The Hunger Games and Battle Royale are too much alike.

Having just finished The Hunger Games, I am a bit shocked that the book was ever published, when it is almost a carbon copy of Battle Royale. Now I know that Battle Royale's author was japanese, but doesn't he have some sort of copyright protection in place, especially since he published in North America years before The Hunger Games? Even if Suzanne Collins swears that she came up with the idea on her own (and I do believe her), her publishers must have known about the books similarities to Battle Royale, yet they went ahead and published The Hunger Games anyway.

I mean, consider the following, keeping in mind Battle Royale was published in 1999 and The Hunger Games in 2008:

1. Both books feature a "last boy/girl" standing "game", in which teenagers are put in an arena and expected to fight to the death, winner gets to live.

2. In both books, these games are conducted by fascist governments as a way to keep an unruly population under control.

3. The children are chosen at random in both books. In The Hunger Games its one boy and one girl per district, in Battle Royale the combatants are all from the same randomly selected highschool class.

4. In both books, at the end of the day the dead players are announced by loudspeaker. The Hunger Games added the detail of having the dead children's faces put up in the sky with a projector.

5. In both books, characters are killed with poisonous food.

6. In both books, more than one character makes it out alive, and the survivors have romantic entanglements.

7. In both books, traps drive the combatants towards one another (though the way it was handled in Battle Royale was "smarter" - instead of random disasters, people knew ahead of time which zones would become dangerous, and this allowed for deeper strategy than The Hunger Games could offer, in which "random events happen as the plot demands").

And I'm upset about it, for a variety of reasons. First, Collins' success has basically shut down any sort of big budget Hollywood adaptation of Battle Royale (which I was really looking forward to!), second Battle Royale was the superior work yet never got the kind of recognition it should have (and now probably never will, because of the popularity of The Hunger Games overshadowing it), likely because Koushoun Takami was japanese and therefore not seen as worth the time to pimp in North America.

Basically, I think that Battle Royale was the smarter work, so in my mind it deserves more credit and the author deserves all those big royalties from a hollywood blockbuster - Not Suzzane Collins, whose The Hunger Games is filled with contrivances to advance the plot for example, mutant zombie werewolves come out of nowhere to save Katniss the trouble of finishing off Cato in his battle armor, a stupid love triangle, and a shallow Mary Sue character as the lead. It's just not fair, dammit!

Anyways, don't want to rant forever, and I've said my piece, but what do you all think? Is The Hunger Games too similar to Battle Royale? Or does The Hunger Games stand on its own two feet and deserves the praise it has received?