Reviews

Battle Royale: Remastered by Koushun Takami

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halthemonarch's review against another edition

3.0

I had to read the Hunger Games’ famous predecessor, Battle Royale, although right off the bat I noticed how different the themes and substances are. Battle Royale takes children at random, all from the same class and of the same age. The citizens can protest but under the dictator’s regime, resistance is absolutely futile. The orphanage director was raped by the orchestrator of this year’s test or experiment as they call it, simply for pleading that two of her boys not be taken. Sakamochi is a menacing government authority who gives these kids their instructions once the children wake from the sleeping gas. He shows them their dead teacher, and kills one of the other students, wounding another in the leg before going on. In the Hunger Games, there were more rigid rules and regulations. There were peacekeepers there to stop chaos, and more importantly, this was done to suppress the thought of rebellion, essentially torture broadcast to the upper caste as entertainment. In the Battle Royale, the experiment is a commonly known and forcibly accepted reality, that growing up you have something like a 1 in 800 chance to take part. I didn't really realize how much time Collins took with the preamble until I started reading this and there was none. It takes Collins more than a third of the book to enter the games themselves, whereas Koshun gets to it right away and is immediately more vulgar. Everything is separated logically-- these students thrown into this situation with weapons and permission to do each other harm react exactly as psychology suggests they would. Some try to band together, others commit suicide, some plan to escape, and some aim to be the last man standing and go home at the end of the experiment. Koshun pays closer attention to the various strategies of escape, subterfuge, and the make and models of each weapon listed. Both offer criticism towards the governments that would volunteer trauma upon its citizens, but in different ways.

Battle Royale is a multiple pov novel, but once you get the sense of who each character is, they all become quite distinct (unless they die early on, but even then some like Yoshitoki are mentioned throughout). Our main protagonist is Shuya, who protects Noriko, Shuya’s best friend’s crush (Yoshitoki, killed at the jump by Sakamochi) and travels with Shogo in the beginning, who promises there’s a way that all three of them could win together. Separately, kids like Kazuo and Mitsuko start picking off their competition. The quandary of being attacker or attacked plagues even the innocent and often that’s enough to trigger murderous hysteria.

When you make the comparison between the Hunger Games and Battle Royale, you can’t help but notice the influences of the different imperialist nations. The Hunger Games was televised, drawn out, and its purpose made clear to its citizens— the suppression of the lower class and continued reinforcement of the caste system. Battle Royale is a mandate from the dictator, an experiment done privately with single instances of resistance immediately snuffed out. Both cases feature young children fighting to the death, and in both cases, it takes no time for these kids to accept their reality and become killers. There are those who comply with the system because it’s within their best interests to do so and those who comply on a whim. Battle Royale is deadly laser tag in an abandoned town, and the Hunger Games is that show Survivor but with murder.

It’s also striking to me what each country considers cool. These hacking savvy fifteen year olds, the proclamation of a gun’s full name every other sentence (smith&wesson’s, M80s, and damn BLTs everywhere), extreme pragmatism or stoicism even in the face of certain death, and Shogo, already a hard-boiled chain smoker, eventually beat Sakamochi (symbolically, the renegade hero beats the government lackey). Shuya is a baseball star, interested in rock, noble and reserved and secretly admired by at least five people. In THG, it was the Capitol and their outfits, the training grounds, the tools introduced to make the game interactive. And of course, being a more modern spin on a classic, THG plucks quite a lot from Battle Royale. There are the innocent ones who would rather not fight, dying mercilessly at the hands of their classmates (and symbolically, the government), there are poisonings and exploding bodies, and there are two survivors, a boy and a girl who are romantically inclined toward each other and part of a tragic love triangle. At the end of each night or chapter, we’re given a head count and by the middle of the book we’re (by we I mean the lens of the audience, not necessarily the protagonists, Shuya, Shogo, Noriko, Katniss, and Peeta) just plugging away, murdering children like it’s our day job.

Halfway, it stopped being a discussion about the ethics of bringing Shogo, a returning winner, into the game, or the logistics of the experiment, or the general vibe of dissatisfaction toward the government in the form of exaggerated speculative fiction and the revolt that is sure to follow-- it was Shuya and Noriko waking up in a shack together and preparing coffee, cut to Mitsuko gutting two girls for the hell of it. It stopped being about the symbols and it started just explaining how these children were, voluntarily or not, brutalizing each other. Because of this, it was tough to finish. Like their modern counterparts, our heroes Shuya and Noriko survive the horrors of Battle Royale and live as fugitives because they refused to die for this well-known annual government experiment.

mandayo91's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging dark tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

4.25

bobertbooks's review

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dark tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

4.5

silentcode's review

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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

Content Warnings

andrew298's review against another edition

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1.0

I will preface this with saying that I did not manage to finish the book. It just wasn't worth it. I got to page 345 and thought to heck with it. Maybe its because I have already seen the movie ten times (the 1st being when I was 15) or maybe its because you can still guess what exactly is going to happen as the author keeps hitting you over the head with the ending but asking you not to believe in it just yet but you know its going to happen. The plot is stilted, not very fast moving and the level of detail is sometimes inane. Whether that is due to the translation, I don't know but it's not something that I wanted to continue reading. For those who have not seen the movie and weren't scared by the book, then certainly check it out.