You’ll like this story, I’m sure of it. Problem is, the author thinks you’re an idiot and that ruins most of the positives found here.
Creative Staff
Story: Junya Inoue
Art: Junya Inoue
Translation/Adaptation: Christine Dashiell
What They Say
By all counts, Ryouta Sakamoto is a loser when he’s not holed up in his room, bombing things into oblivion in his favorite online action RPG. But his very own uneventful life is blown to pieces when he’s abducted and taken to an uninhabited island, where he soon learns the hard way that he’s being pitted against others just like him in an explosives-riddled death match! How could this be happening? Who’s putting them up to this? And why!? The name, not to mention the objective, of this very real survival game is eerily familiar to Ryouta, who has mastered its virtual counterpart-BTOOOM! Can Ryouta still come out on top when he’s playing for his life!?
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers):
BTOOOM! is the name of a new online video game that has quickly become all the rage. The point of the game is similar to every single First-Person Shooter currently on the market: create a team of other players from across the world and kill the opposing team. There’s no in depth plot to the game as revealed in this first volume and it is instead a simple King of the Hill type of game. One player of BTOOOM! is Ryouta Sakamoto, a 22 year-old NEET who does beta testing on video games for publisher Tyrannos Games but with the pathetic side effect of not being employed or getting paid for his work. Ryouta is the top member of the tenth highest ranking BTOOOM! team in the world and the best ranked player in the country of Japan. This manga starts us off with an introduction to Ryouta and his abilities as a BTOOOM! player. Depending on how you choose to look at it, the book either achieves this perfectly or fails extremely hard. Ryouta is possibly the most unlikeable and purely despicable lead characters to grace the page. He is self-obsessed, cruel, narcissistic, and completely unsympathetic. The manga does an excellent job of portraying this to the readers quickly and efficiently. We immediately identify him as this loathsome creature and quickly come into the mindset the manga wishes us to be in. That is also this manga’s initial failing. With such a horrible lead character it is impossible to give anywhere close to two shits about Ryouta once the plot actually begins.
Speaking of, the plot to this manga becomes established over the course of the first two chapters and starts to become better-rounded by the end of this first volume. However, the plot is not close to being intricate or involved enough to require such a time commitment. Ryouta wakes up dangling from a tree by a parachute in the middle of a strange forest. He has no idea how he got there or where “there” even happens to be. Once he frees himself from the parachute, Ryouta makes his way to a beach where he sits down to relax and try to understand what is happening. While digging through his bag, he discovers a fanny pack containing eight strange cubes. While inspecting one of the cubes, it starts displaying a countdown timer and begins beeping. Realizing something is wrong, Ryouta throws the cube where it then explodes. Immediately after the explosion, Ryouta sees an individual walking towards him along the beach. Instead of responding to Ryouta’s pleas, the man decides to throw a small spherical object that explodes upon impact directly behind Ryouta. That’s right; the plot of this manga is the same as the in-story video game BTOOOM!. Ryouta has found himself on a strange island surrounded by enemies where he must play BTOOOM! for real.
What make these initial chapters so jarring and completely not cohesive are actually quite a few different things. First off, as soon as Ryouta awakens on the island he starts to become confused and increasingly scared about the developments he discovers. Ryouta becomes a character that is portrayed as incredibly sympathetic and intended to be a self-insert character for the readers to easily identify and sympathize with. That may sound completely contradictory with how I described him previously but that’s because it is. After spending a good 16 pages making Ryouta out to be the scum of the Earth, this manga very quickly changes its tone and expects us to give a lot of shits about him. It doesn’t work that way guys, I’m sorry. The goal might’ve been to show just how vulnerable a person Ryouta really is, that he really is just like you and me. It’s just in the online world, when he’s by himself in his room, and when around his mother that he is an absolute piece of shit. While there is some extremely valid commentary that can be made about online personas and how it deviates and possibly affects one’s real personality, this manga does not state this case in this volume. Instead, it comes across as a complete tonal shift and we are expected to simply follow along with it, no questions asked. Mission Failed.
However, amidst all these false moves there is a very entertaining manga that is high on action and shock value. The initial fight that Ryouta finds himself in that occurs during the first three chapters of this book are extremely well drawn, articulate in its panel layout and camera positioning, and effective in its entertainment value. There is a clear aptitude for suspense and action displayed in this entire book that despite the flaws in character writing I can see anyone enjoying this book entirely. That’s not to say that throughout all the terrific art and action that it doesn’t still fail as a story.
