King's Game

Survival anime are nothing new when looking back over the last few years. Shows such as Btooom!, Danganropa and Mirai Nikki are all based around a particular survival game and have all found moderate to massive popularity among anime fans. Even outside of anime, you just have to look at franchises like The Hunger Games and Maze Runner to see how successful the subgenre is. It’s clear that stories based around a group of characters, their impending doom and how they try to survive such are intriguing to a lot of people. But why is that? Personally, I believe these kinds of premises can present a darker look at morality; show a darker side to ourselves through characters put in a severe set of circumstances that test one’s beliefs, values, friendships. It’s surprising how a simple concept can turn into a thrilling experience hard to match anywhere else. But this is where I have a problem with most survival anime; they begin with a simplistic setup and never get deeper. Things like character development and thematic exploration are barely touched on in these shows, with more time used for cheap thrills, cringe-worthy horror and overall mindless entertainment. This is an anime that manages to fail at even these aspects.

King’s Game: The Animation is an anime adaptation of a series of “cell phone novels” and is the most recent example of an anime to present us with a survival game that pits everyone against one another until there is one left standing. Considering what I could take from the poorly-designed cover art to the production studio behind it: Seven, who also made a couple Slice of Life comedies I’ve barely heard of and a ton of hentai, I didn’t have much in the way of expectations that this show would be anything good, but I was hopeful that it would at least be a fun watch. That was a mistake. King’s Game follows Nobuaki Kanazawa, the winner of the previous “King’s Game” as he transfers to a new school in an attempt to escape his terrible past. Unfortunately, the game follows him and now his new class are all subjected to the survival game that Nobuaki is all too familiar with. The basic rules of the game are: obey any order sent by the King within 24 hours, failure to do so will result in punishment/death and everyone involved must play to the end. Now, with all the basic information out of the way, here is how King’s Game: The Animation manages to turn a rather generic concept into one of the biggest fuckups of the entire year.

The first major problem with this anime is how it introduces the game, more specifically the “orders” from the King that everyone must obey. The first order involves Nobuaki and classmate Natsuko Honda having to kiss, otherwise they’ll be “punished”. The first order is extremely childish considering this is supposed to be a game where people’s lives are on the line. Show like this need to have some high stakes and consequences to match how serious the game is, also adding suspense and excitement to what characters will do, even if they’re predictable. In the first episode, any sense of initial weight here is lost once you see how all of the orders feel like they were made by a 10-year-old. And if you thought ordering people to kiss was already a dumb move, prepare yourself, because most of the orders shown throughout the show are forcing students to have sex with each other. Let me ask, how is one supposed to take a death game seriously at all when a majority of it is about groping breasts and coerced sex? It’s absurd and should not be taken seriously. Other dumb orders include not sleeping before you have obeyed an instruction and not doing anything unnecessary for 24 hours. If you didn’t understand the last order, don’t worry, the entire game isn’t worth the time and even the minimal effort required to understand. This is clearly a case of a simple concept turned ridiculous due to how serious the show tries to take it. But what’s even more ridiculous is the characters involved in the game.

King’s Game deals with a class of 32 students, not including characters from Nobuaki’s past and none of them are developed to where you are supposed to about them except for the protagonist, and even then he comes off so bland and uninteresting that I’m sure a lot of people watching won’t care about him or the show a couple weeks after finishing said show. In fact, it probably would’ve been better to have killed Nobuaki off midway so it wouldn’t have been so predictably boring. But I digress. Most of the characters are just expendable and are made as victims of the punishments in a poor attempt to justify the gravity of their predicament. Literally about a dozen characters with no prior screen time die on the first day because they were sleeping, and viewers are expected to care? You don’t create sympathy from your audience by killing off characters in such a way with their only key feature being that they exist! That’s one of the most obvious examples of lazy writing in anime. But the poor writing doesn’t stop there, since most of the characters that do get screen time are completely one-dimensional, have no interesting traits and can be easily replaced with any of the nameless character that got killed off first. It’s one thing to say in an anime like this you only know a little about 2-3 characters after the first episode, it’s a whole other issue when half-way through watching, you still only now about a couple of characters when over half of the class is already dead. Not good King’s Game, not good.

But that’s not all, because it just so happens that basically every single character in the show is a [redacted] to the point where even if these characters were developed at all, it would still be difficult to feel anything when these characters die because of their own stupidity. The most blatant example of how autistic they can get is when Natsuko is ordered to have sex with a guy, asks to have sex with Nobuaki first, and then when denied does a whole 180 personality-wise, grabbing the initial dude and tries to do the act in front of all her other classmates. They try to play it off saying she was always psychotic and only acted nice, but considering how she was nice to everyone around her and even showed interest in Nobuaki before the game, I see this . But this is just small example compared to the dozens of time where characters show their complete ignorance to what is even happening around them. These characters are still kids, but the idea that most of them are unable to think for themselves what other players are doing in a game of life or death is bewildering to say the least. It’s like they have selective memory loss where they all just forget what happened 2 minutes before when a character was acting like a lunatic. Even just thinking about how the show would work in our world brings forth a whole new set of questions that the show never ever acknowledges because it knows just how full of bullshit it really is. For example, if so many students in the same class have died in such a short amount of time, wouldn’t there be police involved? Wouldn’t any of the students try and tell someone who isn’t a part of the game about what’s happening? Oh wait, I forgot. This anime doesn’t bother showing characters that are not part of the game. The way that King’s Game avoids showing any sort of outside influence that would have an impact on the game is enough to tell me that this is nothing more that mindless entertainment at a very low standard.

