Jinrou Game is a 2014 psychological mystery manga with Story by Akiguchi Giggle and art by Koudon.
The manga follows a group of teenagers who are trapped in a mansion and forced to play the Werewolf Game, a Social Deduction Game where each member of the "residents" are either a "villager" or a "werewolf". Each day, residents must vote for someone to be executed, and if they execute all the werewolves, they win, but if the number of villagers dwindle until their numbers is equal to that of werewolves, they lose.
Tha manga has one direct sequel Jinrou Game: Beast Side, which takes place immediatelly after the first one's ending. The third installment of the manga, Jinrou Game: Crazy Fox, utilizes a whole new cast and adds the "Fox" player, which will win the game as long as they are among the group at the end of the game, regardless if whether the villagers or werewolves won.
The mangas were adapted in a series of movies that vastly overtaken the manga with 8 entries as of 2020.
Mind you that due to the second entry's premise, there will be spoilers for the first entry.
Tropes
- Asshole Victim:
- Taira used the second game as a means to get rid of his girlfriend after he accidentally knocked her up. Inoue insists on killing him just for that.
- Ise is a Domestic Abuser that brutally beats up his girlfriend for talking to other men. No one sheds teears when he is voted into execution.
- Beauty Is Never Tarnished: Averted it doesn’t matter who you are if you get executed odds are that it will be in a gruesome way. Played with Itami as her execution doesn’t involved any dismembered, she was merely strangled to death.
- Cruel Twist Ending: In the first game, Nishina and Inoue survive the game, only to hear that phase 2 would begin. The two are drugged and wake up back at the voting room, in a new game, where they must now play the werewolf part to survive.
- Big Bad Friend: In the first game, the two werewolves were Tomohiro, Nishina's Love Interest and the Deuteragonist after her, and the sister of the second survivor.
- Chekhov's Boomerang: In the second game, the "Bodyguard" role is added, which permits the player to protect one person other than themselves every night. The card comes into play when, in the very first night, the werewolves can't kill anybody due to trying to get into the protected room. In the very final night of the game, Nishina forgets that the "Bodyguard" was never dealt with, and can't kill anyone that night, forcing her to improvise right when she was about to win.
- Dies Wide Open: Itami dies like this after her sister strangled her to death.
- Four Eyes, Zero Soul: Nishina, by the end of the second game.
- Heart Is an Awesome Power: In the second game, the "Twin" players. Saeki is able to use the role to make everyone dance to her tune. The card allows the twin players to know each other identity, which Nishina initially dismisses as useless, but Saeki realizes that this means she is the only one who can know for sure who not to vote. Using this leverage, she convinces everyone to vote for whoever she points at.
- Protagonist Journey to Villain: Nishina begins as a shy introvert just trying to survive an awful situation, but keeps becoming more unhinged in her attempts to survive the game, culminating in her enjoying the violence she is forced to inflict by the game. Culminating in, when she wins the second game, asking to be let back into the mansion so she can keep playing.
- Social Deduction Game: The Werewolf Game itself.
