DESCRIPTION

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MANGA HorrorOusama Game Shuukyoku
MANGA DramaOusama Game

REVIEWS

• 

  AmishaelAL

  48/100
  Panic, despair, hope, acceptance: the four steps to death in a world where you have absolutely no control

  King’s Game

  If you’ve ever read Michael Grant’s Gone series, or thought, ‘hmm, I really like the premise of a bunch of kids being trapped in an inevitably hopeless situation where they end up dying gruesome deaths for utterly terrible reasons’, then King’s Game is for you.

  I think I picked it up for the same reason I picked up School Days, or the same reason people click on a spoiler when they know they shouldn’t: curiosity. I wanted to know why this series was so infamous, especially when the synopsis sounded interesting. I wanted to know what all the fuss was about.
  I don’t know why I found this anime entertaining – maybe it’s because I didn’t take it seriously from the get go and so just enjoyed it as a mindless despair/gorefest. Similar to how people ‘enjoy’ something like Higurashi or Another.

  The characters were so-so, some of them could have done with more development but when they were developed they were done so decently enough. The art was fine most of the time, although there were points where the animation quality dropped greatly. Music was good. And as for the seiyuus – I think they were great. They actually managed to sound like they were in pain when they were meant to be in pain (at least the majority of them did). There was some fanservice, but not nearly as bad as I expected based on a couple of the reviews I’d read. Apart from the very first scene and another scene about halfway through the series, there was really nothing worth mentioning. And even those scenes weren’t that terrible.

  The torture was another story. Like I said, it’s a gorefest. Worse than Elfen Lied or Akame ga Kill!, but not by much. Besides most of the scenes were done in such a ridiculous way it was hard to take them seriously.

  Let me be clear, the only (or at least the main) reason that I’m giving it a bad score (in my rating system, anything under 60 is bad) is because the plot holes were so gaping huge they were impossible to ignore. This was objectively a terrible anime in terms of plot – it literally makes no sense if you think about it for more than a second or two. I literally had no idea what was going on at the end. But I still found it okay on the whole.

  It was actually very thought-provoking, in a way – it made me wonder what I would do if I was in a similar position. One where I was completely at the mercy of a situation I couldn’t understand, having no idea what would happen next except that it would be inescapable, and painful no matter the outcome. Not to mention that the longer I survived, the more despairing I would be when I inevitably came to die.
  I ended up thinking the characters behaved quite realistically. I mean, in their situation, there were really only 3 choices:
  • Suffer a total mental breakdown and either commit suicide or lose all sense of reality. Maybe try to take everyone else with you for good measure.
  • Try to keep yourself from going over the brink by desperately clinging onto some form of hope - reassuring everyone else helps too.
  • Completely lock off your emotions and become a robot – regard the entire situation dispassionately and logically try to find a way out. It doesn’t matter if no one but you survives.
  I’m actually not sure which one of these I would be…interesting to think about, if a little gloomy.

  So, those are my impressions. The abysmal plotline prevented me from giving it anything higher than a 50/100, but there were interesting parts, and, overall, I didn’t dislike it. So, if you like gore, a big cast of characters, and don’t mind a terrible storyline, you can try giving it a go. You’ll be able to tell what it’s like after the first 3 episodes anyway; it doesn’t progress much.

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• 

  AndoCommando

  20/100
  Mayoiga - One Year Later

  Survival anime are nothing new when looking back over the last few years. Shows such as Btooom!, Danganropa and Mirai Nikki are all based around a particular survival game and have all found moderate to massive popularity among anime fans. Even outside of anime, you just have to look at franchises like The Hunger Games and Maze Runner to see how successful the subgenre is. It’s clear that stories based around a group of characters, their impending doom and how they try to survive such are intriguing to a lot of people. But why is that? Personally, I believe these kinds of premises can present a darker look at morality; show a darker side to ourselves through characters put in a severe set of circumstances that test one’s beliefs, values, friendships. It’s surprising how a simple concept can turn into a thrilling experience hard to match anywhere else. But this is where I have a problem with most survival anime; they begin with a simplistic setup and never get deeper. Things like character development and thematic exploration are barely touched on in these shows, with more time used for cheap thrills, cringe-worthy horror and overall mindless entertainment. This is an anime that manages to fail at even these aspects.

