Summary
- Survival game-based fiction is wildly popular in TV shows and anime, from Alice in Borderland to Tomodachi Game.
- These stories feature intense and high-stakes games where characters must outsmart and outmaneuver to survive.
- Series like Danganronpa and Darwin's Game explore dark themes of murder, deception, and survival in gripping ways.
If lists of some of the most popular TV shows of the current era tell us anything, from Lost to The Walking Dead to Squid Game, it's that people love survival stories. People especially love a series where a character has to survive in a cruel game where the stakes are life and death.
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And if manga and anime are anything to go by, intense, gripping, and highly thrilling survival game-based fiction is one of Japan’s best exports. Here are some of the best anime and manga to come out that revolve around games of survival.
5 Alice In Borderland
A Wonderland Of Death
Alice in Borderland
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- Type Of Survival Game: Strategy-Based Death Game
While Alice in Borderland is most commonly known for its television adaptation released in 2020, it was originally based on a manga that was released in 2010 and received an anime adaptation in 2014.
Just as Alice in Wonderland has the main character enter a strange new world, Alice in Borderland's main character, Arisu (who sounds quite similar to Alice), ends up entering what looks to be a different world when the city they once knew is randomly transformed into the abandoned grounds for a series of death games. Alice in Borderland showcases the focal character Arisu, an intelligent young man who wastes his life, finally utilizing his natural gifts for problem-solving in the worst way. Their world is now nothing but an arena for constant games in which an absurdly sharp mind is needed just to survive the night.
The players must collect cards and survive in a depopulated Tokyo. These players shouldn’t bother making any friends or making peace with keeping the ones they have, for eventually, they will most likely die in a game with almost no solutions to save everyone. Arisu learns that very early on.
4 Tomodachi Game
Debt Between Friends
Tomodachi Game
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- April 5, 2022
- Studio
- Okuruto Noboru
- Number of Episodes
- 12
- Type Of Survival Game: Psychological Debt Game
This is the only anime/manga here to not start as a blatant death game. As shown in the anime, Tomodachi Game is initially only a debt game, where if someone loses, they're set to lose a lot, but at least they’ll keep their life. But anyone who has read the manga knows that later on down the line, the prospect of killing is put on the table.
Still, with the amount of debt the typical contestant has racked up as the manga goes on, it might as well have been a survival game from the start. If you can’t pay your bills, then you can’t survive. This simple fact ends up making the Tomodachi Game for many contestants as serious as life or death from the very start. The entire concept of the Tomodachi Game is for distrust to be sewn between players, especially the players who were friends before entering the game.
Secrets, lies, and devastatingly clever forms of deception are often used in the Tomodachi Game, encouraging players to backstab each other. However, the highly manipulative swindler main character Yuichi decides to play the game differently. He decides to support his friends and only uses his devilish scheming skills to beat rivals in the game and the game masters themselves, making for an interesting story.
3 Danganronpa
Super High School Level Dystopia
Danganronpa: The Animation
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- July 5, 2013
- Studio
- Lerche
- Number of Episodes
- 13
- Type Of Survival Game: Student Killing and Investigation Game
Danganronpa is a visual novel-style murder mystery video game that received an anime adaptation in 2013 - Danganronpa: The Animation.
The rules of Danganronpa are as simple as they are cruel. The only way to escape Hope’s Peak Academy is to commit the murder of a fellow student and get off scot-free. If someone kills another student and manages to evade suspicion, they win. However, when the class trial comes around, and if other students figure out someone is the murderer, they lose. Losing means being executed in both a humorous and horrific fashion by the joyful and crazed host, teddy bear Monokuma.
With its murder mysteries, student-run legal trials, and the weird dystopian world that exists outside of Hope's Peak Academy, Danganronpa brings strange new twists and fresh concepts to the survival game and anime genre.
2 Darwin's Game
Survival App Of The Fittest
Darwin's Game
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- January 4, 2020
- Studio
- Nexus
- Number of Episodes
- 11
- Type Of Survival Game: Supernatural Killing Game
When people hear the name Darwin, they can’t help but have the words "Survival of the Fittest" flash through their minds. The fittest - that’s exactly what players want to be when playing Darwin’s Game unless they want a gruesome death. Darwin’s Game is conducted via a phone app that’s a little less fun than Flappy Birds.
Intrigue arises when it is revealed to the main character that the person who initially sent him the invitation for the game has gone missing. Potential players are invited to the game and should they accept, are forced into a murder contest where they must clear the game and kill its Master.
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Darwin’s Game will have fans on the edge of their seats, watching as the players eliminate each other with various abilities and killing styles, while also trying to discover the strange truth behind the game's conception.
1 Battle Royale
Shiroiwa Student Killings
- Type Of Survival Game: Student Battle Royale
Whether it be through its novel, live-action adaptations, or the violently thrilling manga, Battle Royale is a staple of the survival game genre, and among the most famous and entertaining ones ever created.
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This classic story was responsible for influencing various other stories with death games or, as the name suggests, battle royale motifs. The story of Battle Royale is a tragic one. A group of Japanese students only in Junior High are forced to kill each other in a government-mandated competition that they have no hope of escaping from. With collars around their necks and a zone of areas they are permitted to travel to that are constantly changing, the students are given weapons and told that the only way to escape is to kill their former classmates and friends.
What makes this survival game more cruel is that, unlike a lot of other death games, there is no prize. Participation is mandatory if someone happens to be a part of one of the unlucky chosen classes and the prize for surviving is survival itself. No money. No extra opportunities. Just a lifetime of trauma.
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