King’s Game Series Review: Only For True Fans of Bad Horror

Posted on by Karandi
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Overview:

Something happened at Nobuaki’s old school and all of his classmates are dead. Starting over at a new school he is understandably reserved but slowly gets drawn into friendship with many of his new classmates. Then they all receive a text message informing them that the King’s Game has started and they cannot stop playing.

Review:

This show more or less took a shopping list approach to cheesy horror and then delivered an unevenly paced, poorly gore censored, poorly characterised approach giving us what could possibly be described as the best of what B Grade horror has to offer. You want over the top deaths and reactions to those deaths? Check. You want a totally implausible and inescapable villain? Check. You want a large cast of characters to serve as cannon fodder? Check and check given we get to see the current class bite the dust as well as the previous class Nobuaki was a member of through flash backs.

There is literally nothing good about this show. The plot, the characters, the execution are all sub-standard at best (okay, the opening theme is pretty cool). Yet, it is undeniably fun viewing for people who are fans of movies along the lines of Scream, Urban Legend, Disturbing Behaviour, etc, etc. While I might have liked less of the flash backs to the previous class, the current class to be more fleshed out, and better animation and visuals (particularly on some of the deaths), this is more or less exactly what I want when I say I want to watch bad horror. It hit the spot exactly and I had a blast watching it (though enjoying watching something and actually recommending it to others are entirely different things).

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For those who didn’t watch it during its airing, I should probably be more specific about what the story does and does not do.

Probably the biggest flaw this show has is you won’t ever get an answer as to what the King’s Game is and why it exists and how it does what it does. It just does. Deal with it or watch something else. In a show like Juni Taisen where it was heavily implied that there was a purpose to the fight and then we just never got any detail, this sort of thing bothers me. In King’s Game, it didn’t really matter. A killer text message will still kill you even if you know its exact origin. What little explanation we got was mostly conjecture by the characters and unconfirmed conjecture at that (and that’s probably a good thing because it was insane). Basically, don’t expect a satisfactory motive for any of the game by the end.

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That said, even character motives get murky at times. While there are some clear ones for the survivalists in the group, other characters’ have very confused motives and at times you can’t really see the sense in their actions. You can dismiss most of this because of the extreme situation they find themselves in and because they are young, but after awhile you have to wonder if this class was full of students who were all just a little bit stupid. Also, the absence of reasonable responses from the school, parents or the community to the deaths certainly makes you wonder just what the context for this story is because unless they all got transported to another dimension at the start of the game where no other humans existed outside of the class, it just makes no sense that nobody seems to care that these students are literally dropping like flies.

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Nobuaki (the main character) is brilliant and dreadful all at the same time. Outside of the context of this show, he is a dreadful character. He’s inconsistent, whiny, defeatist (except when he decides he can’t give in), stands on the corpses of his friends but insists cooperation is the key to survival without a shred of evidence. He’s brilliant to watch in the insanity that his very nature brings to the story. A walking contradiction. A survivalist who seems to genuinely believe in the protection of the herd yet somehow always comes out on top.

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By himself, he may have become unbearable, but when countered by Natsuko (also a previous game survivor) who is an undisguised survivalist and will openly trample on anyone and anything, he becomes much more interesting. The two clash over and over and yet they both desire to live. And again, Natsuko is an individually unbearable character and if you removed her from the context here and just examined her actions and motives, you would wonder why she wasn’t edited out of existence. But she works here. She stirs the class and adds tension where it is needed and provides a human face to the horror that might otherwise only be conveyed through blacked out smudges of blood and dismemberment or text messages.

The story also deals with the large cast by very quickly whittling it down with a large number of deaths upfront and the group splitting until very close to the end so that you could spend more time with handfuls of characters. Unfortunately most of the support cast aren’t up to the task of being interesting, but at least you remember their name when they finally bite the dust.

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I do want to address the King’s commands though. From the flash backs it is clear that not every punishment is death, yet in the current game the punishments are almost always death. The challenges themselves escalate, super fast.  Going from confessing, to sleeping with someone, to smashing your own hand with a rock and worse, very quickly with no steps back where an easy task is given. I feel this is one element of the show that should have been played with more with easy tasks being given and more tension building when a punishment was coming because you wouldn’t know if the punishment would involve death, injury, or maybe just embarrassment. There’s certainly a lot that could have been done with this story element that really didn’t get developed.

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Still, I stand by the title of this posts. If you like bad horror, this will be a treat. Otherwise, this isn’t the show for you.

I’d love to know your thoughts on King’s Game if you watched it.

