Ousama Game The Animation

It can be rough transferring to a new school—even more so if you do not want to make any friends, like Nobuaki Kanazawa. But the reason for his antisocial behavior soon becomes clear when his class receives a text from someone called "The King." Included are instructions for the "King's Game," and all class members must participate. Those who refuse to play, quit halfway, or do not follow an order in the allotted time of 24 hours will receive a deadly punishment.

Having played the game before and watched as those around him died, Nobuaki tries to warn his clueless classmates. Unfortunately, they only believe him after the King's Game claims its first casualties. Stuck in a horrific situation with no chance of escape, Nobuaki has a choice: put his own survival above those around him, or do what he could not before and save his classmates.

[Written by MAL Rewrite]

Kanazawa, Nobuaki Main

Miyano, Mamoru Japanese

Honda, Natsuko Main

Horie, Yui Japanese

Honda, Chiemi Main

Ichimichi, Mao Japanese

Hashimoto, Naoya Main

Tachibana, Shinnosuke Japanese

Iwamura, Ria Supporting

Pile Japanese

Matsumoto, Riona Supporting

Uehara, Akari Japanese

Akamatsu, Kenta Supporting

Sasaki, Yuusuke Japanese

Nagata, Teruaki Supporting

Suzuki, Ryouta Japanese

Sugisawa, Ryou Supporting

Kagura, Kitsune Japanese

Hirano, Nami Supporting

Suzuki, Minori Japanese

Kikushima, Kazufumi Producer

Isogai, Noritomo Producer

Ishihara, Naoki Producer

Hashirayama, Taisuke Producer

Reviews

Sep 23, 2024

bellabunbun

Recommended

King's Game is hilarious for all the wrong reasons. This anime is so bad that it's good, the best way to enjoy this is to get some friends together so you can make jokes at King's Games expense. The twists are so hilariously predictable, and the way side characters will switch up out of nowhere and for no reason other than to make our main character more tragic is so funny. Characters will do bad things and no one will care, but if the main character, Nobuaki, does it everyone will start beating him up. But don't think that when a character ends up disrespecting ... Nobuki they won't get punished, because they'll die the worst death imaginable. Those death scenes are so over-dramatic that they end up being funny.
Kenta is the best character, he is Nobuaki's yes man. If Nobuaki told him that Santa was real he would believe it, and if Nobuaki told him to jump off a cliff he would do it without a second thought. But my favorite thing about Kenta is that he wasn't even friends with Nobuaki he just started doing this because the plot needed him to do it.
Everyone in this anime has to end up in a relationship and make stupid sacrifices. They think that if a character dies a martyr with a girlfriend the viewers will suddenly care about a character that had less than 10 minutes of screen time. Characters will go psychotic out of nowhere to try and raise tension, then a crappy inspirational speech will make them return to being normal again. The mangaka definitely made the king give out certain orders to shoehorn in some fan service.
The only thing about this anime that isn't so bad it's funny is that it's kinda hard to follow in the first quarter because it keeps showing us flashbacks. Everyone looks the same so it can be kinda confusing if you aren't fully paying attention.

Reviewer’s Rating: 4

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Aug 1, 2022

Edrodz

Mixed Feelings

Such a let down. The concept was great and this could have been good but the biggest problem in my opinion was the characters. The protagonist was very annoying. He was very corny, and if he knew how to talk to people he wouldn't have to play the crappy savior by himself.
The antagonist, they weren't a problem, they did a good job of making me dislike them, BUT the way the other characters react to the antagonist actions was very dumb and not realistic. People are not gonna just sit there and watch someone do evil things right in front of them, especially when ... it affects them. Example (this didn't happen in the anime) bad person tells my friend to jump off a cliff because they are a loser, I'm not gonna just sit there and watch my friend jump off the cliff with out trying to physically stop him. The fact that no one tried to stop the antagonist from doing anything that seemed suspicious after the third time the antagonist did something bad was so unrealistic.
There were many instances were i almost dropped this anime. There's this one scene where one character just completely breaks for the tiniest reason, didn't make sense. They were a character that i really thought was going to finally stand up to the protagonist, but no. I really wanted to like this anime because the concept was cool but i honestly think all the characters were written poorly.

Would i recommend it? probably not, but if you want to watch something just to have something to complain about, then go for it.

Reviewer’s Rating: 5

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Sep 18, 2025

AeroGunz

Not Recommended

“King’s Game” is what happens when an actual interesting story idea is given to someone with zero imagination and writing skills.

You know, I think my tolerance for garbage writing is getting thinner and thinner and this show is really stretching it. This show doesn’t give a rat’s ass about logic, build up or creating anything that would pretend to be sympathetic characters. The story is actually a pretty solid idea but the plot is utter garbage. The writer was more concerned about shock value than creating anything worthwhile or even coherent.

Before we start I would like to explain something. I will be talking about “plot” ... and “story”. Many people use those terms interchangeably. I’m not one of those people, so to make sure everyone is on the same page…
I use the definitions for “plot” and “story” as Lisa Cron describes them:
“What happens in the story is the PLOT, the surface events.”
“STORY is about how the things that happen affect someone in pursuit of a difficult goal, and how that person changes internally as a result”.

First things first. The only thing I actually like in this show is the story. A story about the only survivor of a death game who is thrusted into another one. That’s actually a cool idea. A story about someone with PTSD who must face everything for a second time. I’m all for that. The problem is that it requires a skilled writer to pull off. This type of subject could be easily made into a bad joke with no subtlety or thought and… this is exactly what we got.

