Clear the Game, or Die. - "As the Gods Will" (神さまの言うとおり)

 I am going to introduce As the Gods Will. It is a horror, suspense action manga written by Muneaki Kaneshiro and illustrated by Akeji Fujimura. This manga is devided into two parts. The first part was serialized in an extra edition of Shonen Magazine from 2011 to 2012, and the second part was in Weekly Shonen Magazine from 2013 to 2017. The comic books were published by Kodansha. The first part is 5 volumes, and the second part is 21 volumes.

The hero of the first part is Shun Takahata. He is a second-year high school student who is tired of boring days. But his boredom is disrupted one morning when a Dharma doll suddenly appears in his classroom. He becomes involved in "Daruma-san ga koronda" (a game like “Red light, green light”) with his classmates under the rule that if they moved, they would die immediately.

The second part depicts a death game which occurrs in a different place from the first part, and the main characters are different as well. The hero of this part is a high school senior, Yasuto Akashi. One day he has a heated argument with his best friend at school and goes home without taking classes. After a while, a statue of Kinjiro Ninomiya visits Yasuto’s house and takes him somewhere. There, Yasuto will be forced to join a life-threating game with other high school students. 

The second part can be enjoyed independently even if you have not read the first part, but it is more enjoyable if you have. Please see it with your own eyes if they can they survive under the difficult circumstance where they die immediately if they can't clear the game. By the way, this manga includes quite a lot of brutal scenes, so I don't recommend it to people who don't like such terrible expressions of violence.

Work of Reference: Wikipedia. https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/神さまの言うとおり (accessed 2022-11-17).

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