Ryouta is the God of BTOOM! right? He knows the game inside and out and is a master at strategy. Then how come he doesn’t realize his bombs are timers until he wastes about four of them!? How come he was able to recognize the timer and understand well enough what it meant the first time he used the bomb, thus saving his life from a very embarrassing act, but nothing clicks to him as to how he uses the bomb? It’s simple, to create suspense and draw out the storytelling for that purpose. While it does achieve that effect very well like I just mentioned, it also insults the readers’ intelligence by giving us a character that is this bloody stupid as the guy we are supposed to root for. The insults continue after Ryouta escapes from this ordeal and manages to get a good night’s rest and provide us with more backstory in the form of a dream. Once he wakes up from this exposition heavy dream, he finds a beautiful woman near a waterfall with a case full of food and water. When this occurs in this book, we are given three pages of lusciously detailed artwork that makes sure to show this woman’s breasts, crotch/ass, and a little bit of her face with absolutely no shame. This is male gaze to its logical extreme. We have no idea who this woman is, or why she is there. Heck, she doesn’t even speak during these pages. Ryouta simply sees her, ogles her, and she gets scared/freaked out and runs away. There is inherently nothing wrong with this scenario. It leads Ryouta to his next encounter and we clearly get the sense that this woman will reappear later and we will then get to know who she is at that point. The problem is the extremely perverse lingering that is done to introduce her. We don’t need to see her perfectly formed camel toe as she bends over to get food from the case! We don’t need panels to slowly scan her entire body as we inspect her “goods”. It’s just creepy! Especially since she is so quickly thrown away. Her only purpose in this book was to give the male readers some eye candy during the downtime of the action and explosions. To make matters worse, the title page for most of the chapters is a mug shot/line-up image of the characters we meet in this book. The nameless attacker from when Ryouta first awakens on the island, Ryouta himself, the woman met at the waterfall and the next person Ryouta encounters. Every single one of these characters has their names and other bits of information presented in the respective title pages. Even the character we haven’t even really met at that point! The guy who deserves to be a nameless face in the crowd is given full details about how his is in his title page. The weird thing about this? The girl is given absolutely zero information in her title page. ZERO! No name, no age, no nothing! The author felt it was important enough to tell us about the random psycho path but not the girl that he draws so seductively and candidly!? That just doesn’t sit right with me and it shouldn’t sit right with you either.
The last two chapters of the book have Ryouta encountering another individual on the island, a middle aged man by the name of Kiyoshi Taira. This encounter serves two purposes: to give Ryouta a person he can interact with in the future, as partners, and to provide the remaining chunks of backstory needed to make sense of this whole ordeal. Following the same distinct display of skill shown previously, these chapters are incredibly entertaining! They are paced out impeccably and framed just right to give the maximum effect. This is just damned good entertainment! Since this book has displayed time and time again over the course of this single volume that it only really knows how to betray that entertainment value with something disturbing or completely ignorant; we get hit by that string of betrayal again! While talking to Taira and forming their alliance, Ryouta hears a plane flying overhead. Remembering the case filled with food and water that the woman had at the waterfall, he concludes that the plane is delivering more rations. Ryouta immediately tears off running towards one of the drop sites hoping to get his hands on the case. While en-route there, he witness a woman running towards the case. She is the only person around and hasn’t noticed Ryouta’s presence at all. Once she gets to the case, there is an explosion followed by a man walking up to the woman and taking her radar chip, bombs, and the rations case. Ryouta is completely shocked by this! He begins to realize that if he had gotten to the case first he would be dead like that woman! No shit Sherlock!! Here you are, this super genius strategist and the top Japanese player of the video game that you’ve been unceremoniously thrust into for real and you never stopped to think about strategy or what could possibly happen to you when you go running off halfcocked towards a case containing food and water!? Either Ryouta is hands down the dumbest character any author has ever written whether it is manga, moves, or any form of fiction; or the author of BTOOOM! thinks his readers are incredibly stupid. Final thought: ARGH!!!!
In Summary
As you can tell by how much I’ve written about this book, it is just incredibly polarizing. The book is extremely competent with the basic skills required. It is handsomely drawn, extremely detailed, and very appealing to look at. The action and suspense is framed almost flawlessly and does a terrific job of grabbing the reader and pulling them along for the ride. It does these things and more superbly! But at the same time commits so many insults to our intelligence, changes tone and representation of its characters so abruptly and nonsensically, and shamelessly views the women shown in this book as nothing but mere objects and of absolutely no importance with such a blatant disregard for anything resembling human decency that I fall more on the dislike side of things than the like. I was so frustrated while reading this book because it would be good and then just thoroughly disgust me. Strange thing is, it does these things so seamlessly that it just keeps flowing by and I had absolutely no issue reading the whole book in one sitting and looking forward to the next volume. How the hell does that happen!?
So anyway, if you’re just reading this summary please read the whole review. I don’t spoil anything in the slightest so it is perfectly safe to read if you haven’t read this book yet, or seen the anime adaptation either for that matter. If these things I describe sound like something you would like or the extreme failings of the book are something you can live with, please, by all means, pick up this book and enjoy the incredibly entertaining story. If not…well, you either were staying away from this series from the get-go or are completely turned off now. No worries, you aren’t missing out on a masterpiece that will ever become required reading.
Content Grade: C
Art Grade: A-
Packaging Grade: B
Text/Translation Grade: B+
Age Rating: 17+
Released By: Yen Press
Release Date: 2/26/2013
MSRP: $11.99
why do i get the impression that you don’t read much manga when i read your review ? Pure hate . No offence but that is what i really think . But i hope you can make it to vol 10 . You will be amaze by how Ryouta become .