Episode Reviews:

Thanks for reading.

Karandi James

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King’s Game Episode 12 – The Dramatic Conclusion (Or Maybe Not)

Posted on by Karandi
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Review (heavy spoilers):

It will be genuinely impossible to review this episode without spoilers so if you want to be surprised by the conclusion (well, don’t watch the show for one but also maybe pass on reading this post until later). We are down to our last five contestants in this game of death and after running an entire day they all all seem pretty energised still (even the girl who fainted and was carried the last bit seems to make a startling recovery). And where are any of their parents, teachers, local police, or anyone else given the entire class is now either dead or wandering around in the mountains at night? Not to mention, the show is still insisting that a real virus somehow became a computer virus.

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However, if you watched eleven episodes of this, clearly you accepted that this was B Grade horror and such gaping holes in story-telling were excused due to genre and general entertainment principles so we’ll move on rather than raising multiple other issues with the narrative that I’ve ignored thus far in the name of having at least one decent horror to watch this season (though the word decent when applied to horror definitely required redefining).

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So the big secret? No one can live!

Wait, you mean you figured that out already? Really? And they were so careful about hiding that (heavy sarcasm).

Yet despite the heavy implication that all participants are now dead watch through the credits and see the sequel bait ending. This show most definitely knows its horror tropes and it played it right until the end. Well, as the opening song says, “This is the end.” I will review the whole series later.

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Karandi James.

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King’s Game Episode 11: There Is No Winning

Posted on by Karandi
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Review:

Other than the near completion of the day long run (which I’m calling rubbish on given most of these kids weren’t dressed for running and they certainly didn’t have enough fluid so more of them should have collapsed) this episode brings us a glimpse at how Nobuaki’s game ended leaving one crucial detail to our imagination. And what we realise is that there is no winning. I guess most of us kind of suspected that given Nobuaki was stuck in another game after surviving one as was Natsuko so it isn’t as though surviving freed them from this game, but to have it bluntly delivered and realising to a point that both of them made the same choice once again makes you want to compare the two.

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Still, there’s a couple of good moments for the side characters later in the episode as they make their choices when things are looking bleak, unfortunately the show doesn’t have time to explore these (having wasted most of the first half of the season on flash back episodes) and so we meet these characters and see their intentions and then they are pretty swiftly removed from further consideration.

The show remains pretty bad (just look at the decapitation early in the episode to see how bad it can be) and yet there’s definitely something fun about watching it. I’m kind of looking forward to what happens next.

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Karandi James.

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King’s Game Episode 10: Questions and Motivations

Posted on by Karandi
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Review:

Seems everyone is asking ‘why’ in this episode. Not the ‘why’ the audience wants answered mind you. No one is asking why the King’s Game even exists or why the king thinks they are capable of running the entire day (because if that was my order I’d be camping out next to a vending machine with a cool drink and counting down the first eight hours). No, instead they are wondering why the person died when he made a promise or why Nobuaki is acting like Nobuaki.

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Even Nobuaki’s subconscious wonders why he acts the way he does which is kind of telling when even he doesn’t believe his own motives.

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And so we end up in the land of flimsy rationalizations. Not once in this episode is any ‘why’ answered in any meaningful way. Instead the question remains unanswered or diverted with silly excuses.

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The end result is a fairly tense and interesting episode despite a lack of anything really happening. Okay, there was a water sequence that set my teeth on edge though I rationalised that to myself by deciding the guy died from internal injuries before he fell into the water (yep, I am as good at avoiding reality as any character in this show).

The one criticism I did have of the episode though is that other than Chiemi, all the floating apparitions Nobuaki has to motivate himself come from the current timeline. What about his best friend and all the other characters from the first game that Nobuaki was significantly closer to?

I know this show isn’t very good but it remains a fairly entertaining watch each week and I’m kind of looking forward to seeing how it ends.

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Karandi James.

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King’s Game Episode 9: Emotional Tension Despite a Lack of Logic

Posted on by Karandi
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Review (some spoilers):

Pointing out holes in the logic of King’s Game is pointless as well as stupid at this point in time. It is clear the story isn’t logical and isn’t trying to be. So the absence of parents at the hospital when two separate teenagers have been admitted with every finger on one hand broken is more or less the standard for this narrative. Questioning it doesn’t get you any closer to anything and it is just one more massive gap in the believability of the world constructed here so you may as well just shrug and move on.

