The third live-action season of Alice in Borderland, based on the death game manga by Haro Aso, drops onto Netflix with big disadvantages. One is that it's released almost three years after the second season, which seemed to end the story satisfyingly, barring an ambiguous final shot of a Joker card. (I assumed that was all there was to the show, only to be surprised when Netflix announced the continuation.)

Another problem is that the death game genre is massively saturated now. Just at the moment, there's The Long Walk in cinemas – the source Stephen King book was acknowledged by Koushun Takami as a likely influence on his Japanese novel Battle Royale, filmed by Kinji Fukasaku. The Long Walk will have barely left cinemas before Edgar Wright's take on The Running Man, another King death game, arrives in November.

And just this summer, Netflix itself dropped season three of South Korea's Squid Game. That series debuted after Alice in Borderland, but it became vastly bigger globally, helped by outstanding performers – the pensioners were best – and cutting social commentary. Many viewers stumbling on Borderland now probably assume that it's a Squid Game cash-in. That must sting its director, Shinsuke Satō, who also helmed a live-action Gantz film back in 2011.

Moreover, anime fans may feel “death gamed” out even if they'd not seen any of these live-action titles. That's thanks to the slew of anime in the genre, as discussed recently on This Week in Anime. Alice in Borderland itself was animated by SILVER LINK years before the live-action version, though only as a three-part OVA which adapted the first chapters of Aso's manga.

I like death game yarns, and enjoyed Borderland's earlier seasons. They could be frustrating or disappointing, but also powerful – like season one's shocking gun massacre, or season two's reality-bending, hugely moving finale. As for season three, it's worthwhile. There are some genuinely interesting new ideas and images, but it's the season that most stretched my patience while watching it. Like season two, it does have an “ending,” only to finish with a sequel-or-spinoff-bait coda which I suspect will go nowhere in today's crowded market.

Spoilers for the earlier seasons follow, though this is the kind of series where I'll strive to give away little. We pick up from the happy ending of season two, with Arisu and Usagi seemingly safely back in the real Tokyo. They're now newlyweds, even though they've lost almost all their memories of Borderland. However, we see that an old acquaintance still lurks in that realm – Banda, a convict from season two – and he remembers them.

In the real world, Arisu and Usagi draw the attention of Ryuji, a (mostly) wheelchair-bound professor obsessed with the afterlife. He capitalizes on Usagi's still-unresolved trauma, the death of her mountaineer father. By the end of part one, Usagi has been lured into a near-death state that sends her spirit back to Borderland. A distraught Arisu follows, helped by a former ally who remembers Borderland better than he does.

All this setup, frankly, isn't interesting enough to make you forget its obvious purpose, to restart the story. In particular, Ryuji never feels like more than a basic comic-book adversary, though mercifully, his disability isn't used for villain stereotypes, but to show how he must struggle more than anyone else. But it could have been much more interesting to have kept Arisu and Usagi in the “real” Tokyo and then subverted that reality, having Borderland break in on the characters in scenes that might be their delusions. (That's hinted in one of Episode 1's better moments, when Arisu sees Banda appear as a shadow-figure under a bridge.) The story could have also made more of the post-disaster setting – if you've forgotten, this is a Tokyo whose Shibuya district was blasted by a meteor.

Once in Borderland, Arisu remains separated from Usagi, who's still with the unpredictable Ryuji. New characters gather round them – the idea is they were all former Borderland players, though we didn't meet them before. The point of this kind of show is you don't know who'll survive, though I had a soft spot for a graceless male trainspotter. I also warmed to a yakuza heavy who bares his tattoos at a crucial moment, which feels so much like a manga panel that it's sublime.

The first big game involves a shrine and thousands of flaming arrows – if you've read the Alice in Borderland manga or seen the OVA, it was the first game in both of those versions. It's passably entertaining in live-action, but still feels like standard deathgame fare. The second game, which I won't describe, is a protracted bust, and even its comments on tribalism and “Prisoner's Dilemma”-style choices feel old-hat from other death games. By the time it ends, I'm guessing many viewers will have moved to something different.

That's a shame, as the show improves considerably from the midway point. Some games use more interesting spaces – one evokes Speed with a different vehicle. It suffers, though, from the presence of plainly plot-armored characters who reduce the suspense. Later, though, the show whittles down the survivors to unarmored characters we care enough for to feel the sting when they die in explosions of blood or fire. (Unlike Squid Game and many others in the genre, Borderland holds out the hope that numerous characters might survive, as they did in Season 2.)

The “final” (not really) game is protracted, but it has clever ideas and moments of true pathos. It's fundamentally similar to the last games in Season 2, when Arisu was put through the wringer, his shame set against his fragile self-worth. Here, it's the other players who are put through the same torments, in a tacit acknowledgement that Arisu and Usagi completed their heroic arcs last season. The show uses the couple to entice us back into the story, but it's the new players who stop this season from just being a mean exercise in frustrating Arisu and Usagi's fairly won happy ending.

The season climaxes with some fantasy spectacle that some viewers may find moronically overblown, but I enjoyed it. The visions reminded me pleasantly of Terry Gilliam's fantasy films, even with torrents of CG rather than Monty Python low-tech effects that might have worked better.

As noted, the series has a clear enough wrap-up, only for the closing minutes to hint at a possible Season 4, perhaps with all-new characters and maybe a non-Japanese setting. (Anyone who's seen the latest Squid Game season will spot the parallel.) It might work, but I doubt it'll be made… and if it isn't, then it'll close out Alice in Borderland with an annoying, artless question mark. It reflects how few popular franchises get fully satisfying endings these days.