I am a huge fan of the High Stakes Game genre. The psychological struggles and battles of wits commonly present in these stories are fun to watch and, when done well, create an engrossing atmosphere. A major sub-genre of this would be the Death Game, where the cast is more or less forced into a scenario where they compete against one another, are driven to the brink and ultimately die off one by one.
The premise, setup and general execution of all stories from this genre are typically the same, and Doubt is no exception.
A cast (size doesn't matter, though it works better with fewer characters) of initially unconnected characters meets for the first time, and before they know it they are suddenly whisked away to an isolated place (abandoned buildings, deserted islands and alternate dimensions are all common examples).
Upon awakening, the cast is given a loose explanation of the "game," sometimes directly by the mastermind and sometimes indirectly through inference.
The ultimate goal is to "escape." Find the key, find the secret door, find the impostor, defeat the mastermind, last man standing; there are many variations of the "device," but both the process and goal are more or less the same in every story.
The characters, driven by paranoia or self-interest, turn on one another. Lies, tricks, betrayals, temporary alliances and scapegoating are all common.
Because of 4, and driven by 3, the cast shrinks until only a few "key" characters are left.
The climax does one of the following: reveal a way out, reveal the mastermind, give the protags the final key. This is the part where half the viewers/readers say, "I knew it!!" and the other half say, "No way!!"
The path to the goal is now clear, and the protags have a decisive confrontation with the antags.
Some number of the cast escapes. They celebrate their victory and mourn their friends.
The viewer/reader, and sometimes also the protags, are given some variation of, "But this is only the beginning," and the story ends.
This is a tried-and-true formula, used in everything from manga to video games to live-action movies. And it's fun. We come for the suspense and we stay for the suspense. Although the end score will be given based especially on creativity and execution during The Reveal and The Conclusion, ultimately these stories are all fairly interesting, and all serve the same purpose.
Doubt is nothing unique or different here; it's a Death Game with a stock cast, stock premise and stock execution. However, that doesn't stop it from being enjoyable. The characters are vaguely interesting, the setup is exciting, and as readers we get to theorize and wonder as the story unfolds.
The story is dark and violent. Murder, paranoia and insanity are common themes, and a truly happy ending is impossible. If this is the type of story that interests you, give it a shot. It's very accessible at a mere 20 chapters of 40-50 pages apiece, something that can be easily finished in one sitting of less than two hours.
Overall, I would recommend it to fans of the Death Game genre, but not to people simply looking for an interesting mystery, or for a new type of story. There are better Death Game stories out there, and by all standards this one is really quite mediocre.
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That's all for the general review. Now I will detail my thoughts on the execution of the story itself. SPOILERS inbound, be warned.
We have six characters: Yuu (protag), Mitsuki (childhood friend), Eiji (delinquent), Haruka (tough girl), Hajime (analytical guy), and Rei (mascot). None are particularly intriguing, but they serve well enough.
During character introductions, three things jumped out at me: Eiji's propensity for violence, Rei's status as a cripple, and Rei's past experience with hypnotism. Eiji seemed pretty par for the course, so of course Rei's traits were immediate red flags; as a huge fan of Corpse Party, which to this day I consider the best horror story I've read, I know that the helpless little girl is rarely what she seems. So, from the onset, I predicted that Rei would be the "secret" antagonist.
Naturally, I was thrown for a loop when she became the first casualty. In chapter 2.
This intrigued me, and I became more interested. The golden rule of these stories seems all-too-often to be, "Find the most helpless character, he/she is the villain," and so I immediately selected Mitsuki as my new predicted antagonist.
Things progressed normally, the barcodes served as the "keys" in this story, and paranoia became a factor. They ran around, they devolved into suspicion, and they fell deeper into despair. Eiji died (pretty pathetically; he got so little "screentime"), and Haruka followed soon after. I was feeling pretty smug about my Mitsuki prediction.
And then she died too.
At this development, I was hooked. My predictions had fallen through, and I was thrown for a loop once again. All of a sudden we had just Protag and Hajime. Who was it? Was Hajime the smiling culprit all along? Does Protag have a dissociative personality disorder? Maybe they were all played for fools and there was a secret mastermind who hadn't even been introduced yet??
I'll admit I was a little overexcited, and I had a moment of tremendous respect for this manga, which I had assumed would be "just another Death Game story." It was doing things with the plot I hadn't seen before. I had discovered a hidden gem.
And then Mitsuki came back.
In classic terrible mystery execution, first we're treated to a solid almost two chapters' worth of Protag going, "How could it be you??" while the culprit's face was obscured. Then once she's revealed, she gives a terribly flimsy excuse for her violent actions: she was seeking revenge on all liars because her father once tried to commit suicide after being betrayed by a friend. Naturally, she herself was lying and betraying the entire time, so her actions were hypocritical on top of unjustified. And then Hajime reveals he had already figured it out (the cheapest mystery twist ever) and had used Haruka's body as a replacement for Mitsuki's to trick Protag in order to figure out if he was an accomplice or not.I was disappointed and annoyed, but the story continued along the classic format. Protag and Hajime team up, they work together to trick Mitsuki, there's a final confrontation and they defeat her. Mystery solved, story over. They pick her up and use her Master Key to facilitate their escape. Except it doesn't work.