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Despite the inherently broken nature of the plot, the show continues to give some really strong emotional moments and definitely manages to engage the audience in these scenes. Natsuko and Aimi’s break downs during the finger breaking game followed by the twist we all knew was coming but didn’t know what form it would take. Things were going too well for Nobuaki this episode and this show has been all about kicking Nobuaki when he is down but somehow never really getting close to killing him.

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And it makes sense. Nobuaki is really the only character the audience has had any chance to connect with and he’s been set up as the tragic hero. He keeps trying to save everyone around him and fails miserably, meanwhile the saps keep sacrificing themselves to keep him alive so that he can fail to save everyone else. It is insane and yet somehow works because it is just so horrible.

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Still, with smashed and snapped fingers, emotional manipulation, and everyone completely shattered by the end of this episode, I’m guessing the final episodes are going to be explosive. Particularly as we still have ten warm bodies in this show and all evidence points to there only being one survivor.

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Karandi James.

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King’s Game Episode 8: Individual Desires vs Collective Survival

Posted on by Karandi
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Review:

Slightly longer post this week.

One thing King’s Game has never been is subtle at nowhere is that clearer than in the theme that has persisted throughout the length of the season. When the game first started, Nobuaki stated point blank that they had to work together and not turn on their friends. This instantly created a divide between Nobuaki and Natsuko as each have opposing viewpoints. Nobuaki, despite being mostly spineless and clueless, wants as many people as possible to survive as long as possible. This is deeply rooted in his own selfish desire not to feel the pain of having failed to save them, but is at least a useful in maintaining some kind of group cohesion.

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Natsuko on the other hand has at every turn expressed a desire to be the one standing on top, the survivor. She’ll do whatever it takes, knock down anyone standing in her way, and ultimately has to qualms at all about walking over the corpses of her former classmates. What is driving her rigid desire to survive at any cost isn’t known yet as we’ve gotten almost nothing from her perspective so basically she’s just a pure survivalist who isn’t concerned about anything other than sustaining her own existence.

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Neither character is likeable and as they are both former King’s Game survivors they both have a lot of skeletons in the closet. Where Nobuaki tries to draw a line between them is in asking if Natsuko actually killed anyone in the previous game to which she claimed with great glee she did. It is unknown yet whether this was actually just a front she put up or whether she did gleefully cut through the former class, but either way it is more or less irrelevant. Nobuaki’s actions killed people as well when he manipulated votes, allowed Ria to try to expose the King, failed to stop his friend rolling the die, and even in the most recent incident he didn’t stop Kenta from giving himself an unfulfillable order. So when it comes to body count and motive, to be perfectly frank you could claim these two are a match made in heaven.

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Yet Nobuaki continues to strive to help others and protect the collective, as long as it doesn’t cost him too much. This episode he puts his trust in those classmates at their request and for the first time ever in this show, it seems Nobuaki isn’t going to be punished for basic human decency (though you have to admit, knocking his friend out to have his girlfriend rape him in the former game really doesn’t earn him many points as far as being a decent human – even if it did save his friend’s life). That said, the current game isn’t over yet and I’m wondering what further twists the game have in store because so far every glimmer of hope Nobuaki has found has been brutally crushed.

What makes this one different, is Nobuaki didn’t initiate this or try to convert the others. He made no grand speeches and didn’t try to control the game to ‘help’ others. He simply trusted in the others and allowed himself to be led by their collective voice. Whether that  ultimately means anything I guess depends on what sort of show this is actually going to try to be by the finish. Are we going for a grand statement about how society needs to remove those who’s desires put them at odds with the collective? Is it a story about finding hope against impossible odds? Is it just a tragedy in the making where everyone will end up dead or broken with very little to say except that bad things happen?

I don’t know the answer to this yet, but I do know that the outcome of this game may very well tip the show’s hand in a more definite direction so I’ll be waiting for next episode with anticipation. That isn’t to say that anything about this show has improved. The story and characters are still a complete mess with poor animation not helping the viewing experience. And yet, there’s definitely something about this show that appeals to the B Grade Horror fan that lurks inside me.

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Karandi James.

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King’s Game Episode 7: Were These Deaths Supposed To Be Touching?

Posted on by Karandi
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Review:

I wonder exactly when it was that the audience was supposed to connect with Mizuki and Kenta. I mean, they were in the sports carnival sequence, and Kenta did kind of stand up for Nobuaki when he was being beaten to death by his classmates. However, none of that really makes up for the fact that essentially these two characters existed so Nobuaki could narrate events from the previous game at the audience. That is literally their purpose in the story. So the whole doomed love story was destined to fall completely flat given these characters never actually served any purpose other than sound board.

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What exactly did Nobuaki learn? Could he enlighten the audience because I’m certain we don’t know.

