Action-packed fantasy dungeon RPG action manga. Review by JC Hallows.
One day, a mysterious email goes out to everyone across Japan containing one simple command — take this aptitude test, or be branded “Neutral.” College loner Shion initially ignores the message, but when news of the strange aptitude test floods the media, he decides to try it out…and receives the designation “Chaos.” Soon after, the world is transformed by a mysterious young girl into a video game-style RPG battle royale between the classic Dungeons and Dragons alignments of Law and Chaos. The goal: motivate humanity from the brink of extinction by exposing them to some real conflict. As a newly-minted demon lord, Shion has to learn to play the game…or face conquest by adventurers eager to loot his stronghold and level up.
Dungeon Battle Royale’s premise requires a little more suspension of disbelief than even the ordinarily wild starting points of most RPG and isekai series (for example…the whole nation regularly checks their email?), and right off the bat you’ll have to handwave a few obvious questions about how this godlike being’s plan is actually going to work. If you can get past that, however, the story chugs along at a rapid pace as Shion figures out the rules of his new world and plans out his victory over the Law-aligned adventurers who make their way into his monster-populated dungeon.
The early parts of the manga spend a lot of time going over how the battle royale setup works in an immense amount of detail — there’s a lot of different points to spend, stats to buff, and monsters to summon (some of which are, of course, cute girls). At one point, the protagonist is forced to pull out the calculator app on his phone to deal with it all. The presence of cell phones, the internet, and other modern conveniences does put a bit of an interesting twist on the video game formula, and the fact that the two sides have had their emotions and memories manipulated in different ways provides a promising setup for some emotional payoff down the road — especially now that the exposition is winding down and the plot is winding up.
The title of Dungeon Battle Royale pretty much tells you exactly what you’re going to get — and you probably know if you’re interested in this series or not just by hearing it. Whether or not you’re going to suspend disbelief for the starting premise and enjoy the detail exploration of video game mechanics is also going to really depend on your taste for that kind of thing. If that is your jam, though, this series offers pretty much exactly what you’re looking for, with enough twists and unusual details to keep it fresh.
