Forum - View topicShiboyugi: Playing Death Games to Put Food on the Table (TV + movie).
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Blood-
 Bargain Hunter Posts: 25599 |
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Season 01: SHIBOYUGI: Playing Death Games to Put Food on the Table (TV) Movie: SHIBOYUGI: Playing Death Games to Put Food on the Table 44: CLOUDY BEACH (movie) Source: Light Novel (ongoing @ 8 volumes, written by Yushi Ukai, illustrated by Nekometaru) Demographic: Seinen Animation Studio: Studio Deen Genres: action, drama, mystery, psychological, thriller, tournament Themes: contemplation, dystopian, fan service, gore, maids, moral dilemma, non-linear narrative, social psychology, surrealism, survival game, tragedy Plot Summary: Yuki wakes up to find herself in an unfamiliar manor, wearing a maid uniform and lying on a luxurious bed. Soon, she discovers five more girls, all dressed the same as her. This is the Ghost House, and the only way they can survive is to make it through the traps that lie in wait—deadly games full of blowguns, buzz saws, locked rooms, and weapons. It's a hopeless, terrifying situation for everyone there...well, everyone except Yuki. After all, this is her career at seventeen. Do you think that's odd? She would agree. But that's how some people are—they earn their living playing death games. [- Yen Press] Air Date & Platform: Season 01: January 07, 2026 (Wednesday) Available on: Crunchyroll, Netflix Movie: Pending Available on: Pending Episode Count / Runtime: Season 01: 11 episodes Movie: Pending [EDIT: Fancy opener stuff edited. -TK] |
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smurky turkey
Posts: 4990 |
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Sigh, I have tried getting into anime about death games several times but maybe they are just not for me.
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Edjwald
 Posts: 3507 |
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I loved Btooom, one of the prime inhabitants of the Island of Abandoned Sequels. And I loved (surprisingly) The Magical Girl Raising Project and Darwin's Game. Unfortunately, most death game anime either (1) revel in showcasing repulsive sociopaths going full rant at the drop of a hat. Instead of having protagonists coming together to survive a dystopian situation, it's more about taking a dirt bath in squalid atmosphere, until you suspect that the author has severe problems. Or, (2) they create some hastily thrown together BS arena situation with rules that contradict each other or make no sense, and the whole thing just seems like a flimsy excuse to go from scene to scene that that the author thought would look cool without worrying about logical scrutiny.
I thought the trailer on this one looked promising. Great visuals, and no signs of a setting with no logical restraints or sadists getting 80% of the screen time. |
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smurky turkey
Posts: 4990 |
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Yup, very much not for me. It has an impressive presentation and there is a lot of style to the whole thing but I am just not into cute girls getting sawed into bits.
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Harleyquin
Posts: 3443 |
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#1
This is a show which keeps or drops its casual viewers very quickly with the double header premiere. The premise isn't as complicated as it looks: a small group of attractive young girls are forced into a death game dressed in costumes to appeal to the fetishes of the rich audience ogling them throughout their ordeal. Prior to their participation, their bodies are modified in such a way they still function but don't bleed, so any carnage is kept to a minimum (their heads are still organic and if there's enough pain and trauma they still die from shock). The puzzles they risk life and limb on can be solved either through cooperation or PvP competition, but it is designed in such a way that it is impossible for a 100% survival rate. The contestants are allowed to choose a "player name" before participating. With the exception of Yuuki (ghost), this game's set of contestants picked a name with a character corresponding to their hair colour. A fairly diverse set of personalities, but it is Yuuki who holds the leadership role as the veteran of 28(!) rounds when everyone else is either a beginner or has limited experience and knowledge. Yuuki is the embodiment of pragmatic survival: she will find a way to get herself and as many survivors out as possible. However, she also knows there will be casualties (especially on the last leg) and that she will have to kill others if it means she and the rest of the group can make it out. No wonder she emphasises the importance of keeping "mental wounds" at a minimum, a level of ruthlessness is required to ensure personal survival is always kept at the forefront even though cooperation is the most optimum route over the course of the challenge. The survival rate she gave at the beginning wasn't quite correct (if Kinko had survived it would have been 66% rather than the eventual 50%), but they knew there would be higher casualties because she was the only genuine veteran in the roster. Ultimately it would be the sadistic whims of the audience and organisers which would be the deciding factor; the contestants can only do what they can to save themselves. As a one off arc, it sets the tone very well. The starting scene felt like a waste of airtime, but the shots in the mansion where the contestants are portrayed in detail close up compared to the surrealism which pervades the camera panning to them as a group from afar stuck with me. Yet the series is centred around the veteran Yuuki and her goal of clearing 99(!) rounds of this frankly absurd competition. And her stated goal is given in the series title: to put food on her dining table. I'm reminded of a recent trend in otaku circles for entertainment media featuring visually attractive females: 可哀想が可愛い. And this adaptation epitomises the expression. Empathy/pity for the girls makes them more appealing than they would be from their appearance alone. Definitely not a show I'd recommend to everyone, but if it's up your alley as a psychological thriller with cooperation and betrayal in equal servings then it's worth seeing this through, even if it's unsettling in its subject matter. |
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Blood-
Bargain Hunter Posts: 25599 |
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The approach to this was a lot more arty than I expected. I'm not citing that as a positive, nor was I enamoured with its slow pace. However, it is different and like I noted about another show this season, sometimes being different is enough for me to at least stick around for a while. One thing I can say is that if each episode is just a run through of the death game du jour, that would get tedious fairly quickly. Hopefully the show will be smarter than that.
