Madhouse to Produce Anime of Btoom! Manga

As the very informative title would suggest, Madhouse Studios (Black Lagoon, Redline) has gotten behind the project to animate Junya Inoue’s Btoom! manga. The manga centres on Ryuta Sakamoto, a young NEET (Not in Education, Employment or Training) who is also one of the top ranked players of the online combat game Btoom!; the game is somewhat like an open world Bomberman setup, where the object is to blow up your opponents before they do the same to you. Unexpectedly, one day Ryuta wakes up on a tropical island with no recollection of how or why he’s there. He sees a figure in the distance and goes to ask for help, but discovers that it was a bad idea when the figure lobs a bomb in his direction. Ryuta soon discovers he is somehow in the world of Btoom! and will need to learn to play the game for real if he wants to survive.

To be honest, I was underwhelmed by the manga when I first read it, and have pretty much left it alone up until now. It evidently caught somebody’s eye, however, as Madhouse has yet to make a bad decision on a show; and even if they have, they turn it into the greatest looking bad decision ever. With relative newbie, Kotono Watanabe (episode director on Chihayafuru, Puella Magi Madoka Magica) at the helm, I have little to go on in terms of how the directing will be, but with scripts written by Yousuke Kuroda (Hellsing, Highschool of the Dead), there’s very little that can go wrong. With no release date, there isn’t much more we can do except wait for more news. I, for one, will be doing so anxiously.

Source: Anime News Network