King's Game The Animation

Episode 7

King's Game was quite literally on fire last week, so maybe it's not surprising that this episode isn't able to escalate its ambitions. It does at least try to surprise the audience, though as usual the execution lets the whole thing down. This episode kind of plays like a Greatest Hits of the ride King's Game has tried to be so far, which speaks to the limited scope and skill of the series.

Thankfully, after almost a full relentless month of flashback episodes to Nobuaki's mind-numbing first King's Game, we finally return to the present, where he and his classmates Kenta and Mizuki are making their way to Yonaki Village to investigate the mystery of the first game. On the one hand, the wrecked ghost village makes for a decently appealing change of scenery, and it's nice to see the story pursuing a mystery the main character didn't already drop the answer to weeks ago. But on the other hand, the time-skip seems to have inflated the show's ambitions past what it was already failing to achieve.

Just like in the past, Nobuaki's friends turn to him for solutions to their conundrum, and it actually makes sense for him to have some ideas in this case since he's been through this before. Unfortunately, his idea to have Mizuki text the antagonistic Natsuko and another doomed classmate is delivered in the most cold and calculating manner possible. Kenta actually calls out his supposedly harsh disregard for life over this, with the intent being that we would understand how Nobuaki's experiences have made him more brutal. The problem with this is that we've never seen Nobuaki portrayed this way before. At the first indication of a King's Game encore, he'd been as panicky and solution-less as his past self; it was the major reason that Natsuko turned on him. Did the extended sleepless train trip to think things over finally spur Nobuaki into pragmatic action? Has the King nefariously switched him with an imposter? Was this whole thing just the author's first draft written on a cellphone? The possibilities are endless.

Inconsistencies like that are to be expected from this schlocky series, as are characters making appallingly dumb decisions. You'll roll your eyes when they break horror-story rule #1 and let Nobuaki go into a spooky house by himself, and when Kenta gets so distracted staring at the house that he doesn't notice Mizuki toddle away from him, but then he finds her and they start negotiating some infuriatingly circuitous plans to beat the “send two death text messages” order she's been stuck with since the show started. All of this predictably leads to a lamely-telegraphed love confession, maniacal emotions, and many stupid deaths.

One fundamental problem with King's Game is that it can't seem to decide what impact its parade of deaths is supposed to have on the audience. Sometimes it's going for simple gore-fest outrageousness, but other times it reaches for pathos by letting us get to know characters so we're affected somehow when the inevitable tragedy strikes. But the inevitability of that tragedy undercuts any tension, and the show barely remembers to start having the doomed cast members endear themselves to the audience before they meet their end in the same episode. Mizuki and Kenta are the same as Nami in episode 4, or Kaori and Yousuke in episode 5. Yes, these two have at least been around since the beginning of the show, but they haven't actually done anything until a third of the way through this episode. By the time the story has them jump through a bunch of hoops only to kill them anyway on a cheap technicality spelled out way back in the second episode, it feels like we've watched them cry and die longer than we've watched them even realize that they like each other. It makes any presence they might have had up to this point feel like a giant waste of time.

The other "shocking" moments of this episode at least shoot for cheap thrills. There's a hilarious scene of one girl having broken into a morgue and straddled a dude's cadaver in an attempt to fulfill one of the first orders, in what I guess passes for fanservice in this thing. We also see that another girl has wrecked most of her house and even killed her parents trying to complete that old “lose something important” order that was such an annoyance in the flashback, but while her parents were apparently fair game, she just can't bring herself to kill her beloved dog. I guess I'll just assume her parents were huge dickbags or something. These scenes feel much more exploitative in their deathly indulgences than some of the past sequences; I definitely get the impression that this "sequel" to the first King's Game is more interested in pushing the envelope.

The main highlight of this episode is its ridiculous plot twist: Nobuaki discovers that Chiemi's father actually played the original King's Game in Yonaki Village, that she also had a sister, and that sister is Natsuko! It's completely out of nowhere and should hopefully lead to more enjoyable stupid resolutions, especially with Natsuko closing out the episode by calling up Nobuaki right in the middle of the King-mandated sex she's having. Episodes like this make me wish King's Game would realize it doesn't need to try so hard; cornball escalation is probably easier than trying to wring emotion from halfhearted character development. This episode does still prove that the present-day storyline is better than the flashback, but an average episode of a lousy show is still a lousy show.

Rating: D+

King's Game The Animation is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.