Thought Bubble: Here’s How We Would’ve Fixed Funimation’s “King’s Game”

DO NOT WATCH KING’S GAME: THE ANIMATION ON FUNIMATION IT IS BAD. Let me delve into the muck of this season and pull out those nuggets of promise. I am going to rewrite the series for you as if it were a Netflix live-action remake. So much will be changed, but it will be better.

Meet Nobuaki. He’s an exchange student who moved from his school after it closed. There were rumors of a psychopath getting loose, and carving up a bunch of students. You can’t get the stains out, so the school got torn down. Understandably, the shell-shocked Nobuaki is standoffish and doesn’t do much more than stare at his desk. That is until he overhears one of the students talking about this funny app game. It isn’t in the app store, only downloadable by the link. Players are matched together by their GPS. The more time they spend together, the more likely they are to be put in a group. The app gives you a task, and you must complete it within 24 hours. Grouped players can see each others’ tasks. During the first episode, these tasks are benign. Jokes and pranks, things that teenagers would do for fun anyways. The punishments for failure are also benign, such as certain texts you sent being revealed to the other players, or pictures of your face get sent out pasted in a fetish porn photo. It’s all in good fun to them, so they spread the link to the class until everyone is playing. Only a few characters notice that suddenly, Nobuaki is extremely alert, and is paying close attention to all of them.

Episode two, the tasks from the King start to get a bit more unethical. It commands two of the characters to have sex, despite the fact that the girl has a boyfriend. We saw this situation play out in the anime, but in this revision, the boy of the pair given the task has a sister with a terrible secret, and once they’ve discussed rather recently by text. For fear of her being exposed to the game, he tries to complete the task. This gets him in trouble with the boyfriend, who we’ve already seen is a bully. At the same time, another boy in the class, an absolute wimp, is given the task to “Become a Man.” Most of the class tease him, assuming that it means he is to have sex as well. At the end of the episode, things come to a head with the not-love-triangle, as the boyfriend spots the two together, and plans to beat the boy to death. At that moment, the wimp comes out of nowhere and decks the bully boyfriend, knocking him out. The wimp receives an “Obedience confirmed” notification. Then, midnight strikes. The girl and wimp watch on as the victim boy begins bleeding from the eyes. After he dies in the hospital, they check his profile in the game. “Punishment by an aneurysm”. The King’s Game is for real, and their lives are on the line!

From there, the show continues to get darker and more grisly, with the tasks posing more psychological and ethical questions, as Natsuki manipulates things behind the scenes. We have no direct evidence that she is doing so until a couple episodes later. She plays up the innocent damsel act until the class discovers Nobuaki is a survivor of the game. She turns the class against him, and as he tries desperately to tell them the secret to surviving, they beat him up as they did in episode two of the anime. However, in a moment of fearful stupidity, they actually kill him. The deaths bring the police on the scene, and they begin investigating the players, who are instructed to hide the existence of the Game or be punished.  Now, the players must carry out their tasks while hiding from the police and dealing with a sociopathic queen bee. No flashback arc, no time to figure out what is causing this. Just horror and stress.

In the end, this gives us far more time with each character, giving us time to get to know them and their motivations. It also allows us time to take characters and either redeem or corrupt them. We have an entire season to do it, instead of six episodes. It also removes Nobuaki from the equation in a way that has to mean. We have set up early on that he knows something is going on, and he’s the first character we see. This makes us think he’s the main character. So, when he reveals how much he does know, we think we’re finally going to get his backstory, and the hero takes his place. Instead, he dies. Not at the hands of the game as could be expected, but killed by the classmates he wants to save. He does so before giving us much information that is worthwhile, leaving his knowledge as a Chekhov’s Gun for later. Now, the viewers are left wondering who their viewpoint character is and find their only options lie amongst a bunch of broken kids who just did something terrible. Something that is going to screw them all over and the audience knows it.

Also, just to keep the suspension of disbelief from getting stretched too thin, the King’s Game itself drops all pretense of viruses (biological or programming) or hypnotism (because hypnotism doesn’t work that way). Instead, it goes back to what another of the manga claimed was the source of the bioweapon: a Japanese myth about putting a bunch of bugs in a jar and letting them fight it out until only one survives. Its blood was intended as a bioweapon, but it instead became a physical manifestation of the cruelty of the first people to play the game. With each winner of the game, the curse changes form to match the times. Thus, when it came to Nobuaki’s first class, the curse did it through texts. The time before, it was notes or letters. If I had my druthers, either the wimp or a redeemed bully character would survive, and a second season would be devoted to discovering the source of the Game before a new round starts up. They are helped out by research left in the form of text messages on Nobuaki’s old phone and discover enough about it to help their next class survive.

Unfortunately, I have no ties to Netflix. But it goes to show how this is a brilliant base concept that ultimately did itself in with bad writing choices, and it continued to go downhill at a breakneck pace.