Volumes 10/10 (Complete), In Print
Shounen
Genre: Fighting, Videogames, Life or Death Game, Romance, Ecchi
Summary: Mikami Shigeru is crazy about video games- playing them, studying them, creating them. One day while buying research for his newest game he accidentally drops his newly bought games and when he picks them up, finds an extra disk he didn’t buy. He touches it and is warped onto the game “Not Alive”.
At first he thinks it’s just a game, but he soon finds out that his Avatar partner, a short, athletic girl named Kyouka Amamiya, actually used to be human. If a player is defeated, their Avatar partner dies and the player becomes an Avatar. They must win the game, working together, to be freed from it. Can Mikami and Kyouka survive to discover the mysteries behind the game?
Review: This series was actually way better than I expected. From the cover art it looks like a dating simulation game or an ecchi harem manga, but actually it’s a fighting strategy game. And very late into the story, it becomes a romance too.
The Major Arcs:
First Arc 1-4: Regular Game Arc
Second Arc 5-7: Cheating Arc
Third Arc: 8-10: The Final Battle
First Arc 1-4: This is the beginning Arc that introduces the rules of the game and the first few battles. The fights are interesting thanks to the fact Mikami is an expert strategist, but otherwise feels like a fairly average Shounen manga.
Second Arc 5-7: I had mixed feelings about the Cheating Arc. On one hand I really felt like the whole game concept was already interesting on its own and didn’t need to be changed up. On the other hand, it is actually all foreshadowing for the ending. In hindsight I think it was fine.
Third Arc 8-10: The Final Battle Arc was really good. The fighting strategy ended up being an impressive battle of wits, and I always like to see winning from strategy over sheer power or gimmicks.
This series really started out as kind of generic, but it started to gradually improve as it went along. The creativity in the different strategies in the fights kept me reading in the beginning, but the main characters got more compelling, and the villains weren’t bad either. And later introducing other characters working together to clear the game added an unexpected layer of depth as well.
There’s some nice character arcs for both of the main characters. Even though the game is everything Mikami has ever dreamed of, he starts to realize that games aren’t everything, and he actually starts to care about other people. And Amamiya, too- she starts off so passive and depressed that Mikami mistakes her for an AI, but she eventually recovers her will to fight and her reason for living.
Lastly, the ending was fairly good. It was not exactly what I expected, but I was happy with it. I think most will enjoy it.
Recommended: All in all, a very solid Shounen fighting manga with a lot of videogame strategy and love for videogames. There’s also a short funny extra chapter at the end of each volume with a bonus stage where they play a different genre of video games, all based on classic games.
Not Recommended: Despite the Dating Simulation game cover artwork this has almost nothing to do with Dating Sims. Also I expected Ecchi Harem, but there is only really one main couple in this series. If you’re hoping for love triangles then this will be disappointing.
Age Rating: PG13: There’s a decent amount of Ecchi artwork in this series mostly thanks to a lot of random pin up like art extras in the manga, but it's mostly pretty mild. Also a good amount of violence but not particularly graphic.
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