  King’s Game: The Animation is an anime adaptation of a series of “cell phone novels” and is the most recent example of an anime to present us with a survival game that pits everyone against one another until there is one left standing. Considering what I could take from the poorly-designed cover art to the production studio behind it: Seven, who also made a couple Slice of Life comedies I’ve barely heard of and a ton of hentai, I didn’t have much in the way of expectations that this show would be anything good, but I was hopeful that it would at least be a fun watch. That was a mistake. King’s Game follows Nobuaki Kanazawa, the winner of the previous “King’s Game” as he transfers to a new school in an attempt to escape his terrible past. Unfortunately, the game follows him and now his new class are all subjected to the survival game that Nobuaki is all too familiar with. The basic rules of the game are: obey any order sent by the King within 24 hours, failure to do so will result in punishment/death and everyone involved must play to the end. Now, with all the basic information out of the way, here is how King’s Game: The Animation manages to turn a rather generic concept into one of the biggest fuckups of the entire year.

  The first major problem with this anime is how it introduces the game, more specifically the “orders” from the King that everyone must obey. The first order involves Nobuaki and classmate Natsuko Honda having to kiss, otherwise they’ll be “punished”. The first order is extremely childish considering this is supposed to be a game where people’s lives are on the line. Show like this need to have some high stakes and consequences to match how serious the game is, also adding suspense and excitement to what characters will do, even if they’re predictable. In the first episode, any sense of initial weight here is lost once you see how all of the orders feel like they were made by a 10-year-old. And if you thought ordering people to kiss was already a dumb move, prepare yourself, because most of the orders shown throughout the show are forcing students to have sex with each other. Let me ask, how is one supposed to take a death game seriously at all when a majority of it is about groping breasts and coerced sex? It’s absurd and should not be taken seriously. Other dumb orders include not sleeping before you have obeyed an instruction and not doing anything unnecessary for 24 hours. If you didn’t understand the last order, don’t worry, the entire game isn’t worth the time and even the minimal effort required to understand. This is clearly a case of a simple concept turned ridiculous due to how serious the show tries to take it. But what’s even more ridiculous is the characters involved in the game.

  King’s Game deals with a class of 32 students, not including characters from Nobuaki’s past and none of them are developed to where you are supposed to about them except for the protagonist, and even then he comes off so bland and uninteresting that I’m sure a lot of people watching won’t care about him or the show a couple weeks after finishing said show. In fact, it probably would’ve been better to have killed Nobuaki off midway so it wouldn’t have been so predictably boring. But I digress. Most of the characters are just expendable and are made as victims of the punishments in a poor attempt to justify the gravity of their predicament. Literally about a dozen characters with no prior screen time die on the first day because they were sleeping, and viewers are expected to care? You don’t create sympathy from your audience by killing off characters in such a way with their only key feature being that they exist! That’s one of the most obvious examples of lazy writing in anime. But the poor writing doesn’t stop there, since most of the characters that do get screen time are completely one-dimensional, have no interesting traits and can be easily replaced with any of the nameless character that got killed off first. It’s one thing to say in an anime like this you only know a little about 2-3 characters after the first episode, it’s a whole other issue when half-way through watching, you still only now about a couple of characters when over half of the class is already dead. Not good King’s Game, not good.

  But that’s not all, because it just so happens that basically every single character in the show is a [redacted] to the point where even if these characters were developed at all, it would still be difficult to feel anything when these characters die because of their own stupidity. The most blatant example of how autistic they can get is when Natsuko is ordered to have sex with a guy, asks to have sex with Nobuaki first, and then when denied does a whole 180 personality-wise, grabbing the initial dude and tries to do the act in front of all her other classmates. They try to play it off saying she was always psychotic and only acted nice, but considering how she was nice to everyone around her and even showed interest in Nobuaki before the game, I see this . But this is just small example compared to the dozens of time where characters show their complete ignorance to what is even happening around them. These characters are still kids, but the idea that most of them are unable to think for themselves what other players are doing in a game of life or death is bewildering to say the least. It’s like they have selective memory loss where they all just forget what happened 2 minutes before when a character was acting like a lunatic. Even just thinking about how the show would work in our world brings forth a whole new set of questions that the show never ever acknowledges because it knows just how full of bullshit it really is. For example, if so many students in the same class have died in such a short amount of time, wouldn’t there be police involved? Wouldn’t any of the students try and tell someone who isn’t a part of the game about what’s happening? Oh wait, I forgot. This anime doesn’t bother showing characters that are not part of the game. The way that King’s Game avoids showing any sort of outside influence that would have an impact on the game is enough to tell me that this is nothing more that mindless entertainment at a very low standard.