Another big issue with King’s Game is how it tells its story. The story overall is not difficult to tell but it tries to combine both the present game with flashbacks of the previous game Nobuaki was a part of before transferring and it ends up being detrimental to the show. The flashbacks shown usually take up most of the episode and makes it a lot more difficult for most present-day characters to get any proper focus or development before they are killed off. The characters in these flashbacks can also easily be confused with characters in the present due to how similar all of their designs are, making it harder to differentiate between the two timelines at times. The transitions between the two timelines does not help to distinguish when a time-jump has occurred. I understand that this anime is trying to adapt 2 different instalments to the franchise, but it ends up being so unnecessary as all that was needed to show was few scenes with Nobuaki and his former classmates rather than encompass more than 1 story in 12 episodes. The outcome of the past game is already given as Nobuaki says himself that he was the only survivor. And the saddest part, most of the characters in the flashback are more developed that characters in the current and try to find out what the King’s Game really is, when it really should be the other way around as the flashbacks stop at episode 7, leaving us to deal with shit characters play out this shit storyline for the rest of this shit anime.

When it comes to the punishments and actual deaths in this anime, I am once again disappointed. Not only because of how cheap so many of these deaths feel, but of how these death are nearly always shameless gore fests, yet not so over-the-top that they end up being hilarious. King’s Game is actually very similar to Another, a 2012 horror anime that also featured a cast of school students and had most of them dying in some of the most exaggerated ways possible that it almost turned the show into a comedy. Seriously, watch a couple of the deaths in Another, on their own they are way better than the actual show. I wouldn’t be surprised if the deaths shown here in King’s Game were inspired by Another, but even then, King’s Game fails to do that right. It has around the same amount of death and bloodshed as Another, but was never amusing, and while part of that is due to stupid actions by the characters, the execution of these deaths are also just anticlimactic. I never thought I would ever say that seeing a character literally explode in a pile of blood was boring, but alas here we are. Well done King’s Game, you even fail at being an entertaining piece of garbage.

Now all that’s been said so far should tell you how awful this show is, but here I give you the biggest problem I have with this anime: The King. From the start of the anime the one in charge of ordering and killing off students is shrouded in mystery along with his method of action. The way he comes across as this seemingly omniscient and omnipotent villain had unique powers over victims similar to Light Yagami and the Death Note. But I was more concerned with the why. Why would someone or something so powerful and dangerous being dicking around with a class of teenagers, telling them to fuck each other or die a woeful death? What do they wish to gain from this and why do they not aim for something greater? But then King’s Game makes the revelation of the force behind it all, it is perhaps the most idiotic reveal I have seen in an anime. Ever. Anyone else theorizing about what could be behind it all gets figuratively dick-slapped as it makes any work or effort into understanding what this power is and how the students can beat it absolutely worthless! I’m not going to reveal the origins of the King’s Game but trust me when I tell you that it is almost as disrespectful as getting blue-balled by your partner on Christmas Day (bitch). I mentioned before how all the orders felt like they were conceived by a 10-year-old, but after learning about who the King really is I wouldn’t be surprised if the original writer had the mental capacity of a 10-year-old.

The only part of King’s Game that I can really commend it on is the production values, but even that has its fair share of problems. I’m not much of a stickler on the animation of a show, but let’s be real: this show was made in 2017, and it looks like it could have been made over a decade ago. Aside from some backgrounds, there is nothing visually impressive about this show and feels lacklustre for the most part. You just need to see how they animate broken fingers to understand how dull and low budget this project was. But it does have its merits: effective facial expressions convey a lot of emotion and a dark colour palette suited the theme of the show, and I can say that the animation was tolerable. The same goes for the sound, with nothing memorable with regards to OSTs yet nothing godawful. I know a lot of people will praise the show’s opening as the best of the season, but I found it boring after a few episodes, with the main line “THIS IS THE END THIS IS THE END!!!!” becoming a meme of the show. And honestly Inuyashiki came out the same season with an OP very similar, but about a dozen times better. The voice acting was below par all across the board, with the English dub being even worse. But if I had to choose, I would still pick the dub, because at least that way I won’t have to think about the show as much, giving my head a well-deserved rest after pushing through this.

And there you have it. That is King’s Game: The Animation; a disordered, pathetic abomination of an anime I plan to never lay eyes on again. We’re at the end of 2017 and yet shit like this is still being made, but this is nothing new. King’s Game is literally Mayoiga: The Lost Village – One Year Later, and if you’ve never heard of Mayoiga, just look at its mean score and that will tell you all one needs to know. They were both cringeworthy horror borefests that started off bad and only devolved into something so pathetic that even the biggest advocators of schlock entertainment would find masochistic. At this point, King’s Game is worse than just edgy; it cuts deep and it hurts, before leaving a permanent scar; something to always remind you of how foolish you were to try and handle the King’s Game. You weren’t raped physically, but mentally and emotionally are left desecrated and missing a part of your soul that you’ll never get back. This is the chance one takes when watching any intriguing seasonal anime. Was it worth it?