A death game with much more emphasis on death than the game. I'm still not even sure if this is a genuine effort.

~!!!!!!GORE WARNING!!!!!!~

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Dead Word Puzzle is a death game manga by Kouhei Tajika and it’s probably one of the worst. Not because it strives to be bad like some other death games, it doesn’t really have anything majorly offensive to the senses… it’s more just the fact that I didn’t think for a second that person who made this tried. At all.

There is no build up or explanation for the death game whatsoever. We get students going to class, arriving at class and finding crossword puzzles, and then a death game mascot character is there. Six pages. Six pages and the death game has already started.

I mean the manga is only four chapters long after all. We gotta get this shit moving and fast. That’s why immediately after seeing this stupid ass crossword puzzle mascot, the students go to leave the classroom and bam the gore starts.

...I know death games gotta have crazy and ridiculous gore, but they are literally just exploding into blood. No variation, no perceived cause, no warning… like apart from the death game mascot just being there, there has been no introduction of the death game whatsoever. Like as you’re reading the first chapter, you have to rationalize what’s happening within your head. As the awful creator of this piece of shit certainly isn’t going to help.

1. Quite a lot of the other death games often happen in schools, so therefore this one also happens in a school.
2. That being said a class of 36 awful interchangeable generic characters is far too many for a manga of 4 chapters. There’s no point in even doing that thing other death games do where you’re shown like all of the characters’ faces and names and the ones that are crossed out are already dead. That’s always seemed like a futile effort to me in the first place, though. Like are they seriously thinking I’m going to look at that and even remember a fraction of those characters? Their appearances OR their names?
3. He obviously cannot keep 36 characters around so he comes to the best solution he could think of. Kill 24 of them off right in the first chapter. All of them die via blood explosions. Except for one. Since it’s a female character and also she actually talks quite a bit in the first chapter, that of course means she has to die a worse death. Rather than exploding with blood, her intestines just sort of schlorp out of her entirely. Again, for absolutely no reason…
4. Thus, we arrive at the actual start of the true death game. Most others only require one person to die to scare the rest into believing that the death game is a real thing, but no, this one needed 24. Because that totally wasn’t overboard or anything.

Honestly, it's so bad that if it weren't for the fact that this guy has at least one other death gamey looking series, I would actually consider the possibility of this being an attempt to parody death games. Like I just kept thinking that there's no way this could be genuine.

It's bad enough reading a genuinely awful death game, it's even worse reading one that's awful on purpose. At least fucking try. But as unbelievable as this manga makes it seem, I think he actually did try.

...It's still really hard to tell, though. No plot. No character development. Give me something, holy shit.

This protagonist who doesn't resemble any other anime/manga character whatsoever at all is just... his entire character is that he's bored with his life and books so when he sees a dead body he thinks

"wow that's pretty fucking cool. It'd be great if I could see more of those."

Then the only other character of note other than the girl who tries to takes a moral stance and thus is immediately killed off is the stalker girl character.

And... there's nothing to her character except that she's a stalker character and even though she is obsessed with protagonist guy and wants to be together with him forever, she just tricks and kills him at the end and that was the end of the manga.

But oh wait! This is a death game series, ISN'T IT?

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GOTTA END WITH THAT ENDING STINGER WHERE... WHERE THE MASCOT SHOWS UP SOMEWHERE ELSE TO... initiate... a bigger and larger version of the... of the death game.

...Fuck this.

#Conclusion: this wasn't worth reviewing but I did it#

There's no other score I can give this but a 1 out of 100. Could arguably give it a full on zero, but if nothing else, I'll give it that one point just because it was only four chapters long rather than a full length death game.

But you know in exchange for only having to read four chapters of a death game rather than like thirty or so, those four chapters are just going to be especially awful and illegible.

So you know, at that point, is it even still worth it...?

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