  Another big issue with King’s Game is how it tells its story. The story overall is not difficult to tell but it tries to combine both the present game with flashbacks of the previous game Nobuaki was a part of before transferring and it ends up being detrimental to the show. The flashbacks shown usually take up most of the episode and makes it a lot more difficult for most present-day characters to get any proper focus or development before they are killed off. The characters in these flashbacks can also easily be confused with characters in the present due to how similar all of their designs are, making it harder to differentiate between the two timelines at times. The transitions between the two timelines does not help to distinguish when a time-jump has occurred. I understand that this anime is trying to adapt 2 different instalments to the franchise, but it ends up being so unnecessary as all that was needed to show was few scenes with Nobuaki and his former classmates rather than encompass more than 1 story in 12 episodes. The outcome of the past game is already given as Nobuaki says himself that he was the only survivor. And the saddest part, most of the characters in the flashback are more developed that characters in the current and try to find out what the King’s Game really is, when it really should be the other way around as the flashbacks stop at episode 7, leaving us to deal with shit characters play out this shit storyline for the rest of this shit anime.

  When it comes to the punishments and actual deaths in this anime, I am once again disappointed. Not only because of how cheap so many of these deaths feel, but of how these death are nearly always shameless gore fests, yet not so over-the-top that they end up being hilarious. King’s Game is actually very similar to Another, a 2012 horror anime that also featured a cast of school students and had most of them dying in some of the most exaggerated ways possible that it almost turned the show into a comedy. Seriously, watch a couple of the deaths in Another, on their own they are way better than the actual show. I wouldn’t be surprised if the deaths shown here in King’s Game were inspired by Another, but even then, King’s Game fails to do that right. It has around the same amount of death and bloodshed as Another, but was never amusing, and while part of that is due to stupid actions by the characters, the execution of these deaths are also just anticlimactic. I never thought I would ever say that seeing a character literally explode in a pile of blood was boring, but alas here we are. Well done King’s Game, you even fail at being an entertaining piece of garbage.

  Now all that’s been said so far should tell you how awful this show is, but here I give you the biggest problem I have with this anime: The King. From the start of the anime the one in charge of ordering and killing off students is shrouded in mystery along with his method of action. The way he comes across as this seemingly omniscient and omnipotent villain had unique powers over victims similar to Light Yagami and the Death Note. But I was more concerned with the why. Why would someone or something so powerful and dangerous being dicking around with a class of teenagers, telling them to fuck each other or die a woeful death? What do they wish to gain from this and why do they not aim for something greater? But then King’s Game makes the revelation of the force behind it all, it is perhaps the most idiotic reveal I have seen in an anime. Ever. Anyone else theorizing about what could be behind it all gets figuratively dick-slapped as it makes any work or effort into understanding what this power is and how the students can beat it absolutely worthless! I’m not going to reveal the origins of the King’s Game but trust me when I tell you that it is almost as disrespectful as getting blue-balled by your partner on Christmas Day (bitch). I mentioned before how all the orders felt like they were conceived by a 10-year-old, but after learning about who the King really is I wouldn’t be surprised if the original writer had the mental capacity of a 10-year-old.

  The only part of King’s Game that I can really commend it on is the production values, but even that has its fair share of problems. I’m not much of a stickler on the animation of a show, but let’s be real: this show was made in 2017, and it looks like it could have been made over a decade ago. Aside from some backgrounds, there is nothing visually impressive about this show and feels lacklustre for the most part. You just need to see how they animate broken fingers to understand how dull and low budget this project was. But it does have its merits: effective facial expressions convey a lot of emotion and a dark colour palette suited the theme of the show, and I can say that the animation was tolerable. The same goes for the sound, with nothing memorable with regards to OSTs yet nothing godawful. I know a lot of people will praise the show’s opening as the best of the season, but I found it boring after a few episodes, with the main line “THIS IS THE END THIS IS THE END!!!!” becoming a meme of the show. And honestly Inuyashiki came out the same season with an OP very similar, but about a dozen times better. The voice acting was below par all across the board, with the English dub being even worse. But if I had to choose, I would still pick the dub, because at least that way I won’t have to think about the show as much, giving my head a well-deserved rest after pushing through this.

