English Dub Review: King’s Game “Eternity (Forever | Dread)”

Is that the light at the end of the tunnel… Or the train?

Overview (Spoilers)

In the modern day, Nobuaki, Kenta, and Mitsuki approach the ruins of the village where this whole mess started. As they come through the entry tunnel into town, they emerge into the light of sunset. The unsettling part of this is that Mitsuki still has to send her murder texts out. If she doesn’t both she and Kenta will be punished, due to Kenta ordering himself to protect her through the game. While all three are on board with Natsuko getting one of those texts, the other one is up for debate. Nobuaki suggests that it be the girl who let a guy die rather than let him touch her breast. Kenta, however, strongly believes that it isn’t up to them to value one person’s life over another. Nobuaki discovers one of the houses is labeled the Honda residence. That was his dead girlfriend’s last name! He goes in, and finds a photo of Chiemi and her father, as well as an apology letter from her father, saying that he was going to be with them. As he explores, Mitsuki wanders off. Kenta hunts her down, and she declares her choice as to who is going to get the other message. Herself. She claims to want nothing more than to protect him, but seems to have forgotten his own command to himself. Instead, she is overcome with her own feelings. She’s in love with him, but realizes that love born out of tragedy is rarely long-lived. When Kenta admits those feelings are returned, she unveils her true plan. She wants this love to be for the rest of their lives… by both of them dying in each other’s embrace. Realizing she has lost all reason, he punches her in the gut to knock her out. He then uses her phone to write the two kill messages. One to Natsuko, and one to himself. Using her finger, he sends the messages, and prepares for death. In the meantime, Nobuaki discovers the corpse of Chiemi’s father, and he’s clutching to a photo. In that photo, he’s holding Chiemi as a baby. But, he’s also holding another baby: Chiemi’s sister, Natsuko Honda. Putting two and two together, Nobuaki surmises that the father of the two Honda girls must have been involved in the first King’s Game, and somehow, the pair of them survived. That’s when Nobuaki sees the light from Mitsuki’s cell phone up on the hill. He arrives in time to see Kenta suffocating. However, looking at Mitsuki’s cell, she wasn’t confirmed to obedience. Replacing her cell phone didn’t work! The messages sent from her new phone didn’t count, and the pair of them were each dying of suffocation for disobeying their orders. Nobuaki places their corpses next to each other beside the road, holding hands. That’s when he gets a call to Kenta’s phone. It’s from… his phone? Natsuko has it, and as she revels in the carnality of the King’s game, she rubs his recent loss in his face. While he was gone, many of the students disobeyed the king, based on Natsuko’s advice. Of thirty two students, only eleven remain. And one is a raging psychopath.

Courtesy: Funimation

Our Take

Man, what is it with this show and making the women go crazy? Sure, psycho chicks are creepy as all get-out, but one is bad enough! Seeing that sweet, frightened Mitsuki suddenly turn into a homicidal Juliette was a little predictable, once she ran off on her own. Classic ploy to get the nice guy off on his own where nobody can help him. I’m glad the story has chosen to focus on the present, but it did so while leaving us with a bit of a cliffhanger in the past. What happened to Chiemi? We are left not truly knowing her fate, as it was only her and Nobuaki left after Ria died trying to hack the game. I’m guessing that will be left for the big confrontation with Natsuko. Again, the King’s commands aren’t very creative here, as we see the class wrapped up in the same, mostly sexual commands as the previous go around. We do see one girl struggle with the command to “lose something valuable”. The messed up part is that she could kill her whole family, but not her dog. She literally values that dog over two to three people and her own life.

The voice acting was sub-par in my opinion. Coby Lewin (Nobuaki) fell into a rut with his character’s moods. The voice he did had only shocked and crying, and it got old rather fast, especially with how Nobuaki kept saying the same things over and over in response to what he found. As much as the art conveyed that Mitsuki was going coo-coo, Brittany Lauda still kept her as a frightened, love-sick lamb. Kenta (Garret Storms), similarly, had only one note. This might have been okay if it weren’t for the inconsistency in the art and animation. Whenever we had close-ups of girls going crazy, we got amazing art and animation. The rest of the time, the animators made sloppy mistakes that made characters look awkward and contorted. Several shots were lazily animated, especially the one with the little dog licking blood off its owner’s hand. It seems like everyone realized the show finally jumped the shark last episode, and are ready for this series to end.

Score

Summary

And to be honest, so am I. What started out as a series with great promise and skin-crawling horror has petered out to be a poorly-written, poorly-acted, poorly-animated disappointment. I give the episode five ruined villages out of ten.

5.0/10