No Game No Life Review

For this week’s ABC Challenge Review, N is for No Game No Life. No Game No Life is a series that I had been meaning to watch for sometime and thought now was as good as any to do so. Full disclosure, I knew the basics behind the plot of No Game No Life which sounded interesting. But what made me want to watch the series was that I had to do a super smart, super cute girl comparison between Shiro and Victorique de Blois from Gosick. I know another dumb reason to watch a series, but I loved the characterization of Victorique and wanted to do a comparison. I won’t share the comparison particularly since there is no dub for Gosick. However, I will say that both are amazing characters with more on Shiro forthcoming, obviously. Without further delay, I bring you my review of No Game No Life. Spoilers ahead.

Basic Plot

No Game No Life has an interesting basic concept. Basically in the world of No Game No Life everything is decided by games. Long before the series there was a huge war that killed all of the gods of their world leaving only the god of games, Tet, alive. Tet being the only god decreed that there would be no fighting anymore, but games would decide everything. In their realm, there are 16 races each holding their own race piece which is a chess piece that gives them control over their race. If one were to obtain all 16 pieces one would be able to challenge Tet to game to decide the fate of the world. That’s the basic overview now on to the story at hand.

The story starts with an MMORPG game with a 4 player team defeating 1200 other players. The Queen after being defeated says they must have cheated but admits to cheating herself. You then cut to two shut-in siblings that are the 4 player team. The older one is a young man by the name of Sora. He is brilliant, manipulative, and cunning. He is surprisingly sociable when taken to context of the games. This is ironic given his general disdain for real life. The younger one is a ten-year old girl by the name of Shiro. While Sora is also vastly intelligent, Shiro might be the most intelligent character from any anime. She is the master of logical play thus she can beat any computer at any game. She literally considers a game like chess that requires a lot of logical behind every move to be nothing more than tic-tac-toe. Her main problem is that given her complete lack of human interaction she is not the best at reading people’s moves. Basically, Shiro and Sora are a perfect balance for one another. Their relationship is honestly borderline creepy. I know they’re only step-siblings but she gets jealous when other girls are with him. Like romantically jealous. They also can’t be away from each other for more than a couple of seconds or they completely freak out.

The siblings are then challenged to a game of online chess. After a long and decisive match they finally come out on top. Turns out the person on the other end of the chess match was Tet who then transports them to his world. During a rather neat free fall sequence Tet explains the rules of his world. Shiro and Sora having picked up on the basic rules of the world then challenge their way into town. While trying to get a room in town they hear of a throne ascension challenge going on. They then witness the granddaughter of the previous king, Steph, challenging the tournament front-runner, Kurami, to poker. Sora and Shiro notice that Kurami is cheating but are not entirely certain how. Sora then tells Steph after she loses that Kurami was cheating and the siblings go up to their room. Steph then shows up at their room demanding to know how Kurami cheated. Sora offers up a game of rock paper scissors. If Steph wins they give her a hint on how she was cheated if he wins then she must do any favor he asks. Steph then tries to out-think Sora which was not the best strategy and loses. Sora’s favor is for Steph to fail in love with him. He claims to Shiro that his plan is brilliant and he’ll get all of her stuff when she falls in love with him. Shiro points out that he could have just asked for all her stuff and his perverted subconscious got the better of his judgement. Steph was surprisingly smitten by the idea of her falling in love with him, although unwilling to complete admit to herself. Later, after some antagonizing from Kurami, the siblings decide that they will be king and prove that Steph’s grandfather was not a fool.

They challenge Kurami, who suggests an unusual game of chess where the pieces can think for themselves. Basically, Kurami was planning on using magic from her elf friend, Fiel, to brainwash the opponents pieces. Sora noting that interactions are not Shiro’s strong point takes over the lead of the troops. Eventually after getting Kurami’s Queen to join their side, Sora and Shiro win the game. The coronation ceremony for Sora and Shiro is interrupted due to a misunderstanding that there could only be one King/Queen. The siblings have a marathon session of games ending in a draw. They finally decide there is nothing to stop them from having two leaders. During the coronation ceremony, Sora declares war on all other races. Later, Tet shows up and formally challenges the siblings to a rematch after they have collected all the race pieces.

After that, Steph gets rather angry at the siblings for seemingly doing nothing while she was dealing with the politics and economics of the country. She then challenged them several times to get them to do some of the work and lost every time. It turns out they had been gaining information on the country’s political and economic system the whole time. They were also trying to find out more information on the other races. The siblings find out about a large library that the previous king lost to a Flugel, a powerful angelic-like species, by the name of Jabril. The siblings challenge Jabril to a game of Shiritori, a common word connection game in Japan, for her everything or their Earth knowledge. The twist being that anything they say for the game will either materialize or dematerialize if it’s already in the room. Eventually, Sora wins by doing something that would have killed Jabril moments before he would die. Jabril then becomes their ‘slave’.