  And there you have it. That is King’s Game: The Animation; a disordered, pathetic abomination of an anime I plan to never lay eyes on again. We’re at the end of 2017 and yet shit like this is still being made, but this is nothing new. King’s Game is literally Mayoiga: The Lost Village – One Year Later, and if you’ve never heard of Mayoiga, just look at its mean score and that will tell you all one needs to know. They were both cringeworthy horror borefests that started off bad and only devolved into something so pathetic that even the biggest advocators of schlock entertainment would find masochistic. At this point, King’s Game is worse than just edgy; it cuts deep and it hurts, before leaving a permanent scar; something to always remind you of how foolish you were to try and handle the King’s Game. You weren’t raped physically, but mentally and emotionally are left desecrated and missing a part of your soul that you’ll never get back. This is the chance one takes when watching any intriguing seasonal anime. Was it worth it?

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• 

  TheGruesomeGoblin

  45/100
  One of the funniest comedy series of 2017... wait, it was supposed to be horror?

  FULL SPOILERS AHEAD. But I'd say there's probably already a seventy percent chance of the person reading this review already knowing exactly what Ousama Game is and the kind of reputation it has.

  

  But being a little late to the party has never stopped me before, and it won't stop me now. Ousama Game! It's a fucking joke! Horror anime? Garbage! GARBAGE!

  ...But not necessarily for the reasons you may be thinking. You can go ahead and close the review at this point if you wish. But for those who make the unfortunate decision to continue: let's begin the autopsy!

  ---

  Initial Conclusion

  

  Ousama Game is… I think you either hate it, love it, or love to laugh at it. Personally, I think I’m definitely in the “love to laugh at it” camp. But there are several layers that you have to decipher or try and make sense of while you’re watching it.

  • A) Is the studio animating this being serious?
  • B) Was the original creator being serious?
  • C) Were you supposed to find the deaths where people exploded into blood funny, and were you supposed to find the non-bloody deaths serious, emotional, and dramatic?

  Some of these questions I still don’t know the answers to. Was this an insult to the horror genre as a whole? No. There’s the whole torture porn genre or the type of horror where whether it’s a beast, human, entity, or monster, there’s something out to kill our entire cast of characters and we the viewer are there to either watch either everyone die or one or a few rise to the challenge and survive.

  

  The problem with Ousama Game isn't that it's edgy, that it's ridiculous, that it's fucking stupid, or that it goes too far. No, I think the problem is that not only is it not enough of any of these things, but it's just completely unfocused.

  Honestly, I get way more of the feeling that more than a few people behind this show knew exactly what they were making than its fellow Fall 2017 horror brethren. So criticizing it from that angle seems way more appealing than an actual full serious breakdown of all of the terrible writing...

  

  I mean, it's teenagers getting messages on their cell phones telling them to do things or they'll die. You should almost immediately alter your expectations accordingly the moment the first teenager explodes into blood or drop the show.

  

  ---

  My Expectations vs Reality

  

  ...Yeah, it ended up being even worse than that. I'm glad that even back then one episode in I called it "cheap trashy horror" because that is definitely what Ousama Game is. But as I noted previously, it is bad trash horror.

  Well right out of the gate, we are never shown a "King." It is this weird omniscient but invisible force and there is no reasoning behind any of the commands it doles out to the students beyond the original creator going "well this is what happens next." When there's no... no tangible and/or visible entity that is putting all these teenagers through hell, it's just... it's immediately lame.

  

  Like imagine the Friday the 13th movies if you just remove Jason Voorhees entirely. Rather than Jason himself wandering around murdering campers, it's just like an invisible floating machete that just kills people indiscriminately.

  ...I'd totally watch a horror movie about a rampaging invisible machete, actually.

