Sabagebu! Survival Game Club
There are many routes to get into a new anime show. You can see a gorgeous poster about it in the latest issue of Megami Magazine, have it recommended to you by friends, or read about it on the J-List blog or in our popular mailing list. Or you can get into it through bizarre anime gifs that you see randomly posted around the Internet. That’s how I started watching Sabagebu!, a fun anime about a school’s survival club game I’d known about for years but never actually watched. It’s the story of a girl named Momoka who finds herself joining her school’s club, where students shoot at each other with airsoft guns while honing their survival skills and breaking the fourth wall in every episode. As the anime points out, the blood and violence shown on-screen is all in the minds of the participants, like chunibyo. “This is all in the girls’ imaginations. You can’t die for real in a survival game, so please don’t worry!”
Like other gun-centric shows Upotte!, C3-bu or Hidan no Aria, Sabagebu! gives us a glimpse into the phycology of the Japanese, who do sometimes obsess over guns, thinking them kakko ii and memorizing the names and model numbers of their favorite weapons. There are many kinds of otaku in Japan, including anime/manga, idol and train wota, even girls who obsess about Japanese historical figures (rekijo). Shows like Sabagebu! are aimed at gun and military otakus who are fascinated by the romance of guns in popular culture. For the record, guns do exist in Japan, generally owned by licensed hunters in parts of Japan where bears and wild boars are common. I had a Japanese friend who had a large collection of Remington rifles, and an American friend in Nagano got his hunting license.
J-List stocks lots of fun anime and related games for PS4 and Nintendo Switch, which are region free and tons of fun to play. We recently added lots of new games, including the panty-focused Gal Gun 2, Fist of the North Star x Ryu ga Gotoku crossover and Attack on Titan. Browse them all now!
