Darwin's Game TV Anime Details and Expectations.

Darwin's Game

Darwin's Game TV anime will start airing in Tokyo MX in January 2020. It began serialisation in 2013 and has been one of the biggest hits in the relatively new manga magazine : Bessatsu Shonen Champion. It currently has 3.6 million copies in print with 19 volumes out at the moment. In addition to this it is the first anime adaption of a series in Bessatsu Shonen Champion.

The studio in charge of the series is Nexus, a relatively new studio with few works under their name. like Granblue Fantasy. However, they have collaborated in a numbers of series before such as SHIROBAKO.

The staff is as following

Director - Yokumoto Yoshinobu
Series Composition - Shu Miyama (FLIPFLOPS MEMBER)
Music - Kenichirou Suehiro
Character Design - Kazuya Nakanishi

A relatively unexperienced director in charge of the series, his only previous work directing was Comics Girls another series by Nexus. He has ,however, a lot of experience as episode directors of various series. In this case, there is not a lot to expect but it is an upcoming director with significant experience in direction episodes and his only previous directorship over a series was a slice of life, comedy series, a rather different genre from Darwin's Game.

Series composition will be done by one of the members of the original author of the series so there is not much that could go wrong in that aspect. After all, the author himself should have a greater understand of his work than anyone else in distinguishing the right pace of the series.

Music is rather important for me and the person in charge seems to have a lot of experience working in series with a similar vibe, so this should not be an area of concern.

Character design is from the visuals rather similar to the original work and perhaps that is for the best. The person in charge does not seem to have a lot of experience character design but the visuals do not show any problems.

Darwin's Game story wise is reasonably far into its story, a recent announcement said it will soon enter its last arc. Its sales have not shown any particular upwards trend in volumes sales and it has been that way for the past few volumes at least when it comes to oricon and shoseki, depending on how seriously one takes them for. This has in fact make me hold a particular negative view of the potential of the anime in bringing about a surge in popularity of the series.

The death game genre is a trend that has gone down in recent times, it was a highly saturated  genre in animation a few years ago, with various series like Ousama Game, Killer bites and many others. Many of these series were not really popular. Darwin's Game at the beginning seems very much like a death game but it gradually develops into a battle series involving factions and various scenarios in which life and death are not always at stake. Whether this is something different enough for it to stand out is questionable. It is also not for me to decide this but for the Japanese audience.

In terms of content without going into spoilers, it seems like the series will be relatively fast paced to cover the first major arc and whether this can be made by Shu Miyama to feel natural will be a something hard to achieve.

The PVs do not show too much and judging from that the quality of the animation can be very misleading as it is usually packed for obvious reasons with the 'better' animated parts.