  It's stupid. You gotta have a monster, you gotta have someone pulling the strings, you gotta have a TANGIBLE ENTITY. Which... Ousama Game itself basically admits and/or eventually realizes. Because while there is an antagonist through the whole show, they are essentially a fellow student who is being forced to play the Ousama Game. Still, the show literally ends after most of the other students are killed by disobeying the King with the actual antagonist just going around and directly causing other people's deaths...

  

  ...Eventually going so far to just pull out a random chainsaw. And it was at that moment where I (and I believe many others who watched this show) probably exclaimed WHY THE FUCK WASN'T THIS THE ENTIRE SHOW.

  Like the end of the show or... maybe even that entire section of the show about the last command of the King was absolutely the best/most enjoyable part of the show. That was the sort of command I wanted the King to be giving out from the very start of the show.

  

  "Get to the summit of this mountain in this amount of time, the person farthest behind will die every so many hours."

  That's weird and has the potential to be fun. You have the potential for just outright sabotage which of course eventually ends up happening, and you just have people dropping off from exhaustion. But instead, most of the commands the King gives are just...

  "Have sex with this person. Why? Because I told you to. Do you want to explode in blood??? Then I guess you better do it."

  

  I really wanted there to be a King. Like a student who is just fucking systematically pushing their classmates into the very depths of insanity just because they could. But it really is just basically whatever goes. There's absolutely no structure or consistency to the commands, and while there are rules to the Ousama Game they are fucking shaky at best.

  

  But I'll of course get to that...

  ---

  A Genuinely Clever Move

  The thing is, in this anime, there are actually like four different Ousama Games. There's the one that's happening in the present which is its own manga in itself, there's the one that the main male character went through which precedes the one that this is mainly adapting (publication-wise as well), there's the original game that was done before all of them via letters rather than cellphones which I guess got its own spinoff manga at some point when the second manga was still going and only ended a year before the anime aired, and finally I guess there's the fourth Ousama Game that the antagonist of the anime and the second manga went through which I guess the original writer can just write whenever he feels like making more money (apparently it already exists in light novel form).

  ...The actual original Ousama Game is in fact actually I guess a series of trashy cell phone novels? I actually did not know that until starting this review that the three different manga are all different people adapting this guy's trash.

  ...So the question is, how do you even approach adapting this fucking mess? Do you start with the very first Ousama Game what with letters rather than cellphones? Or do you start with the first one that the main male character (which I guess either the original creator named after himself or he's using the main character's name as a pseudonym which if it's the latter, good on him because I wouldn't want to put my real name to this shit either) is in?

  Well, the correct answer is... just do it all. Just rip off that band-aid in one fucking movement.

  

  The main focus will of course be on adapting the Ousama Game with the subtitle that's literally just EXTREME but we'll also partially adapt some of the original Ousama Game that Nobuaki was in, with the various references of the other two Ousama Games left intact.

  They could have totally just tried to do a full on adaptation of the original Ousama Game that seemed from what we saw of it, much more boring and actually apparently more about trying to find out who the fuck or what the fuck the King is. But thank Christ, they said "nah, fuck that, let's just get to the chainsaw as soon as possible."

  

  Like the Nobuaki's past Ousama Game was apparently like five volumes long with twenty five chapters. The present Ousama Game is also five volumes long but with sixty chapters.

  ...I have not read any of the Ousama Game manga, but I can already picture it in my head. It's probably a hell of a lot longer. Like by the end of the first episode of the anime, we're already into the Ousama Game. The manga probably has all of this preamble shit and actually like tries to build up or introduce the class and that is... I don't want that. Nobody wants that.

  

  ...Granted, I guess the structure wouldn't be quite as fucked what with like the start of the present Ousama Game leading to a large section of flashbacks that show events of the original Ousama Game and then leading back into the present Ousama Game without actually showing the conclusion of the original Ousama Game until just about the end of the present Ousama Ga--

  Look, either we have to deal with a plot structure that's fucked up beyond recognition, or we have to deal with more Ousama Game being animated. The point is, I'm glad they actively chose to abbreviate it.

  ...Also apparently, there's actually even more Ousama Games than I initially thought? Well, at least they focused on adapting the most over the top one. After all, how can you raise it any further past EXTREME??

  

  Oh fuck off. Yeah sure, waste my time with the smaller fish when you could have animated the entire teenager populace of Japan literally exploding into blood.

