Obviously, that introductory paragraph is a lie, but I honestly wouldn’t be surprised if some part of that was true; in fact, it probably serves as a better explanation for some of the shit that happens in this anime than any other explanation the author could've given me. Liar Liar is the most confusingly ass series I have ever had the displeasure of consuming. It makes so many narrative, character, world-building, and production mistakes in such a short amount of time that it honestly is impressive. The question we are going to attempt to answer today is as follows. Is the author of Liar Liar actually incompetent at writing any sort of narrative story, or did his own or his editor’s greed lead them to make the most generic anime possible in a genre that thrives on creativity?
Fortunately, the myriad of mistakes that this series makes doesn’t necessarily begin with the premise. Granted, the premise is pretty generic: the “transfer student into elite school” trope has been done to death, but this isn’t necessarily a move that damns the series. Now having generic ass characters in a “psychological” anime, a genre predicated on well-made characters in a mentally engaging narrative, is a much more puzzling move that serves as the first major error that this series makes. You see, almost every character in Liar Liar is either a worse version of a better character in a better anime or can be described with a single adjective or noun.
Hiroto, our main character, is just a standard generic self-insert protagonist. He doesn’t have any discernible character traits other than the standard “I want to be successful,” “I want to protect my friends,” and “women fluster me.” From the introduction, you wouldn’t think this as he came off as a cocky, early SAO Kirito-level asshole, but after that scene and the maybe 6 others that happen throughout the story to lesser extents, he says some shit like “Oh golly, I hope that lie was believable”. This robs him of his only distinct character trait and turns him into Ryouta from Kakegurui, or just any other isekai protagonist from a series that has a title that's like a sentence long. Now if this was action anime, this wouldn’t be that big of a deal, but this show fancies itself as a thought-provoking “psychological” anime, a genre where main characters are typically charismatic or intelligent enough to make the shit they pull believable. Considering Hiroto’s character traits, he doesn’t live up to that in the slightest.
Noa gets the honor of being the most developed character in this series, granted, that might be an award she gets by default considering that she is the only developed character in this series, but I digress. She is introduced as a watered-down Kushida from Classroom of the Elite: an overly friendly and popular girl that is revealed to be an asshole that wants to see everyone suffer. After she is defeated by our main character, she becomes a fawning fan girl for him as she sheds all the personality that she had up until that point. Now this is borderline misogynistic and patriarchal writing, but that’s beside the point. Having our best character effectively eliminated from the story halfway through means that we have to rely on Hiroto’s generic ass to carry the story, a situation that definitely isn’t ideal.
Fortunately for Himeji and Sarasa, they don’t have to worry about their character development being struck down in the middle of the series as they never received any in the first place. The former is just your standard kind maid: almost identical to Rem from Re: Zero. The latter is just a tsundere: almost identical to… any tsundere in any anime ever. In practice, these girls aren’t bad characters, in fact, they are definitely the best characters in the series. But the issue remains; neither of these characters can stand by themselves. They’re both solely attached to Hiroto, and since Hiroto is such a bland character, any romantic subplot comes off as vapid at best.
You might have picked up on this by now, but this anime has aspects of a harem romcom despite also masquerading as a big-brained psychological anime. Now to Liar Liar’s credit, only maybe 8 percent of each episode is dedicated to romcom bullshit, but the presence of it at all damages the anime. All of the comedy is romantically charged, and, wouldn’t you know, it’s some of the most generic rom-com comedy I’ve ever seen. I don’t think it made me chuckle even a single time, and if it did, it certainly wasn’t worth massacring all of the female characters to do so. Oh, and to the surprise of nobody, the romance is completely dead and teeters on SAO levels of trash.
At this point, you might be questioning how I can call Liar Liar a psychological anime even though it lacks the strong characters that make psychological anime actually good. And yes, you are completely right. It isn’t a psychological anime, but its narrative likes to pretend it is, well, at least sometimes. The question governing this section is as follows. Was Liar Liar originally intended to be a visual novel or was always supposed to be an anime?
There are only a handful of anime that can shove 8 minutes of info dumps or typical conversation down my throat and still be entertaining. Unfortunately, Liar Liar is not one of them. These info dumps, mostly unnecessarily in-depth game, situation, or side character descriptions, are probably some of the most boring and inconsequential sequences in anime. They happen almost every episode and they definitely don’t have the substance to be 8 minutes long, it’s more like they stretch 3 or so minutes worth of content into 8-minute intervals for some reason. Oh, and since our characters are so bland and everyone in the room has to be fully involved in every conversation like a visual novel, the discourse becomes simply groan-inducing as it genuinely seems like each character is an AI chatbot trained on what archetype that the character is supposed to be. What’s worse is that there is almost nothing happening on screen whenever these sequences take place, maybe just some lazy animations or DVD logo-esque camera panning around the screen. If this was dubbed, I honestly could close my eyes and listen to this shit like an audiobook and I wouldn’t lose any of the impact of the story.
However, even with bland characters and a mandatory 8-minute info dump every episode, a couple of good games and a good narrative surrounding them could make this series watchable to some extent. Sadly, we don’t even get that.
You see, Liar Liar considers itself a “strategy game” anime, yet its games may be the worst thing I’ve ever seen in media. Yes, media. Not just anime, I’ve seen better games in books, movies, American tv shows, fucking gameshows, it is completely asinine. Liar Liar’s games are so bad because they are all fairly simple while being described as the convoluted things on planet Earth. This is where our 8-minute info dumps come in. I've seen this series provide an 8-minute tutorial for a card game where the objective is as simple as getting more cards than your opponent. It’s almost like if I had 5 minutes to teach you how to play chess, so I try to teach you the Sicilian defense instead of just telling you what the pieces do. Occasionally, there is a complicated game, but it’s almost always explained rather poorly in a way where you don’t really know what’s going on until it’s happening. This is a problem considering cheating is a major part of this story and at times, you have absolutely no idea if the main character is cheating his ass off or if he’s just abusing an aspect of the game. This is to such an extent that the main character actually has to remind the audience that he’s cheating so they know what the hell is going on in the story.
