Watercrown Productions

Watercrown Productions presents its first scanlation – Liar Game #98!

by on Jan.22, 2010, under Scanlations

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Now to answer your pressing question: what is a Liar Game, and what does it do?

I’m glad you asked.

Liar Game is a manga by Shinobu Kaitani, best described as Death Note meets Leverage meets Yu-Gi-Oh!: a psychological drama centered around its eponymous tournament, and the most unlikely contestant you could ever imagine.

Meet Nao Kanzaki. She’s sweet, idealistic, honest to a fault – and naive on top of everything else. When a mysterious package arrives at her door, she ends up roped into the Liar Game, a high-stakes tournament of conmen where the winners make millions and the losers wind up in crushing debt.

Needless to say, she quickly realizes she’s out of her depth, and when she loses her $1,000,000 pot to a man she thought she could trust, she ends up having to recruit the aid of Shinichiro Akiyama, an ace conman fresh out of prison for defrauding a major corporation (actually a bunch of scumbags whose pyramid scheme ultimately led to his mother’s suicide). He seems like a mercenary at first, offering to help Nao only in exchange for half her winnings, but when Nao – true to form – tries to help the man who cheated her by giving him her half of the winnings to save him from his million-dollar debt to the Liar Game Tournament, he follows up with his own half, and the two wind up partners in their own scheme, to throw a wrench in the gears of the Liar Game by fighting their way up its ranks and bailing out the other players as they go: if the LGT makes money by forcing its losers into debt, then they can destroy it by shouldering all the debt themselves.

Thus far they’ve made some friends along the way, such as Fukunaga, who was first introduced in the second round as a ruthless adversary, and Akagi, formerly a member of the opposing team in the third round. Which brings us to their enemy: the sociopathic mastermind, Yokoya. Yokoya is all about manipulation and control: in one chapter, we get a taste of his true ambition when he calls Hitler of all people a slacker. He used the same strategy that Nao and Akiyama hit upon in the first revival round to literally dominate his opponents, turning them into his minions in the third; fortunately, his Machiavellian methods were not as foolproof as he imagined, and not only were Nao and Akiyama able to break his fascistic control over his team in the third round, but Nao herself was able to tell him to his face that for all his talk, in the end, he couldn’t rule over squat.

Having technically lost the third round despite beating Yokoya, Nao, Akiyama and Fukunaga pulled through the second revival round, and now it’s time for the qualifiers for the fourth round: the Pandemic Game, a simulated plague scenario where “normal” players collaborate to produce “vaccines” and “infected” players run the risk of “spreading the disease” to others. A player can only win if they have “normal” status and four vaccines at the end of the time limit; the twist, however, is that the players can only ever know their own status for sure. Yokoya exploits this, paying off a pair of accomplices to help him cheat his way into an early lead: at the start of this chapter, Yokoya has managed to sabotage Akiyama’s attempt to establish a rapport with the other players, convince three players to join his side and two more to drop out of the game entirely now that they’ve achieved their victory condition. Of course, Yokoya’s victory isn’t quite in the bag yet…

In this chapter, Yokoya discovers that his three new members aren’t forthcoming about which one is infected; in the meantime, Nao, Akiyama, Akagi and their team’s fourth member “Four-Eyes” have a discussion about selflessness and the nature of trust, and Nao attempts to use the fruits of this discussion to convince the two dropouts to come back and help. Her impassioned argument falls on deaf ears, leaving Nao in despair, but as the results for the second period are announced and Yokoya gloats at his impending victory, Akiyama declares that Nao’s actions have actually secured the win for them instead. What’s his plan? Find out next time!

Special thanks to RHDN’s DarknessSaviour, kern, Paul Jensen, filler and BRPXQZME – in short, everyone who contributed in my translation help topic.

And yeah, it’s 100,000,000 yen, not $1,000,000. It’s close enough to get the point across.


14 Comments for this entry

  • anonymous

    thanks for the upload 🙂

    how often do you plan on uploading updates?

  • Ryusui

    Often enough to catch up, I hope. :3

    This one took me a few hours spread across four days; hopefully I’ll be able to put out at least one a week.

  • anonymous

    wow, that would be awesome 🙂

    thank you very much for the chapter. hope to read more in the future.

  • grateful reader

    Thx alot for the translation. I wander why this manga is not as popular as it supposed to be?

