Btooom! Review: Survival Story With Bombs

 Btooom! Tells us a story of Sakamoto Ryouta, who's nothing short of a genius in a video game called "Btooom!" in which the objective is to kill opponents with bombs. One day he wakes up on an seemingly stranded island not recalling how he got there in the first place. Soon he encounters a man who starts throwing bombs at him and he quickly realizes how much all of that resembles the game that he's so good at...

Art of Btooom! is very good. It gives a definite Seinen feeling not sugarcoating anything, it shows most of the brutality that is going on when playing with bombs and explosions. It's naturally very much seinen-like and really manages to make the readers feel the explosions that are happening as ink on paper. I have to give praise to the author because he hasn't slacked off on making the backgrounds: they are truly a pleasure to look at.

Characters are half of the goodness in this manga. The setting is however pretty generic survival one and how that brings all the bad sides to the surface on people. However I really can't see how else one could set up such setting without bringing up these same characteristic in side characters like in example in Cage of Eden. Main character is a good one in my opinion, because of the skills that he has in the "game" there - thank god - isn't need for a growth story when the main character starts from a scratch and develops over time.

Story of Btooom basically relies on the setting that it provides: not much mystery is really present, even though the reason why someone would put people on a stranded island killing each other with bombs is at first pretty vague. It isn't an especially intriguing mystery since I could think of several reasons why someone in a seinen manga would do that. The psychological aspect of these kinds of mangas are always present and it's one part what makes them so interesting: it's not all about the action and explosions, but all the stuff that goes in characters head: who to trust and who not to.

Conclusion: Btooom! is pretty much character, character interaction (deceiving, psychological) and set-up kind of manga where the only story is to give the characters a setting in which they do their stuff and then play with the character introduction and with some action, in this case throwing the bombs that they have. Even though the idea itself isn't anything original it does manage to be interesting: in my case I've always had a sort of liking to survival manga in which psychological deceiving and all that kind of stuff is present.