It sure is weird watching a gory anime in the morning. I would have preferred to have watched this at night but I wanted to get this first impression out as soon as possible, so daytime it is!
One thing you have to appreciate from this anime is how gory it is. If you’re going to promise us gore, then you have to give it to us and this show delivered. And deaths. And there were a lot.
The show plays out like the synopsis told us. A person called Ousama (King) makes a class play the Ousama Game and gives orders to the students. If they don’t follow the orders, they get punished with death. The first episode starts off with Nobuaki Kanazawa transferring into his current school. He’s very standoffish and doesn’t want to get close with any of the students. Any time they get too close to him he freaks out, runs away, and starts to cry. The girl that sits next to him, Natsuko, tries her very best to befriend him and get him comfortable with the class, but Nobuaki reacts the same way, but when he hears that her parents died and that she had a cheery exposition, he changed his mindset. He joins in on the relay for the school sports festival and he seems to change but then that very night he gets a text from the King, and the Ousama Game starts. The first task is for him to kiss Natsuko.
The next morning when Nobuaki walks into class everyone confronts him about the message and thinks it was him who sent it because he just wanted an excuse to kiss Natsuko. Nobu practically has a panic attack and warns everyone that the Ousama Game is real and it’s dangerous and if they don’t work together they’re all going to die, which for some reason pisses off everyone and makes him think he’s a creep. But of course no one is going to believe him.
Nobuaki decides to not kiss Natsuko and sacrifice himself (and her) so the others won’t get killed. But after running into Natsuko at night and hearing how she fell in love with him at first sight and how much she wants to help him, she ends up kissing him and the Ousama Game goes into full force.
What follows next is a series of hangings and death and characters freaking out. I found the episode to be decent. We’ve got a large cast of characters, most of whom don’t hold much of a presence but a third of them were already killed so the cast got a little smaller. The main characters aren’t very impressive, Nobuaki being a little flat but I have to feel bad for the poor guy because he’s already gone through an Ousama Game and now he needs to see more people around him die. Him not wanting to get close to people and make friends makes sense. Natsuko is fine, but for some reason I feel like she’s hiding a darker side to herself. She’s overly friendly and sweet, kind of like Kushida in last season’s Classroom of the Elite, who hid a yangire side under the sweetness. I’m glad the bully already got killed off because he was plain annoying. This episode just left a bunch of questions for us, such as who the King is, why this game is going on, and how these deaths even occur. Of course it’s too early to get answers to any of these questions.
But what left me confused is that upon researching, this is a sequel. I noticed that from the beginning when we learned that Nobu transferred from his old school because he had already been in an Ousama Game, so why didn’t we start off with that story? I think that would have been better because then we would have seen why Nobu’s the way he is now. I feel like the show might go back and forth from past to present and I’m not sure that’s going to work. I felt the pace this episode felt a little fast, we don’t even know anything about these characters and we’re already losing them. In this type of show, character development is going to be a minimal thing.
When it comes to the deaths and gore, the show definitely doesn’t hold back. It’s pretty brutal. However, the animation was pretty mediocre and after doing some research I’m pretty worried. The animation studio behind Ousama Game is a studio called Seven. I had never heard of them so as I checked the stuff they’ve done, I find out that this studio has done a lot of hentai, and also a lot of the shorts that have aired recently. But the hentai shorts, like the priest one for example. As if it couldn’t get any worse, I checked who the director was. And literally the only other show this guy directed was the short about the man that really loves marshmallows. And now I have no idea what to think. I didn’t have the highest bit of confidence for this show, setting my expectations low after the crappy horror shows I’ve seen. But now with a no name director and a hentai animation studio as its back up, I literally have no idea what to feel anymore. I’m not confident at all. The little hope I had for this series is gone now. I felt this way when Blazblue got its shitty anime and upon doing research for that studio and finding out that they also did hentai, well….shit.
Like I said, the episode was decent. Not great, but not bad. I have no idea what’ll happen next, I hope things will go well for this show but I’m having my doubts. Still, I’ll keep blogging the show but I don’t know for how long.
Possibility of watching: Moderate
Possibility of blogging: Low-Moderate (I’ll give it a couple more episodes)
This first episode seems weird. It’s been a while since I read the manga, so I looked into it again. I haven’t seen the episode yet, but from what I read, Nobuaki wasn’t a transfer student, the game kind of started one day (it wasn’t in the middle of it at the beginning of the story), and the heroine’s name was Chiemi, not Natsuko. Also, it seems like Chiemi and Nobuaki were dating for some time before the start of the series. Did they change some stuff around? Can someone confirm this?
Sorry, my bad. I kind of skipped out on the part that this was a sequel to the first one. Knowing that, this makes more sense, though I gotta agree as to why they didn’t just show the original.
King’s Game is based on a cellphone novel, meaning that it was originally written on a cellphone’s text messaging function.
My guess is the deaths and thus the King are supernaturally based. Either that, or there’s a very dedicated group of wackos breaking into various places to stage the deaths…