"Btooom!" starts from the perspective of Ryouta Sakamoto, a 22-year-old who spends his time playing a PC game called Btooom, and is the number one player in Japan and ranked number ten worldwide. "Btooom" is a first person shooter style game where players fight against each other using only bombs and using sonar to track their opponents' positions. Ryouta and his friends are in a high ranking team that are well known across the servers of the game.
However, despite being well liked and popular in-game, Ryouta is an unemployed shut-in that lives with his mother. His mother begs him to find a job on a regular basis, which is what fuels much of the hostility between them. Despite her attempts at pushing him to advance in life, he is set in his ways and claims he will get the job he wants the most, working as a game developer. (I believe it was game developer, I can't remember entirely as it has been awhile since I've watched.)
After an evening of arguing with his mother, he awakes to find himself hanging from a tree in an unknown jungle, with no one else around. All he has with him is his bag, which contains food he bought the previous evening in it, a bag full of mysterious cubes with buttons on them, and a strange crystal embedded into his hand. While exploring the island, he tests one of the cubes and realizes that they are bombs and plans to leave them behind out of fear. However, he quickly changes his mind when he encounters another man on the island, one whom immediately attacks him with his own bombs. Ryouta hauls ass away and tries to reason with the man, but soon realizes that he has no choice but to fight back. Cue several wasted bombs, as he struggles to realize that the bombs he has are on a timer, and not ones that explode on impact like the other man's. Now, I don't know about you...but if I had mysterious little bombs on me that had an LED display with a number counting down when I pressed the button on it, I would kind of assume they are timed, but this took Ryouta a ridiculous amount of time to realize. I can understand that he's just a regular Joe whom was thrown into a stressful situation with no training and whatnot, but he tested one earlier in the episode, so it shouldn't have been so hard to figure out. Either way, our hero eventually figures out what he's doing and fights back, reluctantly.
He uses his experience in the game world to battle his opponent, with moderate success. After defeating his first opponent, Ryouta is left questioning whether he is willing to kill to survive. We watch as he struggles to come to terms with his situation and attempt to band together with others on the island to find a way out - all the while learning new tricks and strategies along the way. Along the way, he makes a few allies and many enemies. Among the people he allies himself with are Himiko, a blonde haired, blue-eyed high schooler with a serious distrust towards men, and Kiyoshi Taira, a middle-aged man with a generally laid back personality. Most of the series is spent following their journey toward escaping the island alive and unveiling the how and why they were chosen to take part in this deadly real-life version of "Btooom".
Plot: 4/5
I really enjoyed the pacing of the story. We get to see and feel the struggle each of these characters are going through and have gone through previously. Sure, we've seen the idea of "real-life death games" before, but this one made it more about the characters than the death. It was refreshing to see a show like this that was actually more emotional than it was gore-porn. I did feel that they may have went a little too far in how much of a victim they made Himiko at times, but it did help to add to the helpless feeling she always had. For such a short anime, I do feel that they packed it with as much story as possible, though the ending did leave a bit to be desired. The series itself kept a somewhat realistic pace, whereas the actual ending felt rushed and thrown in your face. This could be due to lack of funds, but I'm not entirely sure. It seemed like it would have fit much more comfortably in a twenty-six episode anime rather than thirteen. My only semi-complaint would be about how often it seems Ryouta is immune to losing. I understand that he is the main protagonist, but there's no way someone could be completely unharmed by some of shit he went through. Would be a lot more realistic if our hero wasn't completely invulnerable to damn near everything. Either way, I enjoyed the action, the drama, and the general feel of this one. It might not be everyone's cup of tea, but in a sea of shounen bullshit, this one stands out as one of the better ones to me. (And yes, I do realize this is more categorized as seinen than it is shounen, but really, seinen is just an older version of shounen, is it not?) The manga continues passed where the anime stopped, so if the anime leaves you looking for more, go ahead and give the manga a chance.
Characters: 5/5
I really, REALLY enjoyed the characters in this show. It emphasizes on the fact that they are all just normal people whom happened to be thrown on an island with bombs and were told to survive. Of course most of them would be scared, of course many of them would be clueless. A lot of the characters were very relatable and easy to sympathize with, even if they wound up being seen as an enemy/antagonist. It's hard to be angry at someone for fighting to survive when they have no other choice. The story went very in-depth when it came to fleshing out most of the characters. Some were a bit vague, but most of the characters had a deep story behind them to help explain their actions. Of course, they spent the most time to give us back story for Ryouta and Himiko, but that's to be expected. They made sure every character had their own specific motives and reasons for their actions, and it made each one of them very unique and made it hard to dislike any of them on a personal level. Many of the characters "grew" as the story went on and they experienced more things, and others didn't. For example, we get to see Ryouta grow from a selfish and cowardly person, to a brave, yet reckless man, willing to put his life on the line to protect the ones he cares about. I feel that the character growth reflected humans beings as a whole very well. Some of us grow and learn from our mistakes, actions, and experiences, while others remain stuck in the past and allow it to be their downfall. And that's really how I see the growth in this show. They are all fighting for the same goal, survival, but all of them handle that in their own unique way.
Visual: 3/5
While I do enjoy the visuals of this anime for the most part, I will say that it does feel very inconsistent. Many of the facial expressions seem off unless it is an extreme close-up, and character heights and body types seem to change from scene to scene. They did best at portraying the environment and the explosions, but the character designs usually left a lot to be desired. They made each character so different looking that it was hard to mistake any of them for another, but it made it feel very inconsistent. I do like them trying to give each person their own unique design, but it felt like some were a bit shabby compared to others. Himiko, for example, had very odd facial structure compared to everyone else. The placement of her bangs sometimes made it feel like her eyes were way too low on her face, and her eyes seemed to rotate between being too big for her face and too small. I think if they had put more time and money into this, they could have done a lot better in the animation and art style. I guess the best way to articulate it would be to say that I do like it, but it feels clunky.
Audio: 4/5
I'm a bit biased. I'll admit that a lot of the score here is coming from my long-standing obsession with the singer Nano. Her opening song for the show fits very well, and helps pump you up for the action to come. The voice acting itself is pretty on-point in terms of how well the voices fit the characters, scenes, etc. (I've only watched in Japanese, in case anyone is wondering which version I'm speaking of.) The cast of seiyuus didn't really stick out with any of the more well-known people, but nonetheless, they did well with each of their characters. Ryouta's voice was usually pretty spot-on for who he was, he was good at sounding like an overconfident little shit at the beginning, but also fit for more serious moments without feeling overdone. The soundtrack itself was alright, but left a bit to be desired. There wasn't songs that really stuck out, just a lot of the same. It seemed most of the tracks were either suspenseful strings or a mix of jazz and like an electronic sort of sound. (Not exactly techno or dubstep, but something futuristic and synthetic sounding.) I wasn't the most impressed by it, there were no scenes that stuck out in my brain as being very well coordinated with the music. It wasn't a bad soundtrack, I just feel it could have been done better.
Overall Rating: 4/5
Overall, I think this was a very good watch. It is definitely not a pioneer when it comes to initial plot, but I feel that it did well in balancing action and drama, without feeling overdone in either aspect. If you enjoy the action of shounen but are looking for something a bit more "grown up" and psychological, give this a try. If you aren't into animes that involve a lot of death and darker tones in terms of character development and back story, then you might not like this one, as it is definitely not for the faint of heart at some points, but not completely overboard like some animes. It could definitely have done with a bigger budget, more episodes, or another season, but for what it is, I definitely think it's worth a watch.
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