Written by Haruki Kuou, this is their first work to get adapted and it'll be their only work I will watch going forward, that is for certain. I suppose you have to start somewhere, but my goodness, are there a lot of recent first timers getting adaptations which have been dreadful. They are obviously staking it all on this series, as it's been the only thing they've worked on since 2019 and maybe the original source is a different deal, but the anime stank on all levels.
Liar Liar is set inside a special school where only the most exceptional are allowed entry. Sound familiar? Everything meaningful there is decided through games and every person attending the academy has a ranking of sorts, depending on the amount of stars one has. You win a game, you earn a star, so to speak. Our protagonist, Hiroto Shinohara, just so happens to meet the strongest student on the Island on his first day, the six star ranked Sarasa Saionji, a girl who has never lost a game. Hiroto miraculously ends up beating Sarasa and becomes the strongest student in her place, the incredible seven star, except that, you guessed it, it's all a lie.
That's the main jist of the show (there is an overarching story which is hardly developed), him trying to survive and deceive everyone on a day to day basis, getting challenged to all sorts of games and this would be all well and good, until you quickly realize that the games they play are fucking lame and/or confusing. The vast majority of the games are either poorly explained, incredibly convoluted exposition, coma inducing to watch or poorly executed with the way they develop and end. It's usually a combination of these things.
What was supposed to make these games "exciting" to watch, were the addition of abilities one could use in the games. You are given three slots and can access a wide range of different abilities or powers through your phone, that will do different tasks for you and become useful once the game starts. The more stars you have, the better the abilities you can access. For example, there's a detecting ability that let's you see where students or the objectives are on the map, there's a jamming ability that does what you think it does, etc. Unfortunately, with the way they speed run through the rules and regulations of the games, the powers themselves are barely given another look after we've been introduced to what they do. It all happens very swiftly. I compare it to something like World Trigger, where everything is meticulously detailed and you learn so much interesting things about the specific power system and their games before hand and afterwards, Liar Liar absolutely fails in comparison. There's no room to breathe here, you're playing constant catch up, like you've been away from School/Work for a couple days and are thrown in the deep end once you get back.
That's not even the worst part about these games though, it's the way they are completed. If you're expecting top notch ingenious and smart tactical plays being employed, then I've got bad news for you. It's mainly luck based and/or full of deus ex machina ploys that he finds from fucking cheating. There's nothing interesting or amazing about it. The visuals can't save it either, there's no style over substance here lol, it's full of stills, ugly background artwork, shoddy fighting sequences, etc. At least the main cast looks pretty amirite? Probably the only reason why this thing got the green light.
