Reviews with content warning for Gore - Battle Royale

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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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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aligorical's review against another edition

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dark sad tense fast-paced

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

3.0

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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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skyhawk77's review against another edition

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4.0

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alexander15's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging dark emotional mysterious reflective sad tense slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

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jrod9291's review against another edition

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adventurous dark emotional reflective tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? N/A

4.5

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whimsicalish's review against another edition

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dark sad tense fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

4.5

Every time I picked it up, I had a difficult time putting it down.

"ehhh just one more chapter"
"well I can't leave it there, one more"
"hmmm it's only ten minutes past my bed time..."

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