Posted by OP Sequence
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OP: 「FEED THE FIRE」 by coldrain
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「痕乱」 (Ato ran)
“Chaos (Scars Disorder)”
Well I’m definitely not sure whether to be confused, aggravated, or satisfyingly humoured after Ousama Game this week. I think we all could expect glorious stupidity and meme-worthy moments of horror inebriation following the first episode, but it seems that was just a taster to whet our ravenous appetites. A death game of sex, insanity, and large character casts? Who needs just one when you can have two.
One of the main issues I had with Ousama Game was its adaptation of sequel material with no prior release of (arguably necessary) prequel information. Sure we had a few flashbacks, but it didn’t help things make sense once the game rapidly started and the bodies (almost) began hitting the floor. It seems the show though had considered this aspect, with a lengthy prequel flashback helping flesh out the nature and mechanics of the game. The only problem is I do not think it’s enough. While fantastic Ousama Game is willing to fill in the blanks by using the first story, it begs the question: why even bother adapting the sequel? If the goal is a “complete” horror story, why not just use the one intended as introduction rather than the follow up material which requires a degree of preexisting knowledge? Might just be my personal preference—the show simply may not have enough prequel material to adapt alone for example—but this narrative strategy rubs me the wrong way when distinctively better options are clearly available. Now this can easily improve in the future once the game kicks into full gear of course, but the storytelling right now is not to Ousama Game’s benefit.
Personal nitpicks aside though, what keeps me enamoured of this ridiculous train wreck are the characters. Nobuaki (as shown by that flashback), is now the ever ubiquitous pacifist of the “let’s save everyone!” variety with a dose of intrusive extrovert to boot. Normally I hate these types with a passion (my introvert mindset naturally abhors the socially minded :P), but Nobuaki becomes adorably hilarious when paired against the likes of Ousama’s other equally dumb characters. You’re probably not meant to laugh at Daisuke’s unfortunate discovery of Segal’s law for example, but did I ever find it amusing—probably down to every clock in my house having the incorrect time, because reasons. The real star of the show though was Natsuko, who easily proves that if it’s too good to be true, it probably is. I always considered the girl having a hidden side (any profession of love that quickly is not without caveats), but total psychotic crazy? Never once entered the mind. This reveal, however, does finally give Ousama Game a proper antagonist and a new way to make the most out of the game mechanics. With Natsuko only out for herself and willing to see friends die, Nobuaki must eliminate her if he’s to save everyoneTM, but doing so naturally runs against that very goal. It’s the ultimate battle of ultimate destiny, and there can only be one survivor. Oh how I cannot wait to see how this discovery plays out over time.
With Ousama Game having largely doubled down on the train wreck hilarity and shown its willingness to feature past events, I think we are set for one hell of an experience. This show will obviously split opinions about as hard as Nobuaki’s hypocrisy, but with plenty of time left and over twenty kids remaining, the fun is just getting started—guaranteed. I’m not sure yet if I’ll end up covering Ousama Game (it’s arguably more fun to watch than blog), but without a doubt this one will be Thursday’s greatest bit of entertainment.
ED Sequence
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ED: 「Lost Paradise」 by Pile
Preview
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IIRC one of the rules of the King’s Game is “No Unnecessary Actions”, so I guess Nobu boning Natsuko would count as an unnecessary one. Either that or he’s just really hung up on Chiemi. It would be pretty hilarious if he’d slept with Chiemi last game so that she didn’t have to have her first time with some random guy and that got her killed since it was an unnecessary action.
Also wow are the characters trash, hopefully I can laugh at this for the rest of the episodes instead of groaning.
Oh boy…..I take back what I said in the previous episode, I see little hope for this series. Mainly for 2 things:
1) Like you mentioned, they flashback (and more to come most likely). If they’re going to go out of their way and dedicate an entire half of the episode to the past….they should have just adapted the previous arc then. But from the looks of what I read in the manga, the previous arc is not as “edgy” as what they’re trying to pull currently. But this leads to another issue….too many damn characters. There already were enough currently, now they’re throwing a separate cast at us. It doesn’t help that everyone looks so damn generic. At least with a show with the Horizon in the Middle of Nowhere you could tell their vast cast apart strictly on appearance:
“Oh hey, its the lesbian witches! That’s the pervy ninja! That’s the main character that’s always naked!”
Final gripe with the inclusion of the previous arcs….I just realized the Kings order were the exact same they got this time around as Nobaki’s previous classmates had…in fact in the same order too. I’m sorry but that’s just plain lazy writing to repeat the dares you did in the first arc.
So the characters:
Asides from too many of them (seriously, the episode ended awkwardly as some random dude was yelling looking for Nobaki….who the hell was that?!”
-Like we all can agree, they’re all stupid. Like sure, lets all just watch the chick get rapped and not do anything, but when the same so-said chick screams “Rape” on another guy you all jump to the occasion just to beat the shit out of Nobaki. Plus did they all just forget hearing her say that she wanted to have sex with him first before the other dude? The hell they believing her screaming assault? (Of course I know consent can change at a dime of a hat and it doesn’t excuse real rape, but since that didn’t actually go down between them it doesn’t apply in this situation).
Only redeeming thing about her being so two-face cray-cray is that it gives the show an antagonist…that’s female (rare). Final nitpick, the hell Nobaki telling her to act more modest because she’s a girl? So you’re saying that a dude can try to rape her and it’ll be normal, but when she turns it around and demands sex herself she gets labeled as not modest.
