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I’m a sucker for gambling your life for a game subgenre of horror manga, so I had super high hopes for Life is Money! The manga is about Meguru who is alone in trying to pay off an expensive surgery for his little sister and will do anything to get the money, a very similar plot to, though you may burn to ash. Except without fanservice and just psychological chaos. Meguru is invited to join a game where he gambles his life for the opportunity to win over 50 million yen. But this game requires patrons to be imprisoned for 10 days with each day ... requiring them to play a dice game that gambles each of their six senses away.

At first, I genuinely thought I was going to give this manga a 10/10, but spoiler alert and a general warning this manga straight-up hate crimes and kills its only trans character. On top of that, the female characters in the story don’t get any development but are only used as objects for the male character's story progression. The silver lining to this manga is the art style and the creative renditions of what a person experiencing mental distress looks like. So tread lightly if you are interested in reading this one.

The narrative is like Invasion of the Body Snatchers meets your typical edgy high school manga. Scumbag Loser follows a high school kid that is almost at the bottom of the male hierarchy and discovers a way to boost his status by lying about getting a girlfriend with photoshopped images of his deceased childhood best friend—who happens to transfer to his school the following day.

To be real, this manga has an original premise but falls completely flat trying to tell it. The main issue for me is that this manga suffers from going too big and beyond when it should have only been focused ... on Masahiko and Haruka’s power struggle while discovering Masahiko’s dark family secret. Instead, we have plot points explained to us rather than unfolding and the main protagonist that goes into a coma for a month which is a narrative red flag for laziness. Masahiko’s development as a character goes from unlikeable to heroic with little-to-no development in between.

I’d say the first 6 chapters are maybe worth reading if you are curious, but I’d do yourself a favor and read something else.

I read the manga and I was honestly not too impressed after the first 70 chapters because it never develops into a character-driven narrative but instead it stays 100% plot-driven. And unfortunately, the anime suffers the same mistakes as the manga, but worse. The anime doesn’t bring anything revolutionary to the survival horror sub-genre, but instead completely neuters the franchise from its horror. As the audience, we are robbed of having any kind of suspenseful score to enhance the tension and fear between characters battling off the masked antagonists. Instead, the aesthetics of this anime keep it as a happy-go-lucky survival comedy where all the ... characters are single goal-oriented and are one-dimensional. Unfortunately, the anime relies heavily on showing off underage titties and panties. On top of that, we don’t get to see the real hard-hitting carnage that was portrayed in the manga, but instead, we are left to see characters burst like red water balloons. If you are still curious to watch this, only watch the first 2 episodes the rest of the anime is a waste of your time.