The bullshit starts in episode one. Despite surviving the game once, despite knowing what will happen if people will ignore the orders and, despite positioning himself as someone who doesn’t want people to die, Nobuaki (the MC) ignores the first order. The one he and one of his classmates are recipients of. He consciously condemns someone we have no reason to believe is anything but innocent, to death. This situation is actually worsen when You add into account the knowledge from the last episode and transforms him from just an idiot into a full blown hypocrite (writing in this shit show is so bad that I shouldn’t care about spoilers, but I am aware that there are some people who actually enjoy trash writing so I will try and avoid them). Of course they both survived but not because of him, let me tell You that. It leads me to believe that the author never actually planned anything that is in the plot and winged it all. That would also explain why the whole thing makes little to no sense. So Nobuaki’s introduction as a protagonist leaves a bad taste in my mouth. It’s one thing if he would prefer to die alone but condemning another person is a whole other can of worms. Needless to say I didn’t give much of a damn about him for the rest of the show. Funny thing, I worked with people with suicidal tendencies, the majority of them never wanted to bring someone down with them. That’s a bit of a trivia from an ex therapist. So yeah, the way this waste of space and screen time is written really pissed me off. That is not a way to write a broken character with PTSD.

As much as I despise Nobuaki, the second episode makes me hate the rest of the cast just as much. One of the classmates is put into a position that… ok, I’m not going to sugar coat it, she’s gonna get raped as part of king’s order. Everyone in the class is ok with that (except for our MC of course). But just a few seconds later when Nobuaki is falsely accused of trying to rape that same girl he is being villainized. The whole situation is much, much worse than You think because that girl is playing Nobuaki like a fiddle and yet not one person in the class spends a few seconds on thinking about the accusation as a whole. If they did they would understand that something is not adding up. I’m not even talking about some sort of convoluted plan, the girl herself contradicts her statements and actions from just a few seconds ago. I have no idea of making the class a bunch of idiots with no brain was the goal all along but that’s how I’ve read it. It’s just another example of the rule that the writer is unable to write someone more intelligent than they are. The problem is that the level of stupidity on display in this show is so insulting I’m not sure who is insulted more, the writer or the viewer.

But fear not. The level of stupidity and nonsense has not yet reached it’s peak. For starters episode 5 shows us a character that is a female version of an edge lord that pretends to be intelligent but it’s just cringe. I’m a sucker for white haired girls so I like her design but her personality is so cheap and artificial that it’s painfully obvious that she’s only there to be the “cool, cold and intelligent” but she comes out as childish. If I got stuck in a death game with someone like her I would kill her just so that I could die in peace later down the line. Of course she has a tragic backstory because the writer is inept to create anything that’s not cringe, cliché or just plain idiotic (sometimes all at once). Even when she is burned alive (it’s not a spoiler and I will tell You why in a while), her body doesn’t burn (something that actually surprised me since the show seems to get off on cheap gore and shock), she doesn’t react to the flames at all. No 1,2 or 3rd degree burns, no tissue charring, no nothing. On top of that, her clothes get burned and she stands naked for quite some time. The bitch is practically fire proof. What kind of bullshit is this? On top of that she’s the one who solves the mystery of the game and… oh god… it’s so bad. I don’t think I ever was high enough to think of something so idiotic. It’s the level of absurdity turned up to 11 and not in a fun FLCL sort of way. This is just garbage and we’re only halfway through the show.

From episode 7 every episode is trying to one up the previous one in the level of nonsense and shock for shock’s sake. With the final order being so moronic that I actually laughed. It’s seriously impressive how idiotic it becomes, especially in the “love” (and I use that term extremely loosely) department. Naming every idiotic thing this show does would take at least 10 pages, so I’ll just concentrate on the worst offender from now on. Now, I do think that the less people are alive in a death game the more unhinged they should be because of everything they went through but this is just moronic. Everyone turns either into a bumbling idiot, an asshole or just goes full on psycho. The funny thing is that the psycho is actually the only one honest with both herself and everyone else from. In a weird way she’s the only one who is acting naturally knowing what is said about her. If the goal was to create a bunch of morally gray characters then… mission failed. Instead of morally gray they turned out just stupid.

The show has an interesting, at least on paper, idea. It shows two death games. One is the previous one, the one Nobuaki survived and the new one, the one Nobuaki plays with his new class. On paper it’s not a bad idea but in practice it doesn’t work too well. The flashbacks from the first game are used as info dumps that only turn Nobuaki into an asshole and a hypocrite. Remember the fire proof girl I mentioned before? Yeah, she was in the first game, that’s why I didn’t count mentioning her fate as a spoiler. The problem is that in the first 6 episodes the retrospection smoother the present story to the point I started to care more about the dead characters than the ones that are still alive. People in the first game seem to be a little less moronic and a bit more interesting than the new batch. Not by much mind You.

The world itself is a joke. There is a reason why most death game stories take place in an isolated environment or have some sort of MacGuffin that takes care of the fact that people are dying. Because if You don’t you get the crap we see in this show — an empty world that feels isolated. Kids are dying left and right and yet there are no signs of any sort of authority looking into it. No police investigation, no announcements, not even a dumb school warning for its students. People in general are scarce. I think there are 3 people that aren’t related to the game that have any sort of interaction with the players, and one of them is in retrospect. The world is presented in such a way that if you'd tell me that everyone playing the game was isolated without their knowledge I would believe it. It’s just so empty, artificial and flat. It doesn’t matter that a game that kills people is in effect, no one cares. The whole world just what? Accepted it? Denies it? Cover it up? Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?

This show is probably the worst example of writing I have ever seen and I was a fan of camp movies. Unless You hate Yourself I would advise You keep Your distance from this atrocity.

Reviewer’s Rating: 2

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