Ugh, I swear this show. At this point I’m just watching this trainwreck to see all these dumbasses do stupid stuff…and the opening song (too good for it honestly) Hopefully there’s someone with sense among these kids.
I’m just venting a lot right now because I gave this show the benefit of the doubt previously…but now they pulled all that from underneath me leaving me go “Did I really just defend this show last week?”
PS: Still want to see some dude get an order to bone another dude.
i read it all…you had me LOL’ing at the Rape parts “i know..sounds cray cray lol”…..ahhh ANIME
Hahaha this comment made my day more than watching the anime itself.
Lets see.. Are they want to progress the Story? or want they tell us the past?
I think some other Animes used this kind of telling and crashed the ground.. it was an Superhero one, where they started the 1st Episode in the present and then gone Flashback 11 Episodes long, just to catch up in the present when it was to late…
Some Girl that could go though Walls and such…
That was Tokyo ESP. That case is different though. Cold openings are different from adding a separate timeline to a story. Because with cold openings it basically just shows you what happens in the future, but afterwards it basically just makes it way up to that point shown in the first ep. The following eps in Tokyo ESP weren’t flashbacks at all as they weren’t events being re-tolled by a character.
Ousama isn’t using a cold opening, but instead just putting two different stories that happened at different times together, and apparently allotting them equal runntime without using any good transitions.
As SDFGS mentions it’s not a cold opening, just a poorly thought out introduction to a sequel anyone outside of the original readers know little to nothing about. The flashbacks are designed to fill in the blanks, but are equally poorly thought out right now.
Anyone with sense probably died in the first episode, how else could we possibly keep the ridiculous situations coming? As soon as you inject intelligence here the whole thing just falls apart lol.
The moment Natsuko was revealed to be some totally crazy woman, I lost all interest in her. I’m sure it was meant to be otherwise… I never liked her much in the first place, and the whole “sleep with me first, my first time is special” was just annoying to me. But I actually got MORE annoyed when it was revealed to be a lie. I feel like they just really wanted to have a surprisingly evil character plot twist because it fits the genre, but it felt really forced to me instead.
Oh it was forced, there’s no reason for Natsuko to be psychotic, Nobuaki already has enough trouble with the rest of class. It could make sense if Natsuko knew of Nobuaki previously or was involved with a different iteration of the game, but there’s no indication of that. It’s simply lazy writing.
The Ou-sama Game saga has 6 novels.
https://myanimelist.net/forum/?topicid=1671970
The 1st novel, Kigen/Origin, explains the Game’s origins.
The 2nd, Ou-sama Game, is the one where Nobuaki was first exposed to the Game. Used as prequel parts in the anime.
The 3rd, Shuukyoku/Extreme, is what the anime is covering.
The 4th, Rinjou/Spiral, is a side story to events in Extreme.
The 5th, Metsubo/Annihilation, involves all high schoolers across Japan.
The 6th, Shin’en/Abyss, involves 32 students from Japan, Taiwan and Korea who’ve gathered on an island for a special training program.
gotta love the shows where bodies drop by the dozen and we get not a shred of police involvement… and culprit contacts via the oh-so-difficult-to-trace channel as phone…
hint, hint, even in most criminal, totalitarian regimes of history, such experiment would be done on prisoners, political or foreign, not citizens of own country, even less highschoolers.
even evil has its standards
but when I heard this:
The 5th, Metsubo/Annihilation, involves all high schoolers across Japan.
I just LOL’d
there are limits to suspension of disbelief, if only with logistics needed to pull out such thing
The culprit is not who, but what.
Show Spoiler ▼
Hahah wow, that takes the cake for the most ridiculous mystery answer I’ve seen yet.
Thanks for that zztop, I actually laughed finding that out.
They want you to think it’s only high school kids getting killed off, that makes the twist at the end really surprising when they find the mutilated corpses of subtlety and good writing.
…I’d appreciate this show if it didn’t try and create some damned story to this mess.
It’s a King Game, follow the rules or die horribly. Simple, I don’t want a damned backstory on top of some barely coherent mystery that the writers know nobody is going to care about.
Lets just get on with the senseless carnage and lack of Police involvement or authoritative concern whatsoever.
Unfortunately I’m expecting a few more backstories yet before we get anything decent. There’s this miss blue eyes here for example:
https://randomc.net/image/Ousama%20Game/Ousama%20Game%20-%2002%20-%20Large%2007.jpg
Who is/was obviously close to Nobuaki, so must get the necessary development all “important” characters get lol
To be Honest, i can not see the “benefit” of this kind of Kings games, beside be an party game under much help of Alcohol…
Was is the benefit of this? Losing faces to be called an chicken? hurting Pride? is this all a reason to end someones life?
As i said, i can not take this seriously even when sober persons play this game.. Perhaps the group are more an “cult”, or Children of VIPs that get boring with life
This series amuses me to no end. The ability to kill people off and to know when someone resists and does the opposite of the king’s game at any given time alludes to a hire power and the after life. The Japanese call it King’s Game we Americans call it Paranormal Activity.
What I wanna know is why the game? And to what end, all higher power has a reason to causing people–random people great suffering. I have a feeling this anime will not explain why and let the show end the same way it started.