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Edjwald
Posts: 3507 |
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I have no idea why I can watch relatively soothing, easy breezy healing anime with little or no conflict and love them, but can also watch Chainsaw Man or dystopian nightmare material like this one, but I can. Maybe it's because after this anime was over, I was more appreciative of having a warm, safe place (at least for now...I don't want to jynx it...) where I could just make some soup and be okay?
I can't say I liked the anime, exactly, but I did find it somewhat hypnotic. I'm guessing that the discrepancy between the beautiful visuals and the spiritual ugliness of the game are supposed to have a haunting effect. I think they do. Personally, I would prefer it if the games featured people from all walks of life, but I do get that it's a serving of fetish material for a sadistic audience. Here's the uncomfortable question...does that make me that audience? Hopefully the fact that I'm watching fiction and the presumed audience inside the anime is watching a snuff film isn't a small difference. I'm also not rooting for the death traps...if anything, I'm picturing myself in that situation, trying to figure out the scenarios and wondering what I'd do differently. The ending was disturbing, but it wasn't a copout or senseless in the context of the narrative. The MC is hanging on to a set of rules because they keep her as sane as she is ...now how sane is another question. The real question is, if she cares about doing the best she can within the context of the game...why does she keep playing the game? I do wonder what the significance of 99 games is. Is there some kind of prize for making it to a hundred games? Does the MC have some deeper motive? Is there a revenge motive somewhere in there? |
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smurky turkey
Posts: 4990 |
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I can not follow your lead Edjwald. I love slice of life and can handle anime with action and a bit of drama/tragedy in it just fine but there is a line for me where I am just not able to enjoy the show at all anymore. Maybe it is the real world being dark enough already that I tend to stay with shows that give me (mostly) positive vibes.
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DuskyPredator
 Posts: 15851 Location: Brisbane, Australia |
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I really dislike death games, I really cannot watch Saw movies outside of someone else talking about them separately. And I certainly have problems with series that feel like they are just torturing young people, especially girls in a way that can feel like it is kind of predatory in a break the cuties sort of thing.
But yet, I am kind of digging this from its first episode. It is particularly gross that apparently this game from the start was rigged that it could only have been won with at least 50% of them dead, after earlier in the episode said that 70% is the average. Even gave them hope that they could sacrifice for some time to save an extra person, just to make it more messed up that it was pointless. Personally, I a fan that it could do it without having any real gore, having it replaced with stuffing, which feels deliberate to them being young girls to fit the whole doll theme. Their facial expressions often not visible at far enough distance creates this feel that you maybe could not trust anyone if you don't pay attention to the details. And for a theme of what they are, my impression of Kinko was that she was doing it for her father's debt, with said father did not properly appreciate her. As she was on a death's door sort of thing that she kept repeating a hypothetical conversation of her father thanking her for wanting to be like him, giving the impression to me that it wasn't the case he honestly thought that way. Maybe putting too much thought into things, but the first episode had me thinking about Resident Evil and Silent Hill, where they are games that do the sort of puzzles and death thing. And the most recent Silent Hill was very thematic around girls and women. |
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Eilavel
Posts: 475 |
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Pretentious miserabilist material? I'm here for it! It looks like its mostly going to go for the psychological angle. I will probably enjoy it, though pretty much all the critique of an all girl death game series is 100% accurate.
