Liar Liar

Hiroto Shinohara is a new transfer student to Academy Island, where games determine student rankings. The more games won, the more stars a student has, with the highest ranking being that of a Seven Star. On Hiroto's first day, he accidentally antagonizes Sarasa Saionji, the so-called Empress of Academy Island and granddaughter of the island's head director. Forced into a game fueled by misunderstandings that he somehow ends up winning, he is thrust into a major bluff where he must lie about his ranking or risk expulsion from the school and island.

Fortunately, with the help of the mysterious Company headed by Shirayuki Himeji, Hiroto is not alone in his bluff. The Company will do everything in its power to help him cheat his way through the game challenges sent his way by students wanting to beat him. Though he is a One Star student, he must fight as though he is actually a Seven Star, and overcome insurmountable odds in his quest to search for a missing girl from his past.

[Written by MAL Rewrite]

Himeji, Shirayuki Main

Shutou, Yukina Japanese

Saionji, Sarasa Main

Kuramochi, Wakana Japanese

Shinohara, Hiroto Main

Nakamura, Genta Japanese

Shiina, Tsumugi ing

Moriyama, Yurika Japanese

Akizuki, Noa ing

Tachibana, Rika Japanese

Minami, Shizuku ing

Iwami, Manaka Japanese

Kururugi, Senri ing

Fairouz Ai Japanese

Ichinose, Natsume ing

Kuwashima, Houko Japanese

Asamiya, Nanase ing

Oonishi, Saori Japanese

Kazami, Suzuran ing

Tokui, Sora Japanese

Matsui, Yuuko Producer

Nagamine, Rieko Producer

Yurugi, Sou Producer

Oonuki, Yuusuke Producer

Reviews

Nov 21, 2023

Yogiri_Takatou

Recommended

No game No Life but it's mediocre. Still, it was a fun watch and I got to have new waifus. Himeji, Noa and Shiina are my favs lol. Shut off your brain and enjoy the series. No game No Life is still on top but it was a fun ride. Recommended if you have nothing to watch lmao. Art style is like that one anime.. I forgot the name but there's the senpai who's masochist, junior who's a sadist and his imouto that is inlove with her brother.. step-brother... The games are a bit all around but you can enjoy it.. plot armor gooes brr.. ... (really prolonging this so I can submit my review)

Reviewer’s Rating: 7

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Mar 9, 2025

mcvanime

Mixed Feelings

Liar Liar is a solid anime that draws you in with its intriguing concept and well-executed art style. While not necessarily groundbreaking in of visuals, the animation is clean and effective, bringing the characters and their environments to life. The character designs are sharp, and the animation is fluid enough to keep you engaged during the competitive matches. The artwork is polished and fits well with the tone of the story, complementing the high-stakes atmosphere without overwhelming it.

The plot revolves around a series of game competitions at a prestigious school, where students engage in challenges that are easy to follow and understand. The rules ... of the games are explained simply, which makes them accessible even to viewers who aren’t familiar with competitive games. This simplicity allows the focus to stay on the characters and the drama of each match, keeping things tense and entertaining throughout.

However, there’s one major flaw that undermines the entire premise (not a spoiler... this is explained in the first 5 minutes of the anime): the handling of the protagonist’s star rank. The main character is a one-star student, but his special ability allows him to lie and claim he's a seven-star, which gives him an unfair advantage in the eyes of others. While this adds a layer of strategy to his actions, it directly contradicts the established rules of the competition. According to the system, students with higher stars can’t request matches with someone ranked lower, yet throughout the series, characters keep requesting matches with him despite his one-star status. This creates a glaring inconsistency in the story that doesn't make much sense when you stop to think about it.

It feels like the writers didn't fully consider the consequences of this rule and how it disrupts the logic of the world they've built. If the system can't hold up under its own rules, it’s hard to fully invest in the stakes of the matches, especially when such a crucial detail is ignored.

Reviewer’s Rating: 5

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Feb 10, 2025

misterbadluck

Not Recommended

T'was a peaceful Sunday morning. As usual, I prepared my black coffee and began to doom scroll the internet, only this time I stumbled across an interesting title: Liar Liar. What's this? A battle of wits in a school setting involving scheming, deception, backstabbing and outsmarting your opponent similar to No Game No Life? The MC feels like an underdog but is actually a hidden genius? The school has a ranking system based on stars and merits, à la Classroom of the Elite? Wait, its actually a romcom too? I'm sold! Liar Liar ticks all the boxes for the above-average romcom school anime with a ... little twist just enough to hook you in. Or does it...

Given the score that I put, you already know the answer. But I'll preface this by saying the first episodes (1-3) are actually not that bad. It sets the tone and expectations of the show: through a misunderstanding and sheer luck, our main character Shinohara became a 7-star student, basically making him the top of the pyramid chain in school driven by battles to compete for stars. Then reality checks in, the 7 is just a number and in reality he's a 0-star , making him severally handicapped in battles due to the show introducing an "ability" system that allows students to apply special buffs by meeting the star requirement. Battles can be anything such as a race, card/board games etc. Abilities add a flavor to the battles by slightly adjusting the rules, such as the famous "Numerical Adjustment" (allows the student to modify a numerical value that is part of the game's settings) and the "Bug" (introduces a malfunction/bug into the opponent's device). All of this helps in establishing Liar Liar's world setting, its rules and interesting gimmicks. Except, all of this do not matter. Yes, the MC is a 0-star who cannot use powerful abilities, but this is reverted by having a "Hacker" character hack (I kid you not) the MC's device, allowing him to have an unfair advantage and potentially undoing the "7-star but ACKCHYUALLY 0-star" stunt. But I'm getting ahead of myself, we are still a few episodes in. There is still hope to turn this around: Shinohara starts as a cheater so he can fool the school, but when push comes to shove, he has to rely on his ACTUAL ABILITIES (and most notably, high IQ) without having a Deus Ex Machina come in and save his ass every time.

