English Dub Review: King’s Game “Breakthrough (Solution/Hades)”

Hope lays in a ghost town, and the ghosts of friends still haunt the survivor.

Overview (Spoilers)

Nobuaki, Kenta, and Misaki get on board the morning train to an abandoned town in the country. This was the first recorded instance of the King’s Game, played with letters sent to the populace. The town wiped itself off the map. As they travel, seeing the frightened Misaki reminds Nobuaki of a classmate from the previous game. Nami was a sweet, shy girl who had a massive crush on Nobuaki, even though he was with Chiemi. She had been given an order to give someone else an order. She ordered herself to touch the King. This crazy ploy tried to pit the game against itself. If she went around touching people in the class, and they got a confirmation text, they’d figure out who was the King. Downside, if the King was not in the class, but an outsider, she’d die. Systematically, she goes through the seat listing, touching people. Even the class loner, Ria Iwamura, is not confirmed. Afraid, and facing her mortality, Nami runs away to look at the river. Nobuaki tracks her down, and stays with her until the final text arrives. As Nami did not touch the King, she is inflicted with blindness. At the same time, Nobuaki is given the command to lose something important to him. When he isn’t paying attention to her, Nami vanishes. He immediately realizes what she is intending to do, and he runs off to destroy everything he owns in a vain attempt to destroy something that is treated as obedience. When this doesn’t work, he calls Chiemi to break up with her. This doesn’t work, either. He arrives at the beach, where he finds footprints leading from Nami’s phone, past writing saying “I love you, Nobuaki”, and out into the ocean. She committed suicide to save him. Obedience Confirmed.

We are now given enough clues to start wrapping our heads around this mystery, though I doubt we’ll fully solve it. For one, we know that this is a paranormal event. We know this because the hangings in the first episode were not with rope, but with some sort of… thing. Something that moved of its own accord. Also, the King is aware of everything the players are doing. Even in closed rooms and in places far away from possible surveillance. For two, we know that the King is somehow in the class. He said so in his blindness message. He also said that the only way for them to find him is to hate each other. This event is not localized, as it followed Nobuaki to a new school. This suggests that it is some malevolent grudge spirit that has attached itself to him as the survivor. It grows in strength by feeding off their hatred for each other, which it inspires through this game. These are facets of the game that the students are seeing, but aren’t putting together due to their stress. They are assuming many things, without exploring if those assumptions work with what they’ve seen. When you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.

Two other things I’d like to bring up. Ria seems to be now (in the flashback) as Nobuaki was when he first arrived at the new school. She is also very calm and logical about this whole thing. Could it be that she is also a survivor of the game? Second, where are the teachers in all this? Nobody has noticed that children are dropping like flies in this classroom, and the rest are terrified beyond reason? There are no adults that go, “Hey! Something is very wrong here.” Not that they could do anything, anyways…

Our Take

Well, this show has done an excellent job of instilling emotion and empathy in me, at least. The tragedies befalling Nobuaki and his classmates of the past aren’t just empty sob stories. The characters react in their own way to these things, with varying levels of fear, suspicion, and anger. It is these reactions that we key into, and identify with the characters. This is still not an easy show to watch, but it is getting easier, kinda like how I felt early on with Attack On Titan. A number of characters that got killed off, and how brutal their endings were, made it tough for me to see it, but I couldn’t look away either.

Again, I like that the game’s punishments are not all about death. Punishing her with blindness was a double whammy. Not only did it disable her, but it would prevent her from reading further texts. Her next command, she would be relying on the others to tell her what she had to do. Then, she’d have to trust them and to trust that they were not under the orders of the King to tell her a lie. Going blind basically doomed her to being terrified and paranoid for the rest of the game. The orders being given are also leveling up. Losing something important to you has some interesting implications. Especially when you are trying to save someone else, or save your own life. That life becomes the most important thing, and thus, is the something that must be lost. But, once you have lost something, and prevented the punishment, others may come to feel like they were not important to you, and you lose them, too. This vicious set of orders and punishments from the King are subtle in their full effect but far more powerful.

The voice acting in this episode is similarly potent, especially coming from Coby Lewin as he portrays Nobuaki’s grief and sheer desperation. As the series goes on, Nobuaki’s feelings are coming through better, and I think it may be that Coby is getting the hang of the kid. Jill Harris gave Nami a sweet, innocent depth, and I totally believed the girl’s feelings for Nobuaki. Though seriously, what are these girls seeing in him? He’s nice, but he doesn’t seem like he’s all that and a bag of chips, either. In any event, the rest of the cast just faded into the background. This is fine since we really need to  be able to focus on the key stories of each time period, rather than being pulled in a million direction by different full characters.