Deadly Games in Anime and Manga.
- The entire premise of As the Gods Will. Japanese schoolchildren are forced to play supernatural life-or-death versions of common children's games.
- Basilisk is this trope combined with a Romeo and Juliet plot with ninjas.
- In the English translation of the manga version of Battle Royale (original novel listed in the Literature subpage), the Program the students are forced into is apparently broadcast as a television show across Japan. In the novel and movie, only the winner is revealed to the public; how much of the game itself that gets revealed to the public is unclear. In the novel and original manga, it's ostensibly a "military experiment", so the Defense Forces of Greater East Asia will study the strategies and improvisations used by civilians under stress. Not much of the Program is revealed publicly apart from causes of death and the bloody, smiling winner; and parents are encouraged to view it as a unique form of military conscription and a patriotic duty. In the end, Sakamochi/Kitano says that this is all bullshit and the Program just a way for the dictatorship to terrorize their population into obedience.
- The main character of Bloody Junkie ends up in one of these when he tries to find answers to his brother's disappearance.
- Bokurano introduces its Humongous Mecha battles as a 'game' where the protagonists must defend the Earth against another Humongous Mecha, with the Earth being destroyed if they fail. Unfortunately the robot they pilot runs on Life Energy, meaning every sortie kills one of them. It later turns out the 'game' is a ladder tournament between different Earths in The Multiverse, and every win for our protagonists has killed another Earth and all its inhabitants. As to whomever made the game? They are never revealed, and in the manga go on to start a new tournament with a new roster of pilots on another Earth.
- Btooom! has 32 'contestants'. Every one's a person who's been charged with being a worthless drain on society, and each has a chip embedded in their left hand. Anyone who collects eight of these chips total (via murder, naturally) gets off the island of death.
- Darwin's Game is an augmented reality survival MMO where players are given superpowers known as Sigils, with its objectives being a series of Gladiator Games with the winners being given a huge sum of prize money. Being augmented reality, it takes place in the real world while players use their phones to access the more gamified elements such as a gacha system that teleports weapons to the user. Dead players simply vanish, taking whatever surface their corpse was on with them, leaving behind a person-shaped imprint reminiscent of pixel art that bystanders write off as street art.
- The titular video sharing site of DEAD Tube frequently poses challenges to its members, and whomever posts a video that gets the highest score wins. While it usually isn't stated that such a video includes murder or rape, those do tend to get the highest score and a fairly generous monetary prize... and a Get Out Of Jail Free card for any crimes they committed.
- Subverted in Death Parade. Two people get to a bar and are forced to play a game where the Arbiter says they'll wage their lives on, however, the bar itself is in the afterlife and the two players are already dead, therefore they don't even have a life to wage, but they don't know that. The real point of the game is to see how people would react in an immensely stressful situation against a vague threat, to let the Arbiter judge where they should go after their lives had been lived, and the game's outcome has no real meaning, just the players' behavior through it.
- The manga Di[e]ce is about death games modeled after chess. Players are either on the white side or the black side, and are assigned the role of king, knight, bishop, etc. The games mostly consist of getting out of dangerous situations alive before the time limit is up, and slaughtering a ton of zombies, but the two king's "teams" are pitted against each other, too. The games will only end when one king kills the other.
- Digimon Ghost Game:
- Episode 8 of has the cast get forced into deadly Wacky Racing by Thrill Seeker Villain of the Week Sistermon Ciel, who made a Deal with the Devil with The Grim Reaper Digimon MetalPhantomon, offering the losers' lives in order to make it "more exciting". Failing to outrun it or attempting to leave before sunrise results in the losing Digimon being instantly absorbed by MetalPhantomon as a result of the Magically-Binding Contract Sistermon forced them into.
- Episode 41 has Hiro and Ruli face off against the Mega-level Evil Sorcerer Piedmon, with Ruli playing him in a card game of chance. While Hiro and BetelGammamon fight his mooks, the loser of each round of the game has one of their Digimon allies impaled by Piedmon's Projectile Spell and if Ruli loses the game entirely she'll be turned into one of his playing cards alongside all the children he kidnapped.
