Darwin Game - This is turning out to be really good. I'm not sure if the author is a single person or a group of people (goes by the name Flipflop and I think it's more than 1 person) but whoever is doing this has a way better grasp on the 'fighting with crazy abilities' then pretty much almost any big name guy I know of. In a typical 'real life hardcore MMORPG' where people have powers like teleport and throw fireballs, the main character team/guild made use of some fairly mundane ability including the finale of the bloodbath arc where their plan to negotiate for the hostage back involves the hostage's ability to discern the truthfulness of every statement (so they can mix lies with truth while negotiating and the hostage will have a rough idea of what the plan to rescue him is because he knows exactly what is true and what is not). The girl with Laplace's Demon as her ability (she can calculate the outcome of everything based on the laws of physics though because she's not very strong physically this means she can't always dodge bullets and stuff because her body is too slow to keep up with what she knows) being defeated by the guy who can teleport is also surprisingly scientifically rigorous since she can't calculate any ability that doesn't obey the laws of physics. Oh yeah and the whole thing about guys with machine guns and kevlar having an advantage over fireball throwing guys is a great nod to modern science. I never quite understood why various manga that want to mix technology with magic would think throwing a fireball would have any advantage over a guy with a machine gun. In fact in this bloodbath arc it turns out having a lot of grenades tends to trump any elemental stuff besides machine gun elemental and only really top tier fantasy powers like teleportation is even effective against buying a lot of grenades. It's a great mix of fantasy meets technology and a very logical battle of wits between special powers.
Fate Kalid Prism Ilya 3 - The magical girl spinoff that, despite being pretty bad at various times, somehow manages to capture everything that was cool in the original Fate Stay Night (Eric and I both linked the video from the first season). In typical Fate fashion there's always this obligatory fight against Gilgamesh because Typemoon has some kind of Gilgamesh fetish, but this time it's the Emiya siblings with double Unlimited Blade Works against Gilgamesh's Gate of Babylon. In the Fate universe, Gilgamesh is some kind of super rich Final Fantasy style ninja who just gets a couple hundred legendary weapons with his Gate of Babylon ability and throw them for mega damage, and in the original FSN this was stopped by Shirou Emiya, pirater extraordinare who bootleged an incredible number of fake legendary weapons to cancel out Gilgamesh's ability. Never mind that it's said the pirated legendary weapons are all a grade below the real thing and shouldn't be able to do that, though it looked pretty cool. Well, this time around someone did remember that the pirated legendary weapons can't beat the real thing, so big sister Ilya (or Kuroi, in this case, one of Ilya's split personalities) makes the world go round again by providing double the amount of pirated legendary weapons to make up for a lack of quality. All that's missing is Ilya picking up a sniper rifle and head shotting legendary heroes but maybe we'll have to wait for Fate Kalid Prism Ilya 4 for that to happen. Honestly anything Shirou Emiya ever did that was sort of cool in the Fate universe (and he did quite a few things that are cool), big sister Ilya can do it ten times better.
Liar Game - Nao Kanzaki's guaranteed to win plan fails once again. This is getting really, really dumb. I'd argue the intelligence of the characters have regressed as the story went on.
Alice of the Borderlands - One of the many examples of how to suck at the 'real life hardcore game' genre. It seems like a lot of writers thinks that people will just randomly backstab each other for no reason whatsoever and this somehow is supposed to be representative of the darkness of the humanity. Look, I get that humans aren't hard to manipulate, but you usually wouldn't expect a bunch of people to start stabbing each other in the back for no reason whatsoever. Apparently at least half of the participants in Borderlands is some kind of psychotic serial killer which is why they all start killing each other even when the games they play offers no incentive to backstab your teammates. The height and probably the only good story of this manga is the blackjack arc where Cheshire used a gun to defeat the Las Vegas legendary blackjack player and that's actually quite clever as you'd expect to have some kind of mathematical nonsense for a guy who thus far has been portrayed as a 'brain' type character to overcome his 10 to 1 chip disadvantage, but in a surprising nod to reality Cheshire was smart enough to realize that not only is the Las Vegas blackjack legend better at blackjack than him, even if not he's not overcoming a 10 to 1 chip disadvantage so using a gun was the correct choice.
Fate Kalid Prism Ilya 3 - The magical girl spinoff that, despite being pretty bad at various times, somehow manages to capture everything that was cool in the original Fate Stay Night (Eric and I both linked the video from the first season). In typical Fate fashion there's always this obligatory fight against Gilgamesh because Typemoon has some kind of Gilgamesh fetish, but this time it's the Emiya siblings with double Unlimited Blade Works against Gilgamesh's Gate of Babylon. In the Fate universe, Gilgamesh is some kind of super rich Final Fantasy style ninja who just gets a couple hundred legendary weapons with his Gate of Babylon ability and throw them for mega damage, and in the original FSN this was stopped by Shirou Emiya, pirater extraordinare who bootleged an incredible number of fake legendary weapons to cancel out Gilgamesh's ability. Never mind that it's said the pirated legendary weapons are all a grade below the real thing and shouldn't be able to do that, though it looked pretty cool. Well, this time around someone did remember that the pirated legendary weapons can't beat the real thing, so big sister Ilya (or Kuroi, in this case, one of Ilya's split personalities) makes the world go round again by providing double the amount of pirated legendary weapons to make up for a lack of quality. All that's missing is Ilya picking up a sniper rifle and head shotting legendary heroes but maybe we'll have to wait for Fate Kalid Prism Ilya 4 for that to happen. Honestly anything Shirou Emiya ever did that was sort of cool in the Fate universe (and he did quite a few things that are cool), big sister Ilya can do it ten times better.
Liar Game - Nao Kanzaki's guaranteed to win plan fails once again. This is getting really, really dumb. I'd argue the intelligence of the characters have regressed as the story went on.
Alice of the Borderlands - One of the many examples of how to suck at the 'real life hardcore game' genre. It seems like a lot of writers thinks that people will just randomly backstab each other for no reason whatsoever and this somehow is supposed to be representative of the darkness of the humanity. Look, I get that humans aren't hard to manipulate, but you usually wouldn't expect a bunch of people to start stabbing each other in the back for no reason whatsoever. Apparently at least half of the participants in Borderlands is some kind of psychotic serial killer which is why they all start killing each other even when the games they play offers no incentive to backstab your teammates. The height and probably the only good story of this manga is the blackjack arc where Cheshire used a gun to defeat the Las Vegas legendary blackjack player and that's actually quite clever as you'd expect to have some kind of mathematical nonsense for a guy who thus far has been portrayed as a 'brain' type character to overcome his 10 to 1 chip disadvantage, but in a surprising nod to reality Cheshire was smart enough to realize that not only is the Las Vegas blackjack legend better at blackjack than him, even if not he's not overcoming a 10 to 1 chip disadvantage so using a gun was the correct choice.
