Characters / King's Game

Nobuaki Kanazawa

Nobuaki Kanazawa

Voiced by: Mamoru Miyano (Japanese), Comona Lewin (English)

• Cassandra Truth: Nobuaki's gotten himself into trouble with this trope in too many instances to count. Shuukyoku even has him try to warn the others about the game, but he laments that nobody's going to start believing it until bodies start hitting the floor.
• Clap Your Hands If You Believe: Chiemi and Nobuaki escape their final punishment by simply believing that they will survive.
• Heterosexual Life-Partners: With Naoya, to the extent that Nobuaki lies to his classmates about knowing how to escape the King's Game in exchange to vote to save Naoya's life over Kana's, and allows (forces) Naoya to have sex with his girlfriend to save himself from a punishment. Some of Naoya's last words alive are him telling Nobuaki he loves him and Chiemi very much.
• Informed Attractiveness: Despite looking like everyone else, Teruaki stated he has a handsome face which was getting obscured by his hair as it was getting long. No wonder he offered to cut it.
• Nice Guy: Generally an alright and friendly guy.
• Official Couple: With Chiemi in the first book.
• Shrinking Violet: Of sorts. In the beginning of Shuukyoku, Nobuaki is so traumatized from his experiences of the last King's Game that he has crawled inside of a shell, is very reluctant to bond with his class, and overall nothing like the lively, friendly kid he was introduced and depicted as in the first manga. However, when the King's Game starts up again, he becomes a Determinator to end the game once and for all this time.
• The Hero Dies: He gets killed by a dying Natsuko at the end of Endgame.
• Tragic Keepsake: Nobuaki wears Daisuke's bracelet after his death.

Naoya Hashimoto

Naoya Hashimoto

Voiced by: Shinnosuke Tachibana (Japanese), Howard Wang (English)

• Died in Your Arms Tonight: Died in Nobuaki's arms.
• Heterosexual Life-Partners: With Nobuaki, to the extent that Nobuaki lies to his classmates about knowing how to escape the King's Game in exchange to vote to save Naoya's life over Kana's, and allows (forces) Naoya to have sex with his girlfriend to save himself from a punishment. Some of Naoya's last words alive are him telling Nobuaki he loves him and Chiemi very much.
• Shipper on Deck: Naoya is Nobuaki and Chiemi's biggest supporter.

Chiemi Honda

Chiemi Honda

Voiced by: Mao Ichimichi (Japanese), Alexis Tipton (English)

• Barred from the Afterlife: Chiemi in the movie. She won the first King's Game but refused to become the new King. As punishment, her memory is repeatedly wiped and every new class she joins has to play the King's Game. If Chiemi dies, she is just reborn as a new Chiemi to watch her friends die over and over.
• Break the Cutie: When she discovers (in both the manga and the film adaptation) that it's her fault that the King's Game targeted her class.
• Clap Your Hands If You Believe: Chiemi and Nobuaki escape their final punishment by simply believing that they will survive.
• Died in Your Arms Tonight: Died in Nobuaki's arms.
• Double Standard Rape: Female on Male: Averted. In the original, Chiemi and Naoya are ordered to have sex thirty minutes before punishment is dealt out to the latter. Naoya, not wanting to betray the feelings of the people he loves, begs Nobuaki not to make him do it, but gets punched unconscious by Nobuaki and raped by Chiemi for his own good. Both of them felt awful about it.
• Haunted Heroine: In the manga, the King is a virus that targets her class because her mother (or rather, her first cousin once removed and her father's first love) was the King's previous master. In the movie, Chiemi won the original King's Game, but because she refused to become the new King, she has to relive the tragedy in every new class she joins.
• Missing Mom: Chiemi's mother disappeared when she was one.
• Official Couple: With Nobuaki in the first book.
• The Reveal: Ria reveals that Chiemi's mother was the doctor investigating the game in Yonaki-Mura, and the one behind the game entirely. Kigen clarifies that she's actually Kazunari's child and he is potentially the reason for the resurfacing of the game.

