Anime Review: Btooom!

Btooom!

Length: 12 Episodes
Genre, as Perceived by Dogy: Action, Sci-Fi, ecchi (very slight)
Dogy's Overall Score: 70/100
Would I Recommend it?: To a specific group of people, beyond that, not yet.
Who Would I Recommend it to? Any fan of Battle Royale

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I don't want to say "there isn't a whole lot to Btooom!", but there really isn't a whole lot to it. You have a group of people who get kidnapped and stuck on an island. They're forced to play a game and kill each other to get off of the island. You've probably read this about four or five different times if you've watched anime or just watch movies in general, so this isn't a huge shocker. Btooom only brings two points of originality to the table; the first being that the game is based around an online video game named Btooom, and the second is that everybody on the island was taken by the choice of other people (and I wouldn't be surprised if THAT's been done and I just haven't heard of it yet).

Without trying to sugar coat anything, the series is pretty ordinary by my standards. There is a good chunk of action, most of which winds up being chess-y, mindgame action as opposed to completely over the top theatrics. Actually, when I think about it, pretty much all of the action is based off of headgames or just straight dire situations. That's not a bad thing nor was it done poorly, Btooom simply didn't bring any kind of "wow" or "awesome" to the table to kick it over the top.  The art design didn't really stand out in any way to me, neither did the sound track. I pretty much felt like I watched stayed with this series because it was a "safe" action series. Just ran everything by the books, taking no real risks in anything to either gain or possibly lose interest.

The one thing that I do like about the series is the character backstory, but honestly even this wasn't amazing. Like I mentioned 2 blocks ago, everybody was brought into this game by way of somebody else. With an angle like that, the creators were forced to make the characters have some sort of a real backstory or that major point would flop on it's face. And I think they did aight with it. When I stopped and compared it to other stories/series of this nature, I'd have to say they went more in depth than many others, and even went as far as using it to completely define some characters (as opposed to "Hey this is what happened, now that they're here fighting for survival they've completely changed into THIS kind of person with little to no rhyme or reason.") . Sadly, they didn't do anything new or creative with these. In fact, they are again very safe and standard angles to have. I just like that they put some thought behind this.

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In the end, Btooom is like I've been saying, a pretty standard anime. It doesn't take any risks to try and stand out above others related to it, it just gives you a pretty solid experience all the way through. My only complaint, without being super obvious with a spoiler, is that they literally have to have more.

But for what it is right now, it was fine to watch for a season.