- The Tournament of Power from Dragon Ball Super has each eight universes gather a group of ten fighters to participate in an all-out Battle Royale with the loser team has their entire universe erased at the hands of Zeno. Eventually, seven universes with trillions of beings are erased as they lose the Tournament of Power one-by-one, which is undone once Android 17 wishes for the erased universes to return, during which Zeno and the Grand Priest reveal the true motive of the Tournament: to check whether mortals will be able to request a selfless wish in the aftermath of the decimation.
- In Eden of the East, Akira, along with 11 other people, become players in a game where the goal is to "become the savior" of Japan, armed with ten billion yen, a strange cell phone and a mysterious woman named Juiz who can make anything happen for a price. If someone uses their money in a way that is deemed "unfit" to saving Japan, they end up dragging their feet and being too passive, or if the player runs out of money, then they are "eliminated" from the game. Subverted when it's revealed the players aren't actually killed but have their memories erased. The Selecao that actually did die was a coincidence due to Death by Woman Scorned.
- Enigme: The characters involved have to utilize their respective superpowers to solve the puzzles in order to save their own lives.
- In Future Diary, 12 people have magic diaries that can predict the future. The winner gets to become god. The winner wins by being the last person standing. Anything is allowed.
- This is the entire point of the game in Gantz, because the Final Boss is a 20 Minutes into the Future civilization of 200-foot tall 4-eyed giants who plan on turning all of humanity into toys for their games, like fly fishing with running humans, or fighting them in even larger mecha, or just turning them into food. The contestants are drafted to kill the entire civilization before it can conquer Earth.
- JoJo's Bizarre Adventure:
- In JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Stardust Crusaders, Daniel J. D'Arby is a professional gambler whose Stand ability Osiris steals the souls of anyone who admits defeat in a game with him, most often poker. Furthermore, he can't be harmed, since if he dies, so do all the souls he's collected essentially making his victims double as hostages. His younger brother Terence's Stand ability Atum is almost identical, except he prefers to make people play against him in video games instead.
- In JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Stone Ocean, Miraschon's Stand Marilyn Manson functions similarly to Osiris and activates whenever someone loses or cheats at a gamble with her regardless of circumstances, except instead of taking its victim's soul it robs them of their most valuable possessions, including vital organs.
- In JinrouGame the characters play a deadly version of The Werewolf Game.
- In Juni Taisen: Zodiac War, the titular Juni Taisen is a tournament where twelve Eastern Zodiac-themed mercenaries are poisoned and pitted against each other in a battle to the death. The last one standing is granted an antidote and a wish.
- Jujutsu Kaisen has this in its fittingly-named "Culling Game" arc, where sorcerer (and curse user) contestants are pitted against each other in deadly battles to the death. Murdering humans will award a single point, while slaughtering other practitioners of jujutsu will award five. Refusing to participate will result in one's cursed technique being extracted. Uniquely enough, the rules in this particular game can be changed...but killing one hundred humans or twenty players at the very minimum is the requirement.
- Kaiji revolves around a group of poor and desperate people playing a series of potentially deadly games of chance with the promise of monetary gain if they win, for the amusement of rich people. The titular character Kaiji is a gambling addict who joins the game in order to avoid being forced to spend a decade in a labor camp by the yakuza.
- The Kindaichi Case Files: The case House of Games Murder Case features one, as eight people, including Hajime and Miyuki, are kidnapped by a mysterious "Game Master", who traps everyone in an Abandoned Hospital and forces them to play games including a quiz, wire puzzles, and a scavenger hunt, all modified in some way to kill anyone who doesn't win (the quiz participants are hooked with bombs that will explode the loser, the wire puzzles contain keys to escape from a burning room, etc.). After escaping the game, Hajime thinks back on all the stages and realizes that the Game Master was one of the players, and that their manipulations, the choice of participants, and the layout of the games themselves all conspired to only kill specific people in a specific order, while sparing everyone else.
