So I wasn't planning on writing any review for this show... but since the only review currently available is in French, I thought I'll make the effort for those of you who don't speak the language. If you speak French, I direct you to read Kenseiden's review which is way better written than what you're about to read. For the record, I'm also French... so don't expect my prose to be as compelling as his in English.

So this is a live action adapted from a 22 volumes manga. Now. I'm personally not familiar with the manga itself. Never heard of it before so given the title I was expecting some form of puzzle game à la Liar Game ( of which I've read the manga and watched the 2014 K drama adaptation but not the Japanese one). This review is hence solely and purely based on the live adaptation itself.

The first episode started great. It looked good and it felt expensive... I thought I was in for a high budget wild ride.

...
My... Was I mistaken.
This feels very cheap... All the budget must have gone to produce the first episode, the last 3 minutes of the show and the demons/devils CGIs.

Very quickly this shounen adaptation fell into a very repetitive formula which very flat and boring directing didn't help and led me quickly to a state of ultimate boredom. 1 episode = 1 game + 1 new friend or friendly foe. This is a genre that I usually enjoy. Japanese are usually pretty good at turning something pretty boring on the outside, into something exciting... particularly when it comes to mind puzzles. Unfortunately not this time.

If you manage to get past the 4/5 first episodes ( so HALF the drama), things pick up a bit and though the formula is still the same, there's enough new plots thrown into the mix to keep things mildly more interesting. But not that much.

The series must have stayed pretty faithful to its source material because unfortunately we also get the usual shounen manga style acting that don't always match well with live actions. I'm still not really sure it worked well here but I'd say it's 50/50. By the time I reached the end, I was no longer as annoyed with the over the top anime like acting of the actors as I was when I started the show.

More importantly, good adaptations require sometimes that you let go of some of the shounen clichés such as: revelation no jutsu, talk no jutsu, family trauma no jutsu, the power of friendship no jutsu, the final useless talk no jutsu, the blahblahblahblah no jutsu ( to fill the minute and create some tension in the cheap background that looks like my garage, if I had a garage), the let's be friends forever even if we've met only once and you're an asshole no jutsu, the friendship/rivalry no jutsu, the useless butler no jutsu, the I'm better than you back-and-forth-useless-dialogues no jutsu, I'm turning evil so I change my clothes and haircut no jutsu, the power of friendship is the only thing you need to save the world no jutsu, the savior syndrome no jutsu, the sacrifice no jutsu AH I forgot the I-tell-you-my-life-sob-story no jutsu because I need you to understand where I'm coming from because it would be too long in a manga to draw and too expensive in a live action to film... no jutsu.

Of course this ACMA game... has err.... Games. And as usual in the genre, comprises of lots of strategies that are easier to follow in written format than on TV. I tried to, but as per usual at some point the strategies got so convoluted ( and the characters remember everything because... err Shounen no jutsu, inhumane memory no jutsu and shut up it's a manga no jutsu), I switched my brain off and kept on reading my subtitles mindlessly... no jutsu.

And yeah you might be irritated to read my review no jutsu... But seriously this live action oozes "shounen" from every single pores of its body if it had any. And I get it. It's a live action... But a good live action is an adaptation. What works in a manga/anime doesn't necessarily work with live actors. You ADAPT. And I struggle to see where they adapted anything except for the budget and removing a lot of the original story.

Most of the plot twists were expected though I didn't see the "BIG" plot twist in episode 9 coming. Arguably most people would have seen it miles away but it was just too big a cliché for me to predict. Should have kept my guard up. No amount of plot twists could save this live action though.

In conclusion:

Was it a bad show? Err... I honestly don't know. I don't see it as bad because it is a shounen. Shounen are made to be exciting... But if you're already very familiar with the genre... this one doesn't feel fresh, it's an old recipe that's been done and done again except that it is without directing flair so even its most exciting parts felt either boring, bland or both. Some of the clichés will make you roll your eyes. The final episode ends as it started: with a lot of predictable plot twists which you probably have seen coming miles away and hence just felt like lazy writing.
Reaching the final ten minutes, I started to wonder if this wasn't a shounen parody.
It felt like a manga that was literally riding on a popular trend at the time it was written without any effort to bring something original to the mix and a live action just as lazy, which didn't bother to adapt it well to fit its format.

Would I recommend it? NO

Did I have fun watching it?

Err It depends... I was bored for the first 4/5 episodes but once I understood that this would be filled to the brim with clichés, I started to enjoy making fun of the show... Do you know? It's the feeling you get when you're watching what we call in French a "nanar" : a show that's so bad, it's good.

So my final rating will be a 7. Don't trust the individual notes I gave because I just made it so that it reached 7. The best rating that was suggested from the ones I had originally entered was a 6... But honestly the show got so fun in its ridiculousness that I think it deserves a good 7 for the laugh.