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After a boost in relevancy from Netflix, the three-episode Alice in Borderland anime is now available for streaming! It’s an isekai but not that kind. How do the murder shenanigans pan out and is it any good?
This series is streaming on HIDIVE.
Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed by the participants in this chatlog are not the views of Anime News Network.
Spoiler Warning for discussion of the series ahead.
Steve, I don’t know if you’ve noticed but there is a metric fuckton of isekai anime this season, and I would do just about anything to avoid talking about it for another week. So whattaya say we just pick something at random off of streaming and get away from it all?
Sounds good to me! We might as well avoid that deep dark rabbit hole while we can, before the summer season is in full swing and there’s no escape for any of us. But here in the anime borderlands, sometimes you gotta be careful what you wish for.
Look, at the end of the day, some milquetoast anime boy is always going to magically transported to some kind of parallel world. There’s no stopping that. It’s coded into the elementary particles that make up our universe. And given that inevitability, I’d much rather watch the option with more exploding heads. So without further ado, here we are with Alice in Borderland!
Yeah I’d only heard of it thanks to Netflix showing me the live-action banner every time I log on, because thanks to this column, their recommendation algorithm for me is screwed beyond all hope.
You’ll also recognize this as the impetus behind every isekai series ever, so there really is no escape for us.
Of course, he also has his designated dad-friend Karube to keep his boyish aspirations in check.
I don’t think this opening arc of Alice in Borderland really knows what to do with Arisu besides prop him up as the protagonist. Like, he goes from being the above weenie to being the only guy to figure out the very obvious clue in the first death game, despite the fact that Karube had already been established as the “brains” of the operation. His personality fluctuates all over the place in the subsequent episodes too. I understand he’s under a lot of stress, but the anime doesn’t do a very good job of giving those swings the space they need.
If I’m Karube I’m socking him in the mouth for that particular keikaku.
Goodbye Uma Musume. Hello, Uma Murderer.
Also we kind of skipped over two of our main characters but that’s only because the show does too.
Also that’s not me being coy, they literally bang out of NOWHERE.
And most of them proceed to immediately get horse-stomped, so don’t get too attached.
Hey now let’s not besmirch the good name of High-Rise Invasion. And actually, watching this OVA cemented for me that High-Rise Invasion really was a good example of what I’m looking for in a braindead death game anime. By comparison, Alice in Borderland is just nowhere near campy enough to take advantage of whatever promise its premise might have.
I mean, on one hand, Arisu’s powerfully undercooked character development is definitely a consequence of us having only three half-hour episodes to work with here. But on the other hand, yeah, I don’t know how many more stories I need about This Guy.
It’s especially egregious here because it insists that him having psychological issues from his family not loving him gave him like, ninja powers to not be spotted by the killer? Like nah dude, that mask just blocks his peripheral vision. Your trauma didn’t give you super powers.
Heavy is the yoke of the horse mask.
Right? Like the showrunners here seem to be very big sticklers about their rules, but I guess having your own gun is cool with them. I’m not a professional death game civil engineer, though, so what do I know.
This is the most melodramatic part of the OVA and everyone spends it wearing this stupid headgear. Exquisite.
“Also ignore that winning the last game required working together pls k thnx.”
For all of about 8 seconds for a plot beat that never gets to come up again. Especially weird since Karube is the only one we see hear that message and by the end of this episode he’s not exactly available to share it with anyone.
This episode also wields flash-forwards in an impressively clumsy way that interrupts any tension the game might have had. Maybe it worked better in the manga, but the runtime is short enough that they really should have just done it linearly.
I actually love that this immediately defuses the situation. Chota saves their friendship by being the most awkward dude ever. Now that’s a real tale of inspiration.
So yeah, I guess these OVAs more or less cover the story’s prologue, and the main thrust of Alice in Borderland is Arisu’s quest for revenge. Which I can’t say I’m too enthused by, since he’s not a terribly interesting character, for reasons we’ve already covered.
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