ha ha! I had you beat the entire time!” as he spends half the episode explaining how he fooled everyone. I really want to enjoy this anime because I haven’t seen a good, suspenseful anime in a long time.

I will say after this episode, I feel like they finally have a legit reason to keep playing. I get that’s what Nao was trying to do in the Loser’s game, but why she thought she’d win solo after heavily relying on Akiyama this entire time is beyond me. We’re going into another game with a real goal on the line and Akiyama has sort of taken over as the lead character, so I have faith Liar Game will pick back up before the season ends. I’ll keep watching for now. I just…I just hate Nao.