And then Rei came back.
By her own admittance, Rei was a prodigy of hypnotism who was scapegoated by the media into being a "fake" and a "liar," climaxing in her parents' attempted triple suicide, which she survived. Spurred by this, she swore revenge on liars and decided to turn her one talent - hypnotism - into the tool to meet her goals.
(A quick aside. Hypnotism is real, and it works, but not how it's usually portrayed in fiction. Hypnotism makes use of the subject's compliance with the act and willingness to be hypnotized to place a trance-like state of "suggestion" upon the subject. In this state, the subject will focus intently on a single thought or action, to the exclusion of almost all else. "Party trick" hypnotism often involves acting like an animal or being unable to move part of the body. In therapy, hypnotism can be used to recall past memories, block painful memories, or block tendencies for certain addictive habits. The key is that hypnotism cannot be forced on an unwilling subject, and it cannot inspire actions that the subject would not normally be inclined to make.)
Rei then explains that she took advantage of Mitsuki's depression, as well as her interest in hypnotism, to make Mitsuki into her tool. Normally she puts up an automatic act, but via hypnotic keywords or sounds will revert to her normal sadistic personality. From this Mitsuki is both the culprit and a victim, with Rei serving as the mastermind.
Suddenly Protag and Hajime wake up in a hospital, with police compiling evidence against a comatose Mitsuki, and Rei nowhere to be found. Protag then recieves a call from Rei explaining she has other agents who are about to kill Hajime and that Mitsuki is about to kill him. We get a quick view of Mitsuki standing over Protag with a knife, and the manga ends.
It would be all-too-easy to simply say, "Woah!" and leave it at that, but unfortunately this ending cannot be simply brushed aside as "unpredictable but mediocre." Forgiving Hajime's deception and the faked deaths of Mitsuki and Rei, the plot holes are too major to gloss over.
I can live with Hajime's actions, cheap as they are. I can live with Mitsuki being hypnotized, though it feels like a cop-out. What I cannot justify is Rei's faked "death." Since the body wasn't fake, the only way Rei could trick all of them into believing she was dead was- through hypnotism. Which contradicts not only the real science behind hypnotism, but Rei's in-story explanation as well.
So the story actually began like this: Rei's other pet hypnotized dude (the bald guy, who was the "wolf" from a prior game) knocks out the cast and takes them to the abandoned building. Rei hypnotizes them into believing she's dead and puts the barcode marks on their bodies (except for Protag, cuz she wanted the rest to suspect him). Then they wake up, they think Rei's dead (thanks to hypnotism) and Mitsuki starts picking them off (also thanks to hypnotism). Then finally at the end, Mitsuki wakes up from critical injury-induced coma (also thanks to hypnotism) and murders her best friend (also thanks to hypnotism) while Hajime is presumably killed by the random forensics team member who works for Rei (who didn't even exist until a couple pages from the end of the final chapter). For extra unnecessary stupidity, Rei isn't even actually crippled (she was faking it, which means not only is her attempted suicide story a lie, but her big reveal regarding her parents' attempted triple suicide was in a way a lie as well).
Put simply, this is just bad writing, and a cop-out of all the mystery and suspense they had tried to build. If Rei and the hypnotism had been absent and Mitsuki was the true mastermind, then I could forgive the story for simply being mediocre and using cheap tricks to build suspense. But bringing fake, contradictory superpowers into an otherwise-realistic story smacks of tryhard and deus-ex-machina.
-Now for a quick explanation of scorings.
Story is a simple 4/10. The plot, in everything from the setup all the way through the conclusion, followed the established normal formula, which normally would earn the default median score of either a 5 or a 6, depending on the execution of the particular work. The execution here was overall nothing special, which would normally earn a score of 5. However, I detracted an additional point for plot holes and internal contradictions. The reason I didn't detract more is that despite the severity of these issues, they ultimately didn't effect the greater story all that much; when all's said and done, it's a generic Death Game story with a generic Death Game ending.
Art is a well-deserved 7/10. The clean and simple character designs contrasted nicely with the dark and gritty setting. The panels are rich with detail that can be seen in everything from cracked walls to stitched rabbit masks to bleeding wounds. There's no unnecessary censorship, nor is there unnecessary gore. Lighting is used effectively to intensify the creepiness of some scenes. Finally, "camera angles" are well-done to provide alternate perspectives to different scenes for additional impact, such as showing a masked Mitsuki lurking behind the bathroom door. My one complaint - and this is just style over substance - is that the color pages gave Rei blue hair, which feels excessive and unnecessarily in an otherwise realistic-feeling visual world.Characters is a self-explanatory 5/10. None of them wowed or impressed me, but none of them were particularly bad either. Each played their respective roles with zero depth or development. None of them were grating and none were truly unnecessary, but none were memorable either. If they had been bland but likable they might have earned a 6, but ultimately I couldn't find it in myself to care about any of them.Overall score is a 5/10. Based on averages it would be a 5.3 (and I round), and it was neither enjoyable enough nor unenjoyable enough to influence that score a point in either direction.
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