  ---

  The Death Game Genre

  Wouldn't it be great if we could just... exile the entire death game genre out of the horror/psychological/thriller genres and into its own... thing?

  

  It should just very quickly be noted that I think I would have reacted much worse to the rest of Ousama Game if I hadn't read another death game series before I finally got back to Ousama Game. I won't spend much time on this, but like if you're reading this review and you watched Ousama Game and thought it was one of the absolute worst/insufferable things you've experienced, let me recommend you to your next challenge.

  Ikenie Touhyou. Imagine... imagine Ousama Game but without the gore. And to accompany the cell phone messages, there is this talking vindictive virtual mascot bee... thing?

  

  It... it genuinely made me look upon Ousama Game in a completely new light. I guess the entire point of this section of the review is to just point out the genre that Ousama Game crawled out of is a gigantic trash fire and there's genuine value in the statement:

  "There are worse things out there."

  I haven't even progressed into that one yet any further than the first chapter because I feel as if I'm still not mentally prepared. And also, I don't like cannibalism.

  Also, I am not joking with this at all. The sole reason why I was even able to dust myself off and actually come back to finish Ousama Game after being like on episode three or four for MONTHS was because I read and suffered my way through this absolute gigantic piece of shit.

  So of course I had to include a dedicated section for it in this review.

  "...at least Ousama Game wasn't THIS bad... maybe I'll try it again and then never ever touch a death game anything ever again!"

  

  ---

  How Ousama Game Really Dropped the Ball

  Back to the main thread of this review...

  I think one of the most frustrating things about Ousama Game is almost everything around the antagonist. Like the main male protagonist, she has already survived another Ousama Game but unlike the protagonist, she has came to a very different conclusion about how one should proceed in the Ousama Game.

  

  The whole conflict between them is selflessness versus survival. Hope versus despair. One character will claim to be willing to do whatever is required to ensure she survives the Ousama Game. The other is willing to pay whatever price he needs to if it means ensuring the survival of the others around him. This could have genuinely interesting or entertaining, but the writing is just so fucking trash that the antagonist almost verbatim says something along the lines of "Well, someone had to be the bad guy!" towards the end of the show.

  

  Like if the show had been more about the guy trying to desperately keep others alive despite already having the knowledge that only one person can survive an Ousama Game whereas the girl is just actively fucking sabotaging his efforts and outright killing people or causing their deaths? That would have been great!

  I mean why didn't Natsuko just fucking smash literally all of her friend's fingers in the finger game to send the rest of the class into chaos if she wanted to actively bring the Ousama Game to a quicker end? Like if the rules are so poorly fleshed out that you can just smash another person's fingers and psychologically dominate them into voting the way you want, you would think she would have used this to actually actively thin out the numbers. But literally nobody dies/gets punished in the finger game.

  

  Which wouldn't be too big of a problem if it wasn't for the fact that shortly after the finger game, it's revealed that when Natsuko had the guy who started going on about his dream of being a stylist right before smashing his hand's phone, she blocked the King on that guy's phone. It's established earlier through the flashback episodes of the first Ousama Game manga that if you block the king, it causes you to get punished and therefore killed.

  

  ...That's probably one of the lamest things I've ever witnessed in a horror anything. She had an opportunity to cause chaos and very likely at least cause the death of one other person. She did not take it. Instead, she kills a guy by blocking a number...? That was when Natsuko immediately became a joke and then I realized why the fuck was the entire class just bending to her every whim?

  

  Like basically the only rules of Ousama Game are that you can't withdraw from it, you can't block the King, etc. Hell, the way the show ends basically demonstrates that OUTRIGHT MURDER is acceptable. Maybe... maybe take Natsuko's phone? Maybe restrain the actual insane person? Maybe realize she keeps saying that only one person can survive Ousama Game and she seems very keen on being that ONE PERSON NO MATTER WHAT SHE HAS TO DO?

  

  Finally, when Natsuko is just running around the woods misdirecting other classmates to their deaths as they're trying to get the mountain or outright causing their deaths and when she brings a goddamned chainsaw into the situation... you're just left asking why didn't she do any of this sooner? There is actually absolutely nothing establishing that the "mountain run" command is going to be the last round of Ousama Game so did... Natsuko finally decide she had enough and it was time to wipe everyone else out?

  

  Just using straight up fucking Looney Tunes tactics now.

