A remarkable display of incompetence in animation and writing—Tomodachi Game is a pathetic example of everything wrong with psychological anime today.

The first sign that something is horribly wrong is the introduction of the main characters. Each one has a freeze-frame to display their name at the start. When you think the writing couldn't get any lazier, they add a synopsis of their personality, weaknesses, and relationships. I wouldn't be watching the show if I wanted to read a wiki page.

The main cast is a group of five archetypal high school friends; three angsty guys and two girls defined by trauma. The girls are utilized for (often deplorable) fan service and to motivate the men. Kicking off the anime is a theft—their class savings for a field trip have disappeared! Soon after, the five friends are suddenly kidnapped! Upon waking up in a strange place, a creepy robot mascot introduces himself as Manban and enthusiastically tells them they're in the "Tomodachi Game." He elaborates they will have to play a series of kids' games to pay off a costly debt given to them by a traitor in their group. It should take 5 seconds to realize these games are engineered to tear friendships apart. But it takes hours for them to realize this because the dialogue is primarily spent on dumping a metric ton of exposition: Explaining each game's rules, getting taunted by the obnoxious mascot, and monologuing their strategies. The script consists only of a tedious back and forth between unbearable characters.

Though the show would like you to believe the protagonist, Yuuichi, is a cold and calculated genius with a method to his madness, he often comes off as an unhinged idiot pretending to be smarter than he is. Plot contrivances and loopholes are the only reason he gets away with his half-baked strategies. Yuuichi is engineered for the viewer to live vicariously through him; his sociopathic behavior has minimal repercussions. It simplifies complex social dilemmas and hardly invites any moral discussion. At the drop of a hat, he flip-flops between earnest and psychopathic—why these kids were friends is the real mystery. Tomodachi Game is only a "mystery" in the sense that the author works backward in many parts to explain the absurd plot twists, not through craft or tension. After trying to dazzle us with an unexpected twist, Yuuichi rewinds his intellectual strategy to explain everything. One of Tomodachi Game's favorite gimmicks is starting from the end of the episode; they bait you with the result and then tediously detail the play-by-play. Unless you're invested in seeing a pretentious kid outsmart a pack of stereotypical teenagers, you'd be better off doing something more enjoyable, like watching paint dry or eating a bowl of nails.

Occasionally the show pauses to crosscut between the game itself and a group of unknown women in a security room. The women watch the game while obnoxiously narrating what we can see with our own two eyes. Manban runs the game himself, so the security room serves no functional purpose. They only exist to spoon-feed plot twists and explain character dynamics like we're brainless zombies who consume every shitty anime without caring about quality. Speaking of quality, the visuals look like an amateur studio's first anime made on a shoestring budget. Due to rushed artwork, the freakish facial expressions during intense scenes look like a cheap imitation of Kakegurui and Gambling Apocalypse Kaiji. Meanwhile, Manban looks like the artists took him out of a Playstation 2 game because of his ridiculous CGI model.

The soundtrack is almost as remarkable as the art, not for making the story better, but because it creates as much tension as elevator music. It's incredible how generic and repetitive it is. I'm in awe of how little effort went into sound editing because every scene must fight through the awful music to reach the audience. The profoundly confusing music choices make the mishmashed tone even more confused. I couldn't blame the composer if they were purposefully sabotaging the intellectually bankrupt story.

All bark and no bite summarizes Manban, who simultaneously manages to be a threatening and toothless antagonist. Repeatedly, he reminds the students about the unfathomable amount of money at stake because it is such a lame consequence. How will the debt be granted to them upon completing the game? How will they be forced to repay the debt? Any explanations they do give are vague at best. There's little reason to care without solid consequences established right off the bat, aside from PG-13 violence. Manban's anti-violence rule prevents blood or gore for most of the runtime, which would serve a psychological thriller like this quite well. Except, the mechanics of each game don't create stakes. Instead, they focus more on petty drama in the group and the monetary repercussions of losing. If psychological warfare is what you're looking for, you're shit out of luck because these mind games wouldn't even outsmart a kid. Though Death Note may have inspired it with all of the mind games, it lands closer to its inbred cousin Platinum End. The thrill comes from wondering what will happen next, even though technically—for most of the anime's runtime—absolutely nothing is happening.

Concepts are presented, but it's unclear how they affect the story. There's no explanation for what should be explained, like how the game is being live-streamed and why viewers' reactions affect the game results. The issue with a writer throwing random shit at the wall to see what sticks is obvious: nearly every anime needs internal logic–a sense of the anime's rules and a feeling of sturdy foundation. Without internal logic, everything is just pointless.

Later into the show, an entirely new crew of even less interesting high school students enters the limelight. Yet again, name tags and personality descriptions introduce them: a shining example of the laziest character writing that anime offers. Why should we care about these people? Who knows! Why are new characters getting added when the original ones are as flat as pancakes? By the time the last game finishes, it's hard to care.

Initially, it appears as if Tomodachi Game is just another pretentious psychological anime about a lone genius trapped in a world of morons where everyone misunderstands him. Then, it rapidly spirals into a pit of idiotic narrative turns, astoundingly lazy character development, and stuffed with so many plot contrivances it's almost funny. The result is a confused, awkward, tedious state in limbo. Is Tomodachi Game good? No, it certainly is not. It wanted to be a thriller, but it unintentionally became a comedy, but it wasn't funny even enough to be worth watching ironically.