With Dead by Daylight set to finally preview its Five Nights at Freddy’s chapter, fans of the game are already speculating on potential future chapter releases and the killers/survivors to come with them. One new release, that being the Tokyo Ghoul crossover chapter which added killer Ken Kaneki to the game, has got me thinking; Dead by Daylight really needs to embrace the anime horror genre and add more iconic manga slashers and survivors to the game. In fact, I can name quite a few off the top of my head that would fit into DBD perfectly.
Videos by ComicBook.com
The Tokyo Ghoul chapter is not Dead by Daylight‘s first taste of anime or manga content in the game. Previous collaborations have featured iconic anime and manga characters as premium skins in the game, notably in the Attack on Titan and Junji Ito collections, with the latter dressing up DBD’s characters like iconic frights from the famous horror Mangaka’s works. The Tokyo Ghoul crossover, however, is the first to add a completely new character to the game, and hopefully we have more soon to follow.
The world of Japanese comics and animation is an incredibly diverse tapestry to pull characters from, something that is no less true when it comes to horror. Junji Ito’s works alone, despite generally being less about terrifying killers and more about bizarre, scary phenomena, is an excellent source of potential Dead by Daylight characters. Kirie Goshima from Uzumaki could fit in along with any of Dead by Daylight‘s survivors, and I can only imagine how terrifying it would be to load up into a match against a killer playing as The Hanging Balloons.
There are also plenty of anime and manga which, while not being horror in nature, are horror-adjacent with their themes and aesthetics and have characters that would make great additions to Dead by Daylight. I could just picture Hellsing’s Alucard as a cocky killer who toys with his victims before unleashing his full, ghoulish power with Baskerville, though one could argue that he’s kind of already in the game.
Death Note’s Light Yagami and Ryuk could enter the fray as methodical killers who must find a survivor’s name in order to murder them with the Death Note itself. This chapter also couldn’t be included without a Misa Amane alternative skin and an L survivor cameo. Devilman Crybaby has a host of characters that could fit on either side of the killer/survivor spectrum, something that can also probably be said about Parasyte’s Shinichi Izumi.
I’d even go so far as to say that Himiko Toga from My Hero Academia would make a great Dead by Daylight killer, perhaps with the ability to take the shape of an injured survivor to blend in with the crowd. Honestly, I could even see Kyubey from Puella Magi Madoka Magica making an excellent killer addition to Dead by Daylight.
RELATED: Dead by Daylight Mobile Officially Shutting Down
While I personally believe Dead by Daylight could greatly benefit from the addition of more anime and manga crossovers, there are other fans who would surely disagree with me.
While the Tokyo Ghoul crossover was met with a lot of excitement from players, some fans of the game viewed the new killer with skepticism. Where there is certainly a degree of them which simply do not like anime, there has been concern expressed on social media about what the addition of anime and manga characters to the game does for the DBD continuity, which until now has only used characters from live-action media.
Others say that the animated aesthetic of characters like Ken Kaneki might clash with other Dead by Daylight characters, such as Yamamura Sadako or Michael Myers. That being said, you can easily argue that Behaviour Interactive did a great job of converting Ken Kaneki’s appearance to a more realistic style to fit in with the Dead by Daylight aesthetic.
Personally, however, I feel like a game which has room for Freddy Krueger, a dream-walking serial killer, the Xenomorph, an alien from the far future, and whoever they choose to join the game in the upcoming Five Nights at Freddy’s crossover can also make room for Ken Kaneki and other iconic horror characters from anime and manga.
Most Viewed
-
Image Credit: State Farm