Jabril however has absolutely no real knowledge of how to defeat the siblings’ first major opponent, the Werebeasts. It turns out that Jabril had previously challenged the Werebeasts, lost and had her memories of the game erased. This had also happened several times for the Elves and the king of Imanity (human race). It turns out that, however, Steph’s grandfather’s memories were not erased. However, he was not skilled enough to actually beat them even with the knowledge of the game. Thus he entrusted his knowledge in a set of notes only accessible by a secret room after his death. Of which Steph has the only key. With the knowledge in these notes, the siblings challenge the Werebeasts, betting the race piece in the process.

Sora challenges Kurami for her help and she accepts on the condition he bet the race piece. The game they play is a version of Reversi. Basically, the player is also betting their memories. Whenever you lose, you lose memories, up to the point where you could disappear from exist which almost happens to Sora. His saving grace was his faith in Shiro who continued to remember him. Shiro eventually wins the game and Sora is restored. Sora’s requests from Kurami were to keep each other’s memories and alter Fiel’s memories. The game was more of a trust building exercise then anything else.

The fight with the Werebeasts finally occurs. It is your main 4 of Sora, Shiro, Steph, and Jabril vs 1 Izuna, an 8-year-old ambassador Werebeast. For Izuna, based upon her lack of real challenge and that she sees the game as part of her duty she never really enjoys the games. The game they play is a rather strange shooting game. You have a lovey dovey gun which has love bullets that if you hit someone with they fall in love with you. Hitting NPCs raises your love power and hitting an ally raises their love power to max but they turn into a love zombie momentarily. The object is to hit your opponents and have them fall in love with you. The game’s design is such that the Werebeast’s are the only ones that can cheat and even without cheating are still at a major advantage. As the game goes on it becomes abundantly clear that your two best players are Izuna and Shiro. Shiro later appears to sacrifice herself. This is in fact a ruse. She and Sora eventually have an unknowing Steph shoot Izuna, who admits to finally enjoying herself during the game, to win. Later the Shrine Maiden of the Werebeasts shows up to challenge for a rematch. Sora intentionally causes it to be a draw so that both sides could keep their race pieces and work together. Basically, Sora acknowledges that the way to beat Tet is for all the races to come together. And thus the series ends.

Commentary

I love the concept of No Game No Life. That cannot be understated. The complete twist on the typical fantasy series is just amazing. I mean literally you could argue that based upon skill set alone Sora and Shiro are the most powerful beings in their universe. I mean literally they’ve already defeated a god. Yet they are physically weak complete shut-ins with minimal human interface beyond a computer screen. They are just vastly intelligent. I like series where you can highlight intelligence of a character. Also, intelligence is actually quantifiable vice winning a fight because of friendship or heart. I know that you can get a boost from such things, but it’s such a cop-out.

I’ll admit a simple fact right now. I am not a lolicon, at least not in perverse sense. I like lolis as characters. They are cute, sweet, innocent, and usually funny. Also many of them despite their age are very mature characters. I’m just not a fan of a ten-year old girl flashing her panties. Shiro does this way too freaking much. I get it, the series is an ecchi series, and that’s what they do in ecchi series but seriously it’s too much. That’s ignoring the sheer number of bath scenes in the series too. I mean you could probably get away with it once as a joke, but there has to be some anger or embarrassment involved. Even then not a huge fan of it. As a note, this did not affect my opinion of Shiro who I love as a character, but it did hurt the series overall.

As a note, if you haven’t realized it yet I love Sora and Shiro as characters. Aside from being vastly intelligent, their personalities are just amazing. The weird this is that you don’t even get their full backstory. All you get is a brief sequence where Shiro explains that she was in a lab at a very young age and was told to just play games. She would always win and found it really boring. A few years later she finally meets her mom and her new brother Sora. Sora at some point promised Shiro they would always be together. You don’t even get Sora’s background really other than a passing comment by Kurami that implies his life has been horrible. The only adverse affect you see is them finding the real world boring and not liking real human interaction. Although, you could say their inability to be apart might also be an adverse affect. Sora’s ability to make the opponents play into his hand is just great. Shiro is hilarious to me because she plays the ignorant ten-year old card so perfectly even though she’s probably the most mature character on the show. However, when she acts her age she’s adorable. Both of them are characters that are bred from their upbringing. She was never really able to be a kid and he masks pain behind his personality.

As much as I love Sora and Shiro, there is minimal character development for others in this series. It really boils down to you have a 12 episode series and there wasn’t enough time. I wanted to get behind Steph as your third protagonist but they did nothing with her character at all. Basically, her and Jabril were just comic relief. Honestly, you got more character development from Kurami who’s not even in half the episodes. This is a series that could have been beyond amazing, but a time crunch made worse. As a note I still loved this series, its writing is amazing. However, in order to get more out of this series it needs a 2nd season. The ending of this series feels like the beginning of a completely new journey. And yes, I know I have said that before.

Conclusions

No Game No Life is a series with a great overall concept. Your main two characters have strong depth to their characterizations. The series could use less exploitation of a ten year-old and more characterization given to its other main characters. It is a series that has great writing and really needs a second season. No Game No Life is a series that I would suggest to someone who likes fantasy series, but is bored of the same plot over and over again. Really if you aren’t into fantasy series, but love a more intelligent this ones good for that as well. Give this a go if you’ve never seen it, it won’t disappoint.