King's Game The Animation

Episode 5

If the last episode of King's Game had you starved for poorly-animated outrageous violent stupidity, then this full-flashback follow-up delivers in spades. Compared to the slow burn of Nami's solitary death, episode 5 seems to be expediting the story of Nobuaki's previous game, offing a huge number of his classmates in one poorly executed fell swoop. It's no less stupid than the rest of the show so far, but at least we're back to an entertaining level of stupidity.

This one actually ditches the time-jumping gimmick wholesale, continuing directly from the end of last episode with Nobuaki being confronted by Ria. As if to discard the "tragedy" of that last outing, the show forces a hilarious escalation right away, having Ria double-back on her previous double-back of being the King through a ridiculous technicality, taunting Nobuaki into suddenly being okay with killing someone over the King's actions.

So it's important to remember that we're still in flashback here, where Nobuaki already spelled out that none of his classmates, Ria included, turned out to be the King. She keeps looping back into metaphorical arguments anyway, then pulls a taser on Nobuaki just to make sure we're paying attention. Her ultimate fate might still end up being the most interesting part of this circuitous story, given her baseline competence and desire to actually win contrasting with Nobuaki's flailing about. We do end up getting some personal backstory on Ria when it's revealed that she was sexually abused by her father, which is communicated in an uncomfortable way that seems out of line even for the show's tacky presentation of other violent and sexual antics thus far. It's also unnecessarily gratuitous as a token motive for this presumably doomed character.

That's pretty much the show's stock and trade in this episode though. The meat of the story is spent on two more newly-introduced yet already-dead characters, Kaori and Yousuke. The show has to hastily establish their characterization and relationship right as they appear, since they've never been seen before. If you didn't already know they were going to die, their unbearably cliché romantic setup would make the impending tragedy obvious anyway. It turns out Yousuke was actually the one who did all the legwork to find out about that village that Nobuaki's taking his friends to in the present day.

The genesis of the big schoolkid slaughter this time is that the class gets a text from the King warning against 'unnecessary actions'. You might think this is intended to catch Yousuke in his anti-King research, but that would be your mistake for using common sense. No, after a whole bunch of faceless sacrifices drop dead (including a hilarious chocolate-syrup-blood-spewing incident), Nobuaki somehow manages to deduce that people are not allowed to cry.

That is incredibly arbitrary. Admittedly, this whole show runs on things that only happen to maximize its nominal tragedy, but everything about this random rule addition seems to suggest the King is relying on technicalities to kill as many people as possible. There's not really any irony in the punishments meted out, just rote violence-porn. It's admittedly more enjoyable in the over-the-top ways the previous episode was lacking, but it comes across more like the show trying to make up for a lack of action as opposed to delivering a compelling twist.

All those nobodies dying is really just to set up a punishment targeting our star-crossed idiots Kaori and Yousuke. Amazingly, the King never seems to have an issue with Yousuke finding and sending Nobuaki information on the original game's village. Granted, since Nobuaki seems dead-set on going there in this flashback, even though we know he didn't actually make it there, it's possible this is all part of some despair-inducing plan by the King himself, but that's not apparent yet. It's just a gap in this story where so many dramatic details have been given to us in the wrong order.

Yousuke is allowed to finish his murderbook report and actually gets to send his findings to Nobuaki before he quite literally goes to pieces over the sadness of his dead classmates. This scene does include some more hilarious schlocky violence as Yousuke's fingers explode off while he's trying to hit send buttons, but it's mostly a highlight just because it distracts you from how nonsensical the plot has been.

The final scene with Kaori half-assedly turning on Nobuaki over Yousuke's death has a lot fewer visceral thrills, leaving an episode that at least managed to succeed on the level of a goofy rollercoaster finishing out flat. The misunderstanding driving this scene lasts just long enough for the perfunctory emotional impact to occur, but it comes across way too obvious, like it's just there to take up time before Kaori inevitably has to die "because of Nobuaki". On top of all that, the direction and sound design (especially the effects) are especially poor this time around, seeming very flat and amateurish.

Even more than having its drama neutered, this episode betrays the current flashback formula by seeming utterly disinterested in the gimmick, like it's just trying to get through it as quickly as possible now. I'm not sure how accurate this sequence of events is to the original novel's plot, but it definitely does a disservice to what limited story it has to work with. It feels like the writers are already as tired of telling this story as we are of hearing it.

Rating: D+

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