King's Game The Animation

Episode 4

One of the more unfortunate aspects of King's Game is that it's clearly trying. The writer of this story obviously put effort into coming up with the stupid edgy scenarios that terrorize his cast. Maybe when all's said and done, we'll see they had some grand point they were attempting to make. The anime itself is similarly trying to do the best with what it's been given, making the various violent highlights as ridiculous as possible and weaving the flashbacks and present-day together into a coherent story. Unlike the murder-game orders in the story itself, King's Game is clearly not just phoned in.

Unfortunately, King's Game is just so bad at everything it's trying to do. The sheer failurs of its efforts is on full display in this week's episode, and there aren't even any ridiculous situations or hilarious violence to save it from the inherent suckitude that's been lingering around it since the beginning. Instead, we just get almost full episode of flashback that isn't presented well in the slightest.

That's not to say that the present-day portion of the story is any better. We're scratching our heads within seconds as Nobuaki reveals to Kenta and Mizuki that he has information on a village where the very first King's Game was played, and that going there will probably reveal how to stop it! This revelation truly comes out of nowhere and makes no sense. If Nobuaki had this figured out, why didn't he mention it before? Why didn't he go check it out earlier, before he transferred to a new school and dragged a whole other mess of kids into another round of the Game? Come to think of it, who handled Nobuaki's transfer, and how come there was no investigation or notable press about a whole class getting themselves killed in ridiculous ways? There's no time for those questions, but there's plenty of time for Nobuaki, Kenta, and Mizuki to wait around for a morning train to arrive in relative peace. No new orders? The King is slacking.

So on the way, Nobuaki tells his new doomed friends more about his first Game, ostensibly to explain how the King isn't a member of the playing class. This framing device is the undoing of the entire flashback story in this episode, which involves a girl named Nami attempting a Death Note-style gambit to pinpoint which one of their classmates is the King. Due to the nature of these flashbacks, we already know Nami is toast before we even meet her, and thanks to Nobuaki starting his story with “This is how we found out the King wasn't one of our classmates”, the whole thing becomes an even more needless march to a foregone conclusion. They didn't just telegraph this revelation, they scrawled it in huge neon letters on our driveway! Nami's plan is decently clever in theory, so if Nobuaki hadn't spoiled the whole story beforehand, there might have been an element of suspense to the revelation. It's kind of amazing that the show manages to take something potentially intriguing and make it feel totally pointless through poor presentation.

The only other maybe-interesting portion is the introduction of another flashback character, a girl named Ria. She's suggested to possibly be the King for a remarkable five seconds before she backtracks her confession into pure metaphor, spinning about to make the point that her class would have to kill the real King once they find them to end the game, which everyone reacts to with pensive revulsion. This is despite of that fact that, you know, the King has brutally murdered several of them already. Ria's portion comes across as unnecessary, but she'll apparently be important moving forward in the flashback. (Before she dies, of course, since we already know that will happen.)

So Nami's plan inevitably fails, and the remainder of the episode is one big play on our affection for her that we don't possess because this show provokes less emotional investment than a bad shonen filler episode. To make a dragged-out story short, Nami loses her eyesight as punishment, Nobuaki gets a new order to “lose something important”, and then Nami kills herself to fulfill it because she had a really obvious crush on him. King's Game's major problem of protraction manages to stretch this conflict out into the rest of the episode. We do at least get one laugh-out-loud stupid scene when Nobuaki smashes up all his stuff with a guitar in an effort to fulfill the order before Nami takes a (literal) dive for him.

I can't stress how much King's Game's format shoots itself in the foot through this whole story. Every element, from the failure of the King-finding plan to Nami's "not as bad" blindness punishment gets its tension obliterated thanks to the foregone conclusion hanging over it. A story has to have some surprising elements to keep you interested, but thanks to Nobuaki front-loading all the important details of this flashback, his story wouldn't even be interesting in-universe. What's a suspense series without any suspense? Apparently, it's King's Game, and this week there weren't even any ridiculous personality changes or window-jumps to keep me entertained for it.

Rating: D

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