Natsuko Honda

Natsuko Honda

Voiced by: Yui Horie (Japanese), Bryn Apprill (English)

• All Love Is Unrequited: Natsuko also likes Nobuaki in Shuukyoku.
• Anti-Villain: It's obvious from the beginning that she's indeed a sweet kid. However circumstances, as well as how she was involved by the previous game drove her into thinking of doing anything in order to survive.
• Bad "Bad Acting": Having survived one King's Game already and being forced into another one, she decides to play it as the nastiest and most wicked bitch imaginable, just so people won't get attached to her and her to them in order to avoid another dose of the same pain once again. She only starts doing it once she confirms from the other survivor of a King's Game that there's no way out from it early on and the moment a chance to escape the game arise, drops the nastiness on the drop of a dime in order to cooperate with other participants if the opportunity arises. She ends up overdoing it though.
• Bitch in Sheep's Clothing: Natsuko starts out as a rather friendly character, until she reveals her true colors as the series progresses.
• Break the Cutie: Why she became villainous. See Anti-Villain and Bad "Bad Acting" above.
• Bowdlerize: In the anime, Natsuko's sex scene is censored slightly. Where she was in only her bra in the manga, Natsuko had her shirt on in the animation.
• Brainwashed: She was the one who wrote the letters with the orders because of the virus' will.
• Class Princess: She's introduced as this, being a kind, cheerful girl who the whole class loves. This becomes subverted as she shows her true colors.
• Easily Forgiven: Despite being cruelly antagonistic for most if not all of the game, Natsuko ends up in Nobuaki's version of Heaven. The other students shown don't reject her there either.
• Hidden Heart of Gold: As revealed in Shuukyoku's ending. She really did love Nobuaki the entire time, but due to her experiences in her previous King's game she thought she had to do what was needed to help him survive. Didn't come across so well.
• Kissing Cousins: Kazunari and Natsuko in Kigen are first cousins that are in love and plan on getting married.

Toshiyuki Abe

Toshiyuki Abe

Voiced by: Yoshitsugu Matsuoka (Japanese), Brian Olvera (English)

• One-Steve Limit: Subverted with the Toshiyukis.

Toshiyuki Fujioka

Toshiyuki Fujioka

Voiced by: Koudai Sakai (Japanese), Jean-Luc Hester (English)

• One-Steve Limit: Subverted with the Toshiyukis.

Nami Hirano

Nami Hirano

Voiced by: Minori Suzuki (Japanese), Jill Harris (English)

• All Love Is Unrequited: Nami has a crush on Nobuaki.
• Better to Die than Be Killed: Out of fear of the punishment, some of the students kill themselves of their own free will.
• Eye Scream: Her punishment for failing her self-imposed order is going blind. She later decides living without sight isn't worth it and walks into the ocean.
• Forgotten Fallen Friend: When Nobuaki is shown in Heaven, he's surrounded by all of the girls that were important to him in life... except for Nami, the one person who was required to die for Nobuaki's order to be accepted.
• Too Dumb to Live: Nami gets a surprisingly easy order of giving any order to herself. She decides her order will be "Touch the King" since she was sure that the King must be someone from their class. This strategy doesn't work out and ultimately results in her suicide, though it wasn't a bad idea at the time. The assumption that the King was somebody in the class was plausible given that the King apparently had all their phone numbers and knew each of their names, as well as their seat order. It only becomes stupid when you consider that her assumption was based solely on Nobuaki's own assumption and her desire to catch the King with him due to her crush. The King is eventually revealed to be a sentient computer virus that controls people through hypnotic suggestions sent through their phones... that started as a biological virus derived from insects that ''somehow'' jumped into the internet. But nobody had any way to know that before the big reveal, and given the situation they were in, it was as good an idea as any to try to end the game early. Though the fact that she chose to gamble with her own life when she could have easily passed the trial does come off as suicidally reckless to most people.

Ria Iwamura

Ria Iwamura

Voiced by: Eriko Hori (Japanese), Mikaela Krantz (English)

• Adaptational Backstory Change: In the manga, Ria's cold and stoic personality is because of her belief that emotions didn't matter over winning at all costs. The anime changed this to blaming it on her father's sexual abuse of her.
• Cutting the Knot: Rather than participate in the game any longer, she decides to hack the system sending out commands and delete the game off the network. No dice; hacking counts as leaving the game, so she gets set on fire.
• Dark and Troubled Past: Suffered from sexual torture at her father's feet.
• Genre Savvy: In the original.
• Idiot Ball: Ria has shown herself to be competent and calm in a crisis. She has figured out the truth behind the King's Game and even has a plan to stop it. She then proceeds to wait while 7 of the remaining 10 students are killed before she actually shares this information. While her plan ultimately fails, the information on the true nature of the game lets Nobuaki and Chiemi escape, although Chiemi dies along the way.
• Major Injury Underreaction: Ria gets immolated and she doesn't even bat an eye, saying it's nothing compared to the sexual torture she had at her father's feet. She has enough breath to make a speech, take off her clothes, decide to jump off a cliff, and everything!
• Rei Ayanami Expy: Of the 14 common characteristics of a Rei Ayanami Expy, Ria checks off 8 of them. Also bears a resemblance to Elena Arshavina of World Break: Aria of Curse for a Holy Swordsman fame, who is also a Rei Ayanami Expy (and also voiced by Mikaela Krantz).