The extent of cheating cheapens the main character’s accomplishments. When your main character wins all of these “psychological” battles with the help of a nameless company that can cheat in any way that the author fancies, it doesn’t really feel like he’s doing anything special. It’s almost like watching a streamer kick ass at Call of Duty with aimbot. This is where that asshole arrogance displayed in the intro could’ve come into play, as watching our main character relentlessly taunt those around him while cheating his ass off sounds at least somewhat interesting, but we get generic main character number 11037 who everyone adores. This also cheapens the admiration he receives because it is all ill-gotten, but he will not receive any punishment for that because this is simply not that type of anime.
The worst offender of cheating has to be the author. Like a game of tag on the playground, everything in this story from the characters to the games to the narrative surrounding them is subject to change at any moment, for no previously defined reason whatsoever. This is best personified by the skill system: a simple perk system in which a player can assign 3 before a game. Instead of previously defining the skills so they can be wielded like Chekhov's guns, they stay hidden like a Chekhov’s Assassin's Creed hidden blade: in reality, they function as get-out-of-jail-free cards for whatever outcome the author wants. This leads to asspullitude that I have never before seen in fiction. There's a sequence in this series where in the 8-minute info dump, the author establishes that there is no way to tie a game, before introducing a card called Trojan Horse that allows for that exact thing to happen. Our main character is about to lose a game? Surprise surprise, he equipped a card called pinch hitter, which means that he didn’t lose, his partner did. Liar Liar’s skills are also explained right after they are used like magic attacks in generic isekai (this is the worst in the final arc where everyone throws out abilities like there is no tomorrow); this is a comparison I don’t wanna have to make in a supposedly psychological anime.
Yes, I’m bringing back the psychological anime comparisons, but this is where shit gets a bit confusing. You see, when Liar Liar gives you an 8-minute info dump and tries to pretend like the main character just did a genius move by using his aimbot, it genuinely can seem like it’s trying to be a psychological anime. However, when the author just makes shit up or tramples on basic, anime, or his own logic, it doesn’t really make sense in the context of everything else. By the way, the author also asspulls explicitly with no sort of underlying reason. At times, It’s almost like he sets up the next arc, but he needs a decent reason for that to happen so he just makes up some bullshit and hopes that the audience goes along with it.
“I need a reason for Himeji and Hiroto to fight, so let me invent an evil app that would blow up Himeji’s phone and get her expelled if they don’t fight each other.”
“I need a reason for Noa and Hiroto to fight, so let me give Noa instant transmission and allow her to sprint behind Himeji in heels and take her hostage, tying her hands behind her back with one hand and a rope. Then, if Hiroto wants her back, he must play me.”
In the final arc, the author just flat out gives up on trying to keep it the least bit subtle, so he just allows the rules to be bent and broken for 4 episodes straight, in a way that makes you question what the hell you’re actually watching. This, and other examples like it, obviously doesn’t make any sense, but the author shoves this down our throats and expects us to go along with it. It’s almost like the author doesn’t respect us as viewers, so he thinks he can pull anything at any time and the viewers would still eat it up. It almost follows the same principle of how children's shows are so haphazard in plot because, at the end of the day, the kids don’t care about plot inconsistencies. Story-wise, this is horrible and it actively undermines those bullshit 8-minute info dumps that you have to sit through.
To continue to beat this dead horse, I’m going to have to talk about the production. The “famous” studio Geek Toys really does a suboptimal job here. The only compliment I have for them is the way that they drew background characters. Making them literally two-dimensional Paper Mario style was a nice touch. Otherwise, the character design of the 3D characters is generic and lacks personality. Conversational scenes are lazily animated. Action scenes are lazily animated with an abundance of beams and particle effects to keep them “interesting”. Animations such as sword slashes or running are reused in a single episode to an extent where it is kinda obvious that the production team focused on one animation for the week, so they decided to make it as detailed as possible and reuse it 10 times in an episode. On top of the myriad of mistakes this series makes, this certainly doesn’t help its case.
Let's try to answer some of the questions asked throughout this review.
Is the author of Liar Liar actually incompetent at writing any sort of narrative story, or did his own or his editor’s greed lead them to make the most generic anime possible in a genre that thrives on creativity?
Probably both; the author shows incompetency with the inconsistencies in the plot, but he also makes everything else in this story laughably generic, so I wouldn’t put it past him.
Was Liar Liar originally intended to be a visual novel or was always supposed to be an anime?
I would say anime, but considering the audiobook-ass sections of info dumps and the inherent need to let every character chime in during them, I honestly wouldn’t be surprised if the former was true.
Does the author actually believe that all of his viewers are under the age of 8?
I honestly couldn’t tell you, that’s up to you to decide.
Overall, should you watch Liar Liar? Probably not. It’s either laughably generic, unfathomably boring, or actively not taking itself seriously with the level of asspullitude it attempts. It wouldn’t say that Liar Liar is a part of any genre; sure, it tries to be a psychological strategy game anime with aspects of romantic comedy, but never really commits to embodying any one of these genres. Any attempts it does make are struck down by it being generic or by the author’s incompetence. The only reason I could see anyone watching Liar Liar is because its own ineptitude was kind of interesting at times. Interesting in the way that a dumpster fire is interesting to passersby, but hey, at least that’s something.
Thank you for reading and for the love of god don’t give this series a second season.
