Liar Liar is an anime that you will be fine not watching. As the name suggests, it’s a show about playing games and outwitting opponents through lies. While on concept it sounds great, the show is a downgrade of characters attempting to play 4D chess if your benchmark is Death Note or other average psychological anime.
Note: There are some spoilers mentioned here but not too overbearing that it spoils the plot twists.
Setting:
This academy is located in an island and divided into different regions where there’s a minor school per region. The student representatives compete among other regions or as individuals for stars. This is set into a future where technology is so advanced that your smart phones can set a game stage with interactive holograms for battles. Stars are everything in this island and each student starts with one. Collecting 7 stars makes one an elite but for another odd gimmick there are special stars that consists of the colors of the rainbow with each having the unique ability to influence the game. I had to lay out the settings first so that reading the plot makes some sense.
Plot:
Hiroto enrolls at Academy Island to look for a childhood friend. On his first day lost at school, he meets Sarasa, the Empress, an unbeatable player with 7 stars by serendipity but a slight misunderstanding caused the two to battle with Hiroto ended up winning and earning the Sarasa’s Red Star. It was at this point when a long kept lie was revealed that Hiroto is obligated to hide as defeating a 7-star student wasn’t just a simple news, but the 7-star student he defeated was the granddaughter of the Academy’s founder and previous owner of the Red Star. Now he has to play the role of an elite gamer within the Academy and the comedic part is just watching him lie his way through to victory.
I’m going say it out here that it’s a bad anime and I’ve only picked it up because of a habit to watch non-mainstream anime, or anime that have already been aired years ago which I didn’t get to see just to catch up.
It’s the abundance of convenient solutions to most problems that arise in any game. The opponent may use some underhanded tactics but the protagonist has more overpowered tricks under the umbrella of corporate hacking. In a story where you want to frame the protagonist as a cunning character, they botched it the moment when every victory is mostly handed to him. There are moments when the hacks fail and he has to rely on his own resources to outwit the enemy but these are overshadowed by solutions handed to him.
The world building in this story didn’t get me invested enough because of the nature of how the games change. It’s like every episode there’s a new game idea the characters have to play and you have to pause the show button to process the game rules you eventually wouldn’t care because another game will be introduced on the next episode.
The climactic end for the season was unfulfilling where everything goes for both protagonist and antagonist. It’s like the rules for the game events don’t exist and they are just making up the show as they went along. Other than giving the audience less reasons to be invested in the games, there’s also nothing to ground their expectations except the prevalent idea that the protagonist will outsmart everyone.
The characters just felt like they were there for the plot to proceed and even the subplots can be dismissed because there’s a lack of personality pursuing them. I can’t even feel like the wins the protagonist gets is even deserved because there’s no merit in praising a cheat but the show is about cheating and perpetuating a lie. I think there was a concept that could’ve work but execution was poor.
If you’ve watched Death Note, you’d know this is one of the anime that set the benchmark for characters playing the 4D chess game. Well Liar Liar is that botched up kid friendly version without the high stakes attached per match. You can move on with your life not watching this show because you’re not missing anything and I’ve said this a few times over anime I regretted starting.
I left this show’s season finale feeling glad it’s finally over just to make a review. If there was another season to follow, I’m not going to bother because there’s nothing really worth coming back to this show. It’s one of those average shows to fill a roster you pull up just to pass the time but you got to be desperate to seek it past page 2 or 3 or beyond of the available list which is how I found it in the first place.
Thank you for your time.