Otherwise, this episode takes us into the village of plot convenience and character assumptions and of course it reveals just enough to make it feel like the story is progressing while actually revealing nothing at all.

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Really? Did the clue fairy tell you this?

Though one thing I will give this show credit for is its determination to press on as though it is an actual horror. Despite characters lacking faces in distant shots and a whole range of other issues with the animation, the show continues to deliver skewed images and weird zooms to really hit us with the horror atmosphere. In case that wasn’t enough, the creepy village, the birds, the scene that took place in a morgue all add weight to the attempt at horror even while the story essentially derails any actual sense of dread.

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And so I leave another week of King’s Game wondering why I am still watching this and why do I get a sense of satisfaction from watching this train wreck. Ultimately I kind of hope everyone dies but in the meantime, just wondering how the writers will manage to make this story worse is more or less sufficient entertainment.

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Karandi James.

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King’s Game Episode 6: There’s Suspension of Disbelief and Then There is This

Posted on by Karandi
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Review:

Okay, so this week King’s Game decided that what little sense it was making was to its detriment and so it threw out any desire to ever be taken in anyway seriously. Not that you could take it all that seriously in the first place and it was more the enjoyment of bad horror that was carrying the show. Still…

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Why do characters still think they can ‘stand up to the king’? They don’t know who or what the king is and they haven’t been able to find them. More importantly, it is kind of obvious at this point that it isn’t actually a person so what exactly does this plan of ‘standing up to them’ entail other than shaking your finger in their general direction and saying ‘bad king’?

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Was the King bored or something? There was no way for people to not get punished in this most recent die roll incident. The only question was how many. And even though not all previous punishments have been death, all seven of these were. Also, do the writers not know what decapitation means because it sure doesn’t mean screwing the head off while the person laughs. Also on poor death efforts, no one calmly has a conversation about their tragic childhood while burning to death. No one. I don’t care how indifferent you are to your own life. There is no calm discussion while you are on fire. I give horror a lot of leeway when it comes to their depiction of reality but King’s Game pushed it a bit too far this week.

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Lastly… A virus? Then a computer virus that we can just delete? Is it a virus that increases suggestions like hypnosis (in which case contagious and highly unlikely to only be affecting a single class of students) or is it a phone virus in which case why on earth would that have any effect on the students’ bodies? By the way, viruses and computer viruses are not the same thing. You can’t get a virus from your computer that affects you. This explanation (even as a theory) was insane and actually worse than not finding out anything.

Anyway, all of that happens in yet another flash back but hooray, Nobuaki and the two classmates in the next class that I do not remember the names of because they ceased to be significant several episodes ago, finally arrived at the village that the show is now insisting was the first instance of the game (though has not offered any proof of that). Ooh, more intrigue and more chances for less than plausible explanations. Mostly I’m just watching this to see the over-reactions of characters right before they die at this point.

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Karandi James.

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King’s Game Episode 5: Can We Start Over With New Writers?

Posted on by Karandi
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Review:

As much as I like the concept of this show, there is one glaring issue that we keep coming back to. It isn’t that there are too many characters to really care about any of them or that their interactions are decidedly stupid. Anyone who watches a lot of horror will note these things but move on and just enjoy the show regardless. No, this show suffers from having started out wanting to tell us the story of Nobuaki, sole survivor of the previous King’s Game getting plunged into another one at his new school, but then apparently the show decided the previous game was more interesting and has spent longer in the past (where we already know who lives and dies) than in the present.

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At episode 5, I know more names and personalities from the first class Nobuaki was in but I can’t get attached to anyone in these flash backs. Everyone but Nobuaki dies. We already know this. So I don’t feel worried for him either. And episode 5 shows nothing from the present. Every single moment is dealing with the former game.

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While some of this teaches us how the game works, really, they could do the same thing to the current class (who I guess are still standing around in a field staring at each other while three of them take a train to a village given that’s where we left them one night in to the game before we ditched the present for the past). All and all, if the past is that fascinating and the present that boring that you aren’t even going to show it, why set the story up like this? By the time we flick back to the current class I won’t remember a single person from it or care about what happens to them.

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By the way, I kind of think it sucks that the King is allowed to give ambiguous instructions and then punish a failure to follow. I don’t actually know how the game works yet, but there should be a rule that forces the King to clearly explain the expectation before he’s allowed to dismember people for failure to follow. So, if you are just in this to watch two casts of characters get terrorized and then killed, you will be thrilled. If you are wanting a decent story, this one hasn’t quite got there.

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Karandi James.

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