Battle Royale 5 (Ultimate Edition)

In all honesty, I was kind of dreading this volume.  I knew the showdowns with Mitsuko and Kiriyama and the wind-down weren’t going to last three volumes.  So… yeah, there was a lot of talking involved.  A LOT.  At one point, there was two chapters dedicated to the extreme mental battle Shu was waging with himself during the split second he had to pull the trigger and shoot Kiriyama through the head.  There’s a long speech at the beginning about how Shu wants to believe the good in everybody, including Mitsuko and Kiriyama.

Shogo also gave lots and lots and lots of speeches.  He has a flashback, but he may give a long speech before the flashback, he gives a long speech to his girlfriend during the flashback, and then he gives a long speech after the flashback.  Then another one when the game is pretty much finished.  You know the type of thing.  Moral stuff, what Shu should keep in mind, how he should protect Noriko… the same stuff we’ve been hearing through the entire series.  Again, maybe my patience for this is less since I’m reading three volumes at once, but I kind of hated both of the last two mega-volumes for the lectures I got over and over and over again.

Shogo’s flashback wansn’t actually that bad.  He fights with his girlfriend right before his class gets drafted into the game, and he scares her off when he actually plays and kills a great many of his classmates.  In the end, something terrible happens that he can’t forgive himself for, which he then decides to use as a lesson for Shu and Nori.  Later, we find out that the government got him addicted to morphine in order to ensure his cooperation with the media blitz surrounding his win, and they also gave him an STD for no real good reason.

The fight between Kiriyama and Mitsuko was pretty disappointing.  It was cut with flashbacks for Mitsuko and a lecture from the Shogo camp.  It was also pretty one-sided, and Mitsuko kind of cracks up in a weird way right away.  For whatever reason, Kiriyama just watches her mind go, and… I don’t know, sympathizes with her ravings?  I wans’t exactly sure what was going on here.  There is a head explosion scene which is one of the most detailed and graphic illustrations I’ve ever seen in a comic.

The fight between Kiriyama and Shogo et al is pretty cool, though I groaned the entire way through as Kiriyama literally kept pulling a Michael Meyers act and getting up and somehow avoiding every major trauma.  I mean… shooting the guy through the head didn’t bring him down.  His flashback is slipped in here somewhere, and it’s somewhat unsatisfying, but explains him well enough.  After he sustains major damage, I’m not exactly sure what Kiriyama is doing, he sort of floats through the air in an extremely contorted position for a few chapters.

The end of the series is decent, though I preferred it with the fake-out ending, only because I like Shogo and I really, really didn’t want to hear anything more out of Shuuya and Noriko.  The ending actually reminds you of why the series is cool.  It’s a good idea, and it brings up all the weird totalitarian government stuff again, along with the politics of the game.  Battle Royale is an awesome idea, and of course people reading it are going to be looking for the extreme violence that the series is good at dishing up.  It just… it should never have been stretched out as long as it was.  The filler is honestly terrible.