Reviews tagging 'Sexual content'

Battle Royale by Koushun Takami

24 reviews

greenbutler's review against another edition

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dark emotional sad slow-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? No
  • Loveable characters? No
  • Diverse cast of characters? N/A
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.0

This book will give you intense gore and action, and it will also give you a good exploration of many topics including survival, morality, and government. Where this book struggles is its approach to characters. It has 42 students all participating in this so-called "game", and the book tries to make you care for every single one of them being showing you all of their backstories. I get what the author's going for here, but it has this loop of "introduce character, show their backstory, kill them off", especially early on, and it's pretty repetitive and also the main reason this book is slow-paced enough to be 600 pages despite taking place over only a day. It's fine to have a slow pace and a large cast, and you should want the reader to care for your MAIN characters, but when your cast is this big and you try to develop all of them, you're going to have pacing issues because you're just not gonna be able to fit all that in one book.
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vintagesunkist's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging dark fast-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? A mix
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? No
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? No

4.0

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lithiumlips's review against another edition

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adventurous dark emotional hopeful sad tense medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? It's complicated
  • Loveable characters? No
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? No

5.0

The precursor and inspiration to The Hunger Games never fails. I’ve been reading this book for decades and never fail to feel the hopelessness, the resilience, the humanity of the students. This is a beautiful novel that uses dystopian policies and government to put the most human high school students against each other. It compels you to try and think of a way to escape as you go on this journey with them. The violence is present and chaotic, but it fully immerses you in classic Japanese horror writing. 
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effys's review against another edition

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4.25

I don’t think I’ve ever read anything quite so worthy of a high page count, there was constantly something happening and the tension this book built was immense. 
I definitely struggled with all the different characters early on in the book but as it went on it got easier to differentiate them. 
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davidalexingram's review against another edition

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tense
  • Plot- or character-driven? Plot
  • Strong character development? No
  • Loveable characters? No
  • Diverse cast of characters? No
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? No

5.0

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essiie's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging dark sad tense fast-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Plot
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.5

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silentcode's review against another edition

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challenging dark hopeful sad tense medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? No
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Diverse cast of characters? No
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? No

4.5

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nojai's review against another edition

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dark sad tense fast-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? No
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? No

4.5

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noodlebooknook's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional sad tense fast-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Plot
  • Strong character development? It's complicated
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Diverse cast of characters? No
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? No

5.0

Wow where do I even start

Well first of all given the size of the book (650 pages of my edition) I was a little intimidated but this book FLIES by so fast it feels like a 200-300 page book.

The narration style was so unique starting with 42 characters and we get POVs with a lot of them. Which has its normal downsides where sometimes I would be less invested than normal but overall most of the POVs were so interesting.

Also I really had no idea where this book was going at all somehow have managed to avoid spoilers for 25 year and wow wow wow the ending was just amazing.

I will say absolutely trigger warning this was one of the most gore heavy and violent books I’ve read in awhile and it is absolutely an insane read along with other terrible things happening. 

Overall would highly recommend this book to anyone
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takeachance's review against another edition

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adventurous dark tense fast-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.5

Battle Royale is a very effective character drama and fun to read action-thiller! There's a lot of effective POV scenes which really get you into the heads of the characters, and even with some of the more antagonistic characters, you really get to feel for them or at least understand where they're coming from. 
The action scenes are good, and the booking is Really really good. You can tell that Koushun Takami is a wrestling fan aha. 
While it's a big book, it moves Fast, the scenes just flying by and the end of chapters giving you Just enough to want to keep reading and reading to see what happens next. 

My main problems with the book are the kinda over the top and vague details of the political system. I definitely believe its a fascistic system, but when it tries to make it a communist system as well, it kinda fails because the state seems to have absolutely nothing to do with communism or it's theories? And then to pit it at odds with imperialist America is odd? I know there's a deep and complicated history in japan, considering their role in WW2 and the rise of nationalism that preceded that, and then in turn you have what happened afterwards and the ways America did change ways Japan did things for the negative in the fallout after bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki... History and the way it effects culture is complicated, and to be fair, I don't really have the knowledge of it as a whole, but I do know many Japanese creators work through these ideas and that it's something that many of them keep in mind so... IDK
There Is something interesting being done here re: that, but also I don't feel like it's really well fleshed out or anything. It works as a backdrop to the character drama and and conceit that makes the story move, but on its own it kinda fails. 

But that's honestly a relatively small criticism in the face of the rest of the book, which is a really exciting book about teens being teens and how they experience and process trauma, but Also about them killing each other because a good amount of them don't trust each other and want to survive. 
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