Corpse Party is by far the goriest anime I have ever seen. If you thought for a second that something like Attack on Titan or Tokyo Ghoul was "gory" then I dare you to watch this and tell me otherwise. The reason I decided to choose this as my topic for the week was basically because I was at Barnes and Nobles the other day with my friend and we found the manga and of course I was like, "Oh 'Corpse Party' that sounds interesting!" And when it came time to write the post and I still hadn't watched anything for this week I went to read the manga online and found out there was a short series of OVA's and decided to watch those instead. I did do some research before hand to see just what I was getting myself into by watching something like this and I found out that both the manga and the anime are derived from a video game released on PC all the way back in 1996. It was later remade several times and you can even buy it on Steam or the Nintendo 3DS version. Sadly, I did not have the time to play this game, and frankly after watching the anime I'm not sure I even want to anymore. Nevertheless I sat through this and now I'm going to tell you about it!
It's kind of difficult to give a short synopsis for what exactly this series is about, but I'm going to try my best. Basically it's a group of nine people that are gathered together after school one day to send their friend off on her last day before she transfers to a new school. One of the friends is into the occult and tells them about how the school they currently go to was built on the site of Heavenly Host Elementary School where numerous tragedies occurred forcing the school to close many years ago. They then decide to perform a ritual she saw online that was supposed to bond them together as friends forever. The ritual ends up going wrong and everyone ends up at Heavenly Host Elementary trapped with no way out. They find out they're all separated into different closed spaces and have to appease the vengeful spirits of the four children that were murdered here and get a confession from the teacher that killed them in order to get out and return to their original time space. Brutal murders occur, people go insane, mysteries unfold, and severed tongues are returned to their owners. If you are in any way turned off by body horror, I recommend you watch something else.
I don't really know whether or not I liked this anime. I definitely feel grossed out and kind of a little bit sick after watching it. I liked all of the characters for the most part and the story kept my attention throughout all four episodes. I couldn't believe that the people who were killed off were actually killed off (spoiler alert: they brutally kill the main characters 12 year old sister by strapping her to a science table, stabbing her repeatedly, and ripping her eyeball out of her head). I also found myself getting frustrated at some of the characters decisions so I guess that means I cared about what was happening. I'm almost at a loss for words in that I can't really recommend that anyone watch this, but I also can't find a reason like "it was a bad anime" to tell you not to. It was a solid anime, solid story, solid characters, and there is a lot of content in the form of games, manga, and a live action film (I definitely want to watch this) that can keep you going if for some reason you happen to find yourself a fan of Corpse Party.
It was initially very shocking to me that Japan allowed this to air because of all their strict sensor laws. I know in Dangan Ronpa they had to change the color of the blood from red to pink to adhere to those laws and I guess maybe this was more liberal because it's older and definitely labeled as for adults. (When you look this up a lot of sites require that you be over eighteen to view it.) A lot of the things that happen just shocked me though. They cut peoples tongues out, explode bodies onto the wall, sever heads, stab people in the eye, the list of ways people die in this anime is a very long one. I would compare it to a cross between Battle Royale and Dangan Ronpa, but with vengeful ghosts that have the ability to kill.
I guess to close this out I would say that Corpse Party is different from a lot of the horror anime's I've seen. It goes in a darker direction than a lot of what's out there (maybe I just haven't delved deep enough into horror anime yet and there's actually something far worse than this) and in a fairly short amount of time. There are only four episodes that are each a half an hour long so it's a quick watch, but of course this means you're not getting the full experience. I would recommend you play the game as that is the source material for this, but also it's one of those games where it's possible to get different endings meaning you have to play it a lot in order to get the one true ending and if you're like me you might play it over and over again in order to know every possible ending there is. When I went into Google images to find pictures for this post there was a lot of stuff I didn't know from the anime including new characters and scenarios (I guess they also had a swimsuit episode lol) so you definitely won't be getting the full story from this if you choose only to watch the OVA's. Check it out though, maybe this will be your next obsession!
-Bookwyrm
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