Schillok wrote:
No, go manga. This is Schillok's opinion.
The games are similar, but the drama leaves a lot of things (and characters) out. I have rather a bit of "filler" (What fillers? It is the original anyway and I can't really remember something that was just made to drag the manga out.) than dumbed-down games and tactics.
And from what I remember... the acting wasn't great either. It is soap-opera quality.
Maybe knowing the "solutions"/outcome of a game influences the perception? Reading/watching how the game got turned around once more is the most interesting element after all. Rewatching/rereading it won't have the same tension.
Some of the games in the manga turn out completely differently, and for the worse. Many of the characters are just ridiculous and completely unlikeable in the manga (Fukunaga, for instance). The end of the Contraband game in the manga is absolutely dreadful and is more or less an insult to the characters involved; they tried to offer a reprieve, but it was too little, too late. For the record, re-watching Liar Game was just as fun for me as the first time around, so I dunno how your theory holds up. If something is truly good, it will withstand many, many watches and your appreciation of it likely isn't going to fade so easily. There are no "dumbed-down" tactics in the drama, considering the drama drastically improved on many of the resolutions to the games and made good characters (particularly in Season 2) where they were not presentable at all in the manga version.
Anyone is free to disagree, of course, but for anyone who is looking for an opinion, here's mine at length:
The manga, for me, just laid out a nice basis for the drama. It isn't drawn, written, or paced very well at all, but the games themselves are unique and the idea is an interesting one. The tone itself skirts a little on the ridiculous most of the time, which is why the drama is so fantastic--it knows exactly what it is and doesn't ask the actors to pretend they're not participating in something that could conceivably happen, unlike so many other J-dramas. The filming and, especially, the editing of Liar Game is the best I have seen in Japanese television because they really utilize their magnificently constructed sets with a lot of different angles that give the actors a real means of participating in the quality of it all. The music is also very fitting and serves well to underline the tone of the series, which is point-for-point consistent throughout, unlike the manga. As a result of their attention to detail and preservation of tone, the actors--particularly Suzuki Kosuke (whose character was awful in the manga, to reiterate) and Matsuda Shota--were able to deliver some very convincing performances.
As for the acting not being great--that's just Japanese dramas period. Japan doesn't have especially strong actors considering much of the acting "talent" are models/singers/personalities that are forged into actors by their representation companies (agents that are creating products, not actors). There are some stand-outs here and there, and Liar Game's drama does not ask you to forgo your perception of what good acting is. Merely, it is more about the games and all it requires of you is to invest your interest in the games and how the realistic and believable characters approach the games--instead of how it is in the manga, where you have to accept a number of secondary characters that make absolutely no sense whatsoever.
From my experience, Chinese and Korean actors are far, far better than the Japanese. Admittedly, my exposure to the former two is a little limited, but I can never take the Japanese actors seriously in actual confrontations; they do melodrama extremely well, but any sort of other conflict generally falls
completely flat in every instance I've ever seen--particularly anything involving action. Japanese actors tend to focus on going way, way over the top or just saying the lines without much conviction. This is why they do decently at average life situations in their filmed fiction, but may explain why they can't exactly convince me that they're capable of anything more. In their horror movies, they can't get over the theme of social isolation and all the horrors that come out of it (that, and "ghost cell phone worlds"). For horror, the Japanese are known for providing very, very excessive gore, but this does not appeal to normal audiences simply because A) they're usually underfunded, B) they are created with a very twisted sense of humor that isn't exactly applicable to everyone, and C) they come off as really campy, almost universally. When they aren't going with C, specifically, it all gets really out of hand and the focus of the narrative finds itself completely absent.
The best Japanese movie I've seen was Battle Royale, and it was remarkable for two things: the concept and the violence. Both of which were handled with a Western mindset, which is why the movie has received international acclaim that other Japanese movies do not (whereas Chinese and Korean movies are very often widely acclaimed overseas). The acting in Battle Royale was "decent", but all the same, it had to go far, far over the top to get anything out of it. It really comes down to the camp factor a lot of the time, but the social commentary of it all teamed with the whole package make it a good movie and a definite recommendation. On that same note, the two Death Note movies were good as well, but to its credit, the manga they were adapted from was actually fantastic, so that isn't really applicable to what we have here (although Battle Royale was based on a novel, which I have not read but would presume is at least all right). The problem many Japanese movies seem to have is they can't find out what kind of tone they are shooting for, and the actors seem to do their jobs aimlessly in many situations--without any sort of direction, they just produce inconsistent work from top to bottom, leaving you with a bad taste in your mouth by the end of it.
In conclusion here: Liar Game is a standout drama from a genre of otherwise lackluster Japanese productions, based on a manga that would--simply put in my opinion--not be worthwhile without it.
(For anyone interested in a bit more on Japanese filmmaking/television, figured I'd add that it also doesn't help that most J-dramas are filmed very quickly and with little finesse; they are nearly always star vehicles that are pushed out to meet the ratings quotas for the upcoming seasons and to help keep their 'actors' relevant in the grand scheme of things. Also, I don't mean to be overreaching here, but they really should invest in higher quality filming equipment and maybe a little post-production. Actually... do some pre-production, too, and plan out some creative shots beforehand, since if you're going to be working with actors that can't deliver, at least it should look pretty decent. We see indie filmmakers working with a budget that's only a fraction of a percent what they have to work with, so if they would maybe consider learning instead of churning out 10 dramas a year... well...)
One final note on Liar Game:
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