  • Ryusui

    No idea. Maybe it’s the magazine it runs in; maybe it’s the “thinkiness” of it. Death Note’s probably the closest thing to it in terms of headgames, but Liar Game also throws in a few extra levels of psychological analysis for good measure: it’s a bit like comparing Risk to, say, Disgaea. Furthermore, most of the non-protagonist characters are pretty one-note; it’s almost a lampshade hanging that the in the Pandemic Game, most of the players are addressed by a label rather than their names. There’s none of the moral ambiguity that makes Death Note so interesting – not to mention contentious. So it’s obviously not going to be everyone’s cup of tea.

    I imagine it’s just a matter of time before it gets licensed…and I hope whoever licenses it does a good job.

  • Vin

    I don’t think that it’s good style to release a manga someone else is already scanlating without even asking, but I guess that’s probably a common thing in the scanlation scene.

    How you mock Cityshrimp’s scanlations on the RHDN forums (and on his/her blog), though, that’s just impolite and haughty.

    Both Cityshrimp’s translations and your work are good, both fueled by passion for the hobby. And neither of both deserves to be discredited like that.

  • Zero Presence

    >I don’t think that it’s good style to release a manga someone else is already scanlating

    lol. Already managed to forget how Cityshrimp started on Liar Game? Null were sure pissed.

    Thanks for your work, Watercrown. I was thankful to Cityshrimp for picking it up when they did, but I’m likewise thankful that you guys have shown up now. Actually nicely done, as well.

  • S.D.R

    Dude, why don’t you cooperate with Cityshrimp instead of trying to beat him at scanlating or something? One of you could scanlate chapter 99 while the other scanlates chapter 100 and everyone wins.

    Don’t be so childish and mean, Cityshrimp was doing his best and with good speed.

    Anyway, your release was good and I hope you keep up with it, but as I said, I think it would be wiser to form a team or something.

  • Mitsuki

    Cityshrimp started scanlating after Null had stopped for more than a month. If he hadn’t been there, Liar Game would have been forgotten by many people.

    I also think you should cooperate; this way you could both work on Liar Game and releases would be faster~

    I really hope that neither of you stop working on Liar Game because of this… (@_@)

  • Ryusui

    I offered to cooperate. Cityshrimp turned me down.

    http://cityshrimp.wordpress.com/2010/01/14/liar-game-chapter-97-trust/#comment-264

    I’m not the kind of guy who uses “it’s just a hobby” as an excuse to do a poor job. Fan translations should set a good example. They should aspire to more than simply “getting the job done”: they should aspire to quality as well. It took me almost three years to hone my English script of Breath of Fire 2 to perfection, and I would not have settled for anything less. Fortunately, I’m aiming for a more reasonable time frame for my scanlations – I have no idea if I’ll achieve such a goal, but I aim to finish at least one a week.

    I’ll keep working on Liar Game until someone else shows up who can do a better job of it. I’ve got #99 done but I’m waiting for someone to go over it first; #98 came out with some embarrassing mistakes in it, and I’m currently working on #100. I’ve done some nice work with the color front page, I think. ^_^

  • CityShrimp

    Hi Ryusui,

    It was surprising to see that someone else already scanlated Chapter 98. I’m also glad to hear you’re going to continue on this and have a group dedicated to doing so. I was hoping that you would have at least informed me that you were going to start scanlating Liar Game. Seeing that this is but a hobby to me, I wouldn’t have hesitated to have someone else do it. In the case of null, I started scanlating two months after his last release. Not to mention two other scanlators have scanned prior to me. So it never crossed my mind that I should’ve asked for his permission.

    But in any case, the only thing I ask is that you will continue to scanlate Liar Game. As for me, I’ll be looking for other mangas to scanlate.

    -CityShrimp

  • Ryusui

    I love this manga. I’ll scanlate it as long as I have the time and ability to do so. :3

    This is, as noted, my first scanlation, so apologies if I came off as unduly rude jumping in like that.

  • CityShrimp

    No worries, I don’t mind that you decided to take over. And it’s good to hear that you’re passionate about Liar Game. 🙂

  • yaaay

    Hey Ryusui I like your scans. I will let it be said that these unwritten rules in scanlating are silly because without competition we end up with this liar game situation. All I ask is that if you start scanlating it, can you please stick with it. First null started then they got incredibly slow, so project liargame started, and soon he stopped because null started up. Not surprisingly they stopped again so cityshrimp starts and then cityshrimp stops because you have started. We have all seen what a lack of competition has done to liar game scanlators, and i fear the cycle will repeat. Please stick with it, and dont let any other person or group stop you from scanlating (unless you just dont want to do it).

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