well the executions are clever, but they remind me of many anime cliches in both of anime and videogames, not because they look like anything i have seen, but because they are ultimate, time stopping attacks
Eh, it's the fun art style, and I always enjoyed horror sequences.
But really, Little Black Sambo's Death Cage refers to a story called Little Black Sambo where the protagonist gets the tigers who robbed him to chase each other round and round in circles until they reduce themselves to butter. I actually thought that was pretty clever to reference a relatively unknown story like that.