- Played with in an issue of an early The King of Fighters manga by Tatsuya Shinjyouji. Kyo, Daimon and Benimaru have to battle Mai, Yuri and King in the streets of Osaka instead of any official KOF stadium, but in a variation, it's not to save their own lives, but to save Kyo's kidnapped girlfriend Yuki, locked in a hotel room that contains a time bomb. The only way her kidnappers will tell Kyo and Co. where poor Yuki is so they can rescue her before she's blown into smithereens is to have them win their fight in a certain time limit. For worse, Kyo is forced to carry a cellphone that they'll use to send him the "coordinates"... and Rugal's envoys use it to "remind" him that he and his friends are running out of time. They win in the end, so they're given the instructions, manage to locate Yuki and then they bail her out of the room literally seconds away from the explosion, and Kyo even tackles her to the ground to shield her with his own body... but it turns out the bomb was actually a fake, and Yuki never was in life-threatening danger. The one behind the deal, KOF host Rugal Berstein, was just trolling Kyo and Co. For the Evulz.
- Episode 2 of Knight Hunters does this with a game of Human Chess that doesn't particularly resemble chess, but which does involve forcing competitors to fight one another to death.
- Not quite deadly, but Liar Game's titular game leaves most of its participants with crippling, 100-million-yen or more debts which must be repaid by any means necessary...
- The titular game of The Ones Within; or rather, the "live" version. Individual rounds aren't always dangerous (some of them, in fact, are downright silly), but it's made clear to the participants that if they don't achieve the ultimate win condition, they'll literally be playing the game until they die—and rebellion will not be taken lightly.
- Real Account: 10,000 people on the titular social network are summoned to cyberspace, participating in a game televised across Japan. The key to surviving is the number of followers one has on the social network, so long as one has at least one follower; these followers can drop out at any time. Of course, that isn't a safeguard against death itself, and if one player happens to die with a positive follower count, his followers die with him. It separates itself from other "death games" by actually having the audience both be participants and murderers in its choice to stick with or leave the players.
- Zig-zagged somewhat in Though You May Burn To Ash. The participants are already dead, but exist within the confines of the game Kroel invited them to and will die if they lose.
- Along the lines of Liar Game, the titular game of Tomodachi Game leaves its losers with crippling debt while threatening to kill their loved ones if they talk about it. Things escalate even more later on in the story, as the high-schoolers participating are invited to the "adult" version of the game with higher stakes and life-threatening situations.
- Underdog features a year-long tournament, wherein the goal is to be the sole survivor of the 200 participants that initially entered. In each round, a player wins by killing their opponent through indirect means only (meaning that they can't directly injure their opponent, confine them in a way that causes their death, or hire others to kill them.) Otherwise, anything goes.
- Yu-Gi-Oh!:
- The eponymous protagonist has a Superpowered Anti-Hero side who has the power to turn any game at all into this. Early on, many villains use this on Yugi.
- The Death-T Arc in the manga is a series of Deadly Games orchestrated by Kaiba that he puts the heroes through in retaliation for his first loss to Yugi, but almost all of them are either blatantly rigged or tipped overwhelmingly in Kaiba's favor. For example, the first one is like Laser Tag, but while the heroes only have toy guns, their opponents are trained assassins with lethal version of the weapons. The only way they can survive is by Cutting the Knot when they can and outsmarting their foes when they can't. Kaiba himself doesn't cheat in the Final Battle, although his deck is much stronger than Yugi's from the start.
- Most of the matches in the Dark Tournament in YuYu Hakusho end with the loser's death. Similarly, Elder Toguro mentions that his wish if he wins the tournament is to kill the surviving members of Team Urameshi and all their friends, forcing the team to win or be massacred. Mostly averted in the Demon World Unification Tournament, as a result of Yusuke's insistence that they refrain from killing when they can.