And it partially works, for one battle or two. He manages to outsmart a student, but not without the intervention, in one way or another, of his friends and the fellow "Hacker". Good, but not great. There is still light at the end of the tunnel, as long as the writer keeps this momentum going and slowly but surely pulls away from the "cheating the system" ploy bit by bit until the show becomes as decent as Classroom of the Elite.

Alas, Liar Liar entirely goes off on a tangent. The battles become more and more absurd and illogical, episodes take half of the time explaining the rules of the battle only for the main cast to suddenly win with barely any development. They basically speedrun the show and all the while we are waiting twiddling our thumbs, dumbfounded at what we are witnessing on our screens. And the art/animation direction was pouring more oil on the fire: background characters are all, with no exceptions, faceless copy-paste dummies! They were too lazy to even have alternate variations for them! As for the animation, it looks stiff and some frames do not connect or mesh well, and by the final episodes (last battle), I thought I was watching a low budget Isekai anime with all the virtual battles going on. However, the background music was enjoyable, though it felt more fitting for a neo-noir Spy movie. It helped elevate the ending of the battles, even by a minuscule fraction, by making the MC seem like he just outsmarted everyone, including us.

You know what's sad? The romcom part revolving the side characters (Shinji & Nanase) is better developed, more fluid and natural then the main cast's. Their constant bickering and back-and-forth insults all while hiding their Tsundere personalities made this more enjoyable then probably everything else in the show. Go Nanase! In short, this contrast proves how bad the rom part was handled since the interactions between Shinohara and other female leads are reduced to your typical harem-fighting and misunderstandings between him and the main lead (Sarasa) which are rare, but slightly better. Speaking of which, the main reason behind the relationship tying those two together is built on hiding a lie from the entire school, but the lie slowly becomes inconsequential as we progress.

Let's take a moment to draw a parallel between Liar Liar and Classroom of the Elite. The school "merit" system is very similar: in COTE, students collect Student Points (SPs) and Class Points (s), whereas in Liar Liar students collect "stars". Even the "special points" in COTE was turned into "special colored stars" there. There is even a female antagonist (Akizuki Noa) who bears a striking resemblance in of characterization to Kushida Kikyou, a double-faced female student who acts like an angel but is a complete monster on the inside. Liar Liar fails to have a proper copy: Akizuki's true nature revelation is skimmed through, even completely forgotten about later on, as she becomes a completely different person after her arc. COTE's influence, and probably other similar LNs, are all over the place in the show, and if we take a minute to look at the numbers, it all fits into place: the first Liar Liar light novel volume released in Q1 2019, so minus a few months we get the period where the writer began his work: 2018 to end of 2019: a period of time where COTE was as its peak due to the first year arc being at its climax, so the sales were skyrocketing. The fact that COTE got an anime adaptation even before 2018 also contributed to the sale numbers. Liar Liar followed the same approach in of marketing through a subpar anime with a low budget production just enough to boost its reputation, except it was too little too late. The hype around the "battle of wits" catch was over by then after the disaster that was Kakegurui. But that's a story for another time.

To wrap this up, Liar Liar has been developed purely to its light novel adaptation, and nothing else. It does not try to be better despite its decent premise and heavy reliance on similar works. Rather, it manages to screw up somehow because it simply does not care about production quality nor characters. Maybe Liar Liar set my expectations too high after a few episodes. But I can't help feeling disappointed after having all the questions raised during the runtime go unanswered:

- The MC enrolled in this specific school to look for someone. We have no clue who that is
- The principal has a sinister plan that involves the MC collecting all "colored stars". We have no clue as to why
- The MC is hinted at being a genius before enrolling, and was actually scouted by the school and not the other way around. We have no flashback/explanation whatsoever about his back story
- Some side characters like the motorcycle girl never make a second appearance. We have no clue about their whereabouts and motives
- The villain is there because we want to raise the stakes, but I already forgot his name

That, and the fact that:
- The battles were underwhelming and poorly executed: its no longer a battle of wits, but rather a battle of hax (Thank you, Hacker-chan!)
- The rom part is underdeveloped and completely overshadowed by the romance between two side characters (Nanase <3)
- The com part gradually fades away after each episode until it becoming predictable (harem fights), in favor of convoluted battles that drag out too much only to end anticlimactically

You want answers? closure? Well read the light novels, humph! Oh wait, translation is moving at a snail's pace, and only 5 out of 15 volumes (as of the time of writing this review) are translated to English. My opinion? It's not even worth the time. If Liar Liar cannot even manage to properly "copy" similar elements from different LNs and when doing so execute them in a worse manner (flat romcom, disappointing battles, plot holes...), then it is not worth investing your time in it. Now excuse me while I pour away my cup of coffee into the sink as this anime already left an immensely bitter taste in my mouth.

Reviewer’s Rating: 4

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