Riona Matsumoto

Riona Matsumoto

Voiced by: Akari Uehara (Japanese), Tabitha Ray (English)

• All for Nothing: Riona kills herself to avoid the virus spreading to the rest of Japan, thinking that would put a stop to the King's Game once and for all. In the last moments of Shuukyoku, we learn that other schools across the country have started getting messages from the King, meaning her sacrifice was worthless.
• Last Survivor Suicide: In Shuukyoku's ending, after Natsuko killed Nobuaki with her last strength, Riona, being the only person alive, took his body to the sea and drowned herself.
  • Or did she? Due to the fact that the King's Game happily continues along its path of destruction after all surviving participants from the previous games supposedly died, and the fact that we never actually ''see'' Riona drown herself in the ocean, it is entirely plausible, even likely, that she never actually killed herself.
• Never Found the Body: The anime ends with her dragging Nobuaki's corpse into the ocean, then smiling at the moon, followed by a closeup of said moon. When the camera cuts back, all we see is some ripples on the water, and then it pulls back to reveal an empty beach. Clearly the implication is that she drowned herself in order to stop the game from spreading, but given how the series ends, this seems implausible. Unless of course, the message they pieced together at the end was a complete lie, or there were multiple instances of the game running at the same time, unbeknownst to everyone involved.
• Regal Ringlets: Yep, she sure does have drill hair, though it's more subdued than many examples.

Kana Ueda

Kana Ueda

Voiced by: Yui Makino (Japanese), Megan Emerick (English)

• Better to Die than Be Killed: Out of fear of the punishment, some of the students kill themselves of their own free will.
• Break the Haughty: When she loses the popularity vote, she doesn't even stop to see what her punishment is and throws herself out the window.
• Screw the Rules, I Make Them!: She's a prime example. She gets a completely harmless punishment (confessing to the person she likes) the second after she jumps out the window, then giving the next king punishment by death 30 minutes before midnight when she dies of her injuries.

Shouta Yahiro

Shouta Yahiro

Voiced by: Shuuta Morishima (Japanese), Austin Tindle (English)

• Break the Badass: Shouta began to break long before the King's Game decided to completely rear its ugly head. When Daisuke dies because of his order, he feels genuinely guilty.
• Suicide Dare: When Shouta gets to be King, the first thing he does is dare Daisuke to hang himself and die. Like a good chunk of people who do this in fiction, he didn't actually want to make Daisuke actually kill himself, and he's notably distraught after hearing the news about the order.

Ryou Sagisawa

Ryou Sagisawa

Voiced by: Hiroyuki Kagura (Japanese), Justin Briner (English)

• Break the Cutie: Possibly the most heart-wrenching is Ryou mentally snapping and being in complete denial over Teruaki's death.
• Heterosexual Life-Partners: With Teruaki in Shuukyoku. Their friendship is as close as Nobuaki and Naoya's, and has heavy amounts of Ho Yay.

Daiki Kurosawa

Daiki Kurosawa

Voiced by: Hitoshi Horinoushi (Japanese), Chris Thurman (English)

• Brainwashed: Daiki and Suzuyo did hang themselves after the virus inside them received the signal from other infected hosts about them not having fulfilled the King's order.

Teruaki Nagata

Teruaki Nagata

Voiced by: Ryōta Suzuki (Japanese), Matt Shipman (English)

• Heterosexual Life-Partners: With Ryou in Shuukyoku. Their friendship is as close as Nobuaki and Naoya's, and has heavy amounts of Ho Yay.
• Off with His Head!: He gets decapitated as punishment when Natsuko blocks the King on his phone.

Daisuke Tasaki

Daisuke Tasaki

Voiced by: Hisayoshi Suganuma (Japanese), Dallas Reid (English)

• Morton's Fork: Poor Daisuke gets stuck with a particularly nasty one: hang himself and die, or hang himself for failing.

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