I didn’t know what to expect from this one

My discovery of this series was quite an interesting one. I couldn’t remember where I first heard of it, but after watching more of it I realized I’d seen bits and pieces of it in WatchMojo.com’s anime top 10 lists. So not as blind as advertised.

Still, all I remembered from it was the name of the series and on a whim, I found that someone was pirating it for their viewing pleasure on YouTube. In the time between when I saw the first two episodes and completed Army basic training, I found that the channel had been taken down, though as of writing, there’s still a video of all 12 episodes in a 4+ hour marathon, so if you wanna game the system without risking malware Trojan horsing into your devices, have a looksee. Otherwise, go in with a shield and beware the spam on your hard drive.

I talked briefly about Btooom! at the end of December when I wanted to speedrun the topics I had on my mind at the time before I stepped off to new adventures, but I didn’t have enough time to properly explore my thoughts on the series, especially since it only has 12 episodes to boast compared to similar series like SAO that have franchises and can simultaneously earn the praise of some and the ire of others. So let’s give Btooom! some love it should have by now.

As of writing I’m only six episodes deep into Btooom! which I’d say is good enough to fully write about what I’ve witnessed thus far. From what I remember of the first two episodes I watched in December, as a Seinen series, it’s not the type of series to highlight the good in everyone. It knows its characters are bastards and scoundrels in some shape or form. The protagonists are definitely antiheroes. We’ve got three of them: Sakamoto, Himiko, and Taira. Each of them have at least something to balance out their negative qualities.

Sakamoto was a 20-something NEET with no passion or future in anything more productive than just lazing in front of the screen and keeping his high scores. This part is understandable since not everyone is required to behave like the heroes and crusaders they might be raised to believe, but what makes Sakamoto quite s[fart noises]t is that he’s that kind of toxic gamer. Abusive to his mother, refuses to find a stable job or training and move out of the house, no affection even for his stepdad (honestly this fits a lot of toxic gamer tropes that even I myself fell into as a teen at one point), and really hot-tempered. All those jokesters and mouth-breathers who argued that video games caused violence probably would’ve been onto something if Btooom! was used as an example.

Himiko’s the second character we see in the anime and her flaw was being a bit two-faced. Prior to being sent to the island to play the game IRL, she and some school friends were going to be the groupies for some musicians, but when the band mass molested them, she was the only one to book it and leave her friends to their fate. Now they don’t want anything to do with her seeing as she abandoned them when they needed help, but it wouldn’t be long before, in their eyes, she’d get a taste of her own medicine. I talked before about the molestation scene and I don’t want to elaborate further on that aspect as it was harrowing to watch only once, but to catch you up to speed: the one decent person who helped her got rejected, physically assaults and rapes her, she pulls out a bomb and explodes him to the seventh circle of hell.

You might begin to cheer her on for defending herself, but down the road she appears to be killing men left and right as a trauma response. And I think that’s one of Btooom!’s highlights. Trauma in western media tends to be hit or miss with more strike outs than home runs to speak of, which would be why so few of them handle it very well and with the maturity the subject matter demands.

I heard this show handles trauma pretty well. I haven’t seen it myself yet. I might…

For Himiko as a rape survivor, the reactions sound valid but get less and less rational as the series goes on, which may be the point. She narrowly dodges an assault, is the victim of one, and is motivated to never, ever be the victim of such an act again, even if it means a series of pre-emptive strikes that could easily be mistaken for Unabomber attacks, especially considering this series.

Finally, there was Taira, a middle-aged convenience store manager who meant well to his friends and family, but according to himself, was a great bastard to his subordinates. Allegedly, he’s the type of guy you’d talk about in order to not be like him. The example of what toxicity at work looks like, so to speak.

Now that I think about it, the series felt like the Saw franchise but anime and with bombs instead of overelaborate traps. Also, few people are genuine do-gooders in the series. The characters are either believable or wickedly f[power tool noises]d in the head. Each of these characters are ripped from their familiar surroundings and dropped into a real-life version of the Btooom! video game, only it’s more like The Most Dangerous Game with more evidence left behind for a forensics team to analyze.

The game Btooom! is pretty much a battle royale, deathmatch style video game similar to Call of Duty’s or Halo’s multiplayers, though more Halo style since everyone is kitted up in sci-fi looking armor and in place of guns and small arms, it’s all bombs of different types, from incapacitation to full-on lethality, and seeing the types of characters running around in only six episodes thus far, a lawless, free-for-all for keeps is exactly what would attract more than a handful of psychopaths who just felt like killing. Some of the nobodies who get gunned down in Black Lagoon would feel right at home in a series like this.

Sounds like an exciting watch, right? Well, I and whoever ran that now-deleted channel and whoever is still uploading clips of the anime to this day all thought so, but at only 12 episodes with the manga lasting far longer than that, I’d at least want to know why the anime died off while a similar yet comparatively lighthearted series like Sword Art Online became an overnight global success. Well, I came across one video that pretty much explains the reason behind Btooom!’s faults and failures.

In short, the series was a sufferer of a vintage anime bugbear where the anime releases before the manga is even halfway done. For the most part, up to two or three chapters of a manga can make one episode while depending on the style, that’s one or more volumes making a full arc, and it looks like there wasn’t enough time given between the first episode and the release of the 9th volume in January of 2013, which sounds like time constraints or nonexistent timetables made a mess of things anime-wise.

The manga at least finished all the way up until 2018 with creator Junya Inoue’s assistant Hiroki Ito releasing a spinoff series called Btooom! U-18 the same year as the manga’s conclusions. Yes, plural. There’s a light ending and a dark ending; U-18 follows the former. But even with an interesting premise, the biggest culprit is that the manga was never financially successful, almost forever doomed to cult status. This fate followed the home releases of the anime with only a few collectors having it on Blu-Ray and DVD in Japan at least. Japanese publishers notoriously ignore foreign data and market share so there’s no way to know for certain if they know that the show had an audience overseas. My best guess for why this is for a lot of studios at least is that they agree to let western studios and voice actors dub it over and immediately call it a day. That, or they go straight to work either on the rest of the series or something else until another season is announced.

Speaking of which, a second season was promised under the condition that the tie-in online mobile game stay within the top 5 in Japan for a set amount of time. In 2016, the mobile game developer Asobimo developed a mobile game based on the series as a bit of a glorified promotion and also as an early pioneer in the battle royale genre which in turn was based on the manga which itself was based on the series that gave the genre its name.

Holy Christopher Nolan, Batman. We’re discovering fractal layers left and right!

So all of these conditions needed to be met before an animator could get to work on a second season of the show, but alas it wasn’t meant to be. The success of the game was short-lived and it lost its high marks and status after a month and change. It wasn’t even in the top 100 in Japan anymore and I don’t think Asobimo was doing much to help promote or maintain it. It’s last updates were in the Spring of 2017 and it lost support two years later. A second season is a long shot, and a well-done second season is aiming at a gas station sign from five miles away. With only one arrow.

It can be done, we’ve seen more unlikelier series come back for a second season even years later…

…but assuming that of every series is like assuming every coffeehouse makes joe the same way, like they follow an industry standard. It just doesn’t work that way. Maybe we’ll get more Btooom!, maybe we won’t. My crystal ball is looking kinda gray, but if there’s a silver lining, it’s this. It’s finished. The manga’s done, so an extended continuation is in no way off the table if the cards are played well and the season is properly formatted. I just hope it doesn’t go the way of Rising of the Shield Hero season 2 or The Promised Neverland’s season 2.