  It literally doesn't matter. Because time to actually give some kudos to the original creator, as he actually did the right thing and didn't shy away from having literally everyone end up dying. Unfortunately, it's kind of ruined by the fact that there are plenty of other Ousama Games...

  "We found out the truth about the Ousama Game! It'll keep going on forever unless everyone who's played dies!"

  

  Then they have their little chainsaw battle at the end, and both the hopeful protagonist and the despair inducing antagonist die knowing that they're free from having to suffer this fate for the rest of their lives, and nobody else has to go through it because of them.

  But nope! Can't just end it there! Gotta keep making Ousama Game! More and more! MORE AND MORE! OUSAMA GAME: ANNIHILATION. OUSAMA GAME: APOCALYPSE. OUSAMA GAME: GALAXY.

  I would pay money to see a sci-fi Ousama Game but like all the students are aliens. Just keep pushing it as far as you possibly can.

  

  ---

  The Actual Comedy of Ousama Game

  

  When I called Ousama Game unfocused, what I mean is that... there's like two different "types" of deaths utilized through the whole thing.

  Oh and also worth noting, it becomes very blurred whether some deaths are just how these characters are actually about to just die on their own or actual punishments from the King because they still send out a message claiming that they're being punished.

  

  Or... the punishment doesn't have to be death at all but those are so few in number that it may as well as just be Ousama Game itself deciding to just fuck with everybody.

  "Haha! Time for the punishment! Hope the person who is getting punished didn't immediately kill themselves because the punishment for this one ISN'T death!

  

  Like the ones that are supposed to be funny are the especially gory ones where characters just basically explode into blood.

  But the true hilarious deaths are of course the ones that are treated as if like the intention behind them was to make you feel emotional for these characters who are dying. One of the deaths that caused me to laugh the hardest when two characters who we are very quickly shown that they love each other right before it happens, like their punishment is like death via heart attacks.

  

  Completely bloodless, shouldn't be funny whatsoever, but I was laughing hysterically as these two characters were like trying to drag each other to the other so they could hold hands as they died. Reading that previous line word for word back to myself really... really paints myself in a bad light but I can't help that this trashy horror makes me laugh so much.

  Also, that death is almost directly after when we're shown what like some of the other students in Ousama Game: Extreme are doing which just... it's a tonal nightmare. Like when it's doing that stupid emotional heart attack death, the series actively wants you to forget what series you're watching. Just a couple of scenes before that was THIS.

  

  The gory deaths are funny sure, but this series is way funnier whenever it tries to be serious.

  "I know we're doing like a finger game thing or whatever, but I really need to cut the main protagonist's hair because I dream of being a professional stylist one day, and I plan on breaking my fingers in this finger game and I know that I cannot cut hair without this hand!"

  

  It's almost a parody. I know this shit is probably directly right from the source material, but I really think the people behind the anime knew.

  

  ---

  Conclusion

  

  ...I genuinely really don't think it's quite as bad as it's made out to be, honestly. The writing is trash, the source material is trash, when thinking of this in terms of like an actual serious horror it's a complete joke, but.

  In terms of over the top, cheap, trash horror...?

  

  While at the very start it was kind of miserable, I did end up laughing quite a lot at this. Like the gore and the deaths in Another are a billion times better, but the overall tone of that series is way more serious which is what primarily prevented me from enjoying it because I was taking Another seriously and then... it disappointed me with how it turned out.

  Ousama Game is pretty much a joke from the very start as I've already stated. There was no taking it seriously. But the King being like a goddamned virus rather than one of the students...?

  

  Ugh. Ousama Game, while disappointing, was some pretty funny trash. I do remember being a lot more miserable in the first couple of episodes than the rest of the series, though.

  ...Possibly controversial, but I give it a 4.5 out of 10 or 45 out of 100. Again, it's trash, but I genuinely think as far as the anime goes, a bunch of it was intentional. Plus, it ends in a pretty gloriously trashy way what with that fucking chainsaw that I guess was just at the summit of the mountain waiting for them.

  It's edgy, it's stupid, it's over the top... but if you're looking to watch something where the characters are there just to die... it fulfills that purpose! Also, if we're being honest, that other "horror" show that aired along with it in the same season is enormously worse than Ousama Game. Come on.

  
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