(Why cut off legs not arms? I guess they are heavier? Reattachment is really that easy? Whats the nature of the dystopian world thats like this? Raises a lot of questions but I'd almost rather it not try to answer them, I feel the answers can't be as satisfactory as exploring individuals responses to the circumstances). As to the gore and such like, I guess I'm not super-bothered by it in general but my tolerance is certainly higher in anime. The layer of abstraction just means it draws less of a visceral response in that way; basically, I generally enjoy this type of material more in anime/video games. |
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rapata
 Posts: 96 |
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Rather different tone and content than expected, but for the better. As for who are the sickos they are organizing this death game for, I guess the initial scene where Yuki is inspecting the gramophone is hinting that it's us. I'm not sure they are actually going for some fourth-wall busting, it's not that fresh anymore, and I didn't catch other hints. I wonder what the overlapping Yuki/narrator voiceovers mean.
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Velorien
 Posts: 121 |
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Could someone enlighten me as to the significance of the countdown? Does it convey some kind of information to the viewer, or is it just a reminder that time is passing, with an arbitrary second number?
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rapata
Posts: 96 |
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In Ep 1, the N / 23 counter appears to have counted up from 0/23 to 22/23 at the end just before game clear, so probably it indicates "stages" of the death game. In Ep 2, the count at the end is 8/33. The second counter is counting down from 5:32:09 at the beginning down to 4:19:10 close to the end of ep, probably it's just some time limit for completing the game after which something nasty happens. I think these don't have any deeper meaning.
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Harleyquin
Posts: 3443 |
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#2
I was wondering how the adaptation was going to go about telling an overarching story given the nature of its set piece death games, and one way of going about it is to discard temporal continuity and recount Yuuki's previous successful attempts piecemeal before at some point catching up with her most recent or ongoing game attempt. This time round she's recounting her successful 10th attempt, but the circumstances are very different from the pilot episode. Although she's the most senior of the contestants, she is not the leader as the other four have played with each other and the leader is used to bossing it around. Yuuki's failure to get the upper hand over her when she was still unconscious didn't help, since it lends the current leader Mishiro credibility as the most physically capable contestant. Things go from bad to worse for Yuuki, since her inability to convince Mishiro and the rest of her value as a trap detector lessens her utility to them. Perhaps it's something she has grown accustomed to, hence her choice of player handle and having to survive many of the attempts without cooperation from the others. One thing she figured out long before the leader and groupies did is what kind of a game they're involved in, and how the contestants have to respond appropriately. Without a flashlight and without support, how exactly did Yuuki survive this attempt? And does she succeed alone or do the others rally around her if for whatever reason Mishiro is incapacited? Anyone who has watched the Monogatari series will recognise the numbers used in the episode. In the double header, the episode progression was split into 33 parts and viewers are made aware of how much longer the current session has to go before Yuuki and anyone else still around succeed. Likewise, this episode stops at 8/33, but there is no guarantee the pacing of the arc is even or some segments are shortened or curtailed. To me, it's another (pointless?) stylistic choice the adaptation is utilising for dramatic or visual effect. Unlike the first game, this session has a countdown timer and a simple map and guide for the contestants when they first awaken. They are also given a backpack and some tools as starting equipment. The unlucky first contestant was disoriented and didn't collect anything beyond the torch before blundering into the first trap and getting herself eliminated, although at first I was wondering if sabotage was going to come into play. The countdown timer is simple enough. If this is a game where contestants will succeed based on their adeptness at detecting traps, then there's no sport if they play it so safe and map the entire playing area out for the hazards before proceeding unharmed to the end. The timer, lack of lights and hazards force the contestants to take risks to succeed, and in doing so make it more entertaining for the audience. The question for me is whether this attempt is adapted in two or three episodes. The former will feel rushed, but it would given an extra episode for later arcs which might be useful as there's more ground to cover in terms of narrative. Three episodes sounds about right with the next two weeks clearing the remaining two thirds and a bit of this arc. As this is a retelling of Yuuki's previous successful attempt, the conclusion is known but not the process. Because the team dynamics are so different from the pilot, how she gets to the end (in one piece or missing limbs) is part of the appeal to stay with this arc until the next one begins. |
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Velorien
Posts: 121 |
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I guess it's possible this is actually a flashback to a past game, but it immediately occurred to me that it could also be in the future, and Yuuki is just lying about her level of experience for whatever reason--for example, to avoid triggering Mishiro's arrogant hostility (only for ten games to still be a higher number than Mishiro can stomach). Alternatively, the first episode's twenty-eight could have been a lie, for example to solidly establish her right to leadership. Yuuki herself tells us to trust no one and question everything.
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