King's Game The Animation

Episode 8

Maybe last week was a pit stop to bring us back up to speed in the show's present-time plotline, as well as kill off two more useless characters because the series still wasn't sure we knew it meant business. Or maybe Natsuko really is the match needed to get this garbage fire going. My point is that after the slowdown last episode, King's Game is back baby! Hopefully we're done with the slow burns, since this is the most aggressively absurd episode since the last arc ended with a girl casually dispensing plot points while on fire.

I honestly don't know where to begin with this wreck, since the sheer weirdness of it stretches through the whole episode. From the very beginning, where Natsuko dangles a used condom as if it's some sinister manifestation of her successful sexual encounter, the series is just begging you to bask in its edgy excess. This sequence also culminates in Natsuko stalking Teruaki post-coitus into a bathroom to steal his phone in a hilarious sequence. It actually features a shot framed as though we were staring up through toilet water, a perfect metaphor for this series if I ever saw one. But that's just the beginning, and so much actually happens in this episode after that; I'm sure I don't need to explain that the ridiculous machinations of this show's messy plot are worth dissecting piece by piece. Technically the big ‘revelations’ of this episode come from Nobuaki talking with Riona, another character we've barely interacted with until now.

One of my many questions has been how a grisly event like Nobuaki's first King's Game could have occurred with no coverage, and here Riona reveals that his wasn't even the only recent King's Game! There have been several King's Games going on around the same time, and the mass deaths that resulted were all somehow glossed over as ‘group suicides’. Unbelievably, the published names of those involved reveal that Natsuko was indeed a participant in a previous Game! “She tried to hide this from us” Riona insists, pointing at a published article with Natsuko's name that she found with a quick Google search. Nobuaki and Riona then conclude that Ria's previous hypothesis about the Game being a mutated hypnotic suggestion computer virus murderbug still holds true, setting off a race to collect the deceased's phones that might hold the key to hacking their way out of the game without getting spontaneously combusted.

That is a lot of dense information (that we kind of already knew) for a show that frankly doesn't need that much explanation for people bursting like poorly-animated blood-piñatas. I have to wonder if the fact that this story was composed on a cell phone motivated so much of its mechanics being based around phones (not unlike the show I reviewed last season, In Another World With My Smartphone). But even if King's Game is all wrapped up in excruciating details this week, we'd be robbed of this episode's incredible second half without them, so it's a more-than-fair tradeoff.

Just ignore that the show pointedly delays giving us the details of the current order until the commercial bumper spells it out for us and then the characters describe it one scene later. First of all, the finger-breaking points-accumulating game is so unnecessarily complicated as to be meaningless. The idea hinges on the students being entirely in contact with each other the whole time, sitting in a circle together discussing their plans, which kills the potential suspense of not knowing who will betray anyone at an unexpected time like some past rounds. So the story tries to mine dramatic irony out of the characters in the murder-circle only half-communicating to each other out of fear of Natsuko, only to find out later that they all agreed on a plan to beat Natsuko once she stepped away anyway! It's King's Game's usual issue of giving us information in the exact wrong order for dramatic impact, making the whole sequence to follow just plain bizarre.

But that's not half as bizarre as when Teruaki takes time out on his turn to give Nobuaki a haircut! I'm glad I wasn't drinking anything when this non-sequitur just pops up, like a random fever dream on par with Natsuko's evil stripping and Ria catching fire as King's Game finds bold new ways to baffle me. The idea was to give Teruaki some inevitable pre-death pathos by revealing his dream to be a stylist and presenting it as a bonding moment with Nobuaki, but it just comes out of nowhere so you can't help but laugh at the whole thing. The show can't even get foreshadowing right, as you might imagine Teruaki fawning over his super-expensive haircut scissors would preclude using them to do the finger-cutting deed, but he just ends up snapping one back with his free hand. There were some ups and downs getting here, but by the time Teruaki was tearfully asking Nobuaki for a haircut evaluation before triumphantly smashing his hand with a rock as a cliffhanger, I was ready to call this the ‘best’ episode of King's Game yet.

Oh, and the whole episode looks awful too, pretty much guaranteeing that there's no chance of taking this absurdity seriously. But that's okay! Finding new ways to suck is the only path to survival for this show, and King's Game succeeded at failing in just about every way this week.

Rating: C

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