YMMV / King's Game

• Alternate Character Interpretation:
  • Ria's role midway through the anime has her wait until all but 2 of her classmates were dead to reveal that she can attempt to shut down the virus. Was this a standard holding of the Idiot Ball or did she have a decent reason? There are two potential motives for her behavior. At the time before her entrance 6 people needed to die as per the King's latest game, so she may have needed to keep herself out of everyone's minds as she was not particularly well liked amongst the group (one of which had already panicked and taken a hostage). The other is that she hadn't finished figuring out the problem yet.
  • The amount of confessions and sex in the King's orders have been theorized/joked about by /a/ to be a way to force Japan to raise their declining birth rates. With the reveal that the King isn't a real person, this interpretation was swiftly put on the kibosh.
  • On one hand, these kind of orders come off as bizarre for people in their frequency. However, if the orders are put into the context of insects, all of a sudden, they start to make perfect sense. As considering the origin of the game, a jar full of bugs really doesn't have many options to go with besides their natural instincts.
  • Are the participants truly holding the Idiot Ball on purpose or is the King's Game which depends heavily on the use of Mind Rape and hypnotic suggestion, artificially corrupting their minds altering them into the level of a insect's mindset, in order to make them more susceptible to its orders?
  • Speaking of the punishments, do they really happen as they are depicted or are they merely what the participants think they see them play out after reading the messages from the King? Considering that the entire game is using brainwashing to take effect, the punishments themselves might just be hallucinations, masking what really happens to the punished participants, aka that they either are killing themselves or are murdered by the other students while under the influence of the Game.
  • The anime's ending implies that everyone dying was not in fact enough to stop the King's Game from continuing. However, some people believe that since we don't see the actual death (indeed we just see her taking Noubaki's corpse to the sea), that Riona didn't actually kill herself, allowing the virus to spread further.
  • Mother's Basement suggests that, since Nobuaki was fully aware of how the game ends all along, he's actually a Designated Hero who was willingly giving all his "friends" false hope for the sake of getting to play hero for his own satisfaction.
• Ass Pull:
  • The end of the second novel/anime: despite getting run straight through by a chainsaw, Natsuko somehow survives long enough to kill Nobuaki alongside her, rendering pretty much everything he's done moot. Being impaled through the spinal cord by a chainsaw should've rendered her paralyzed and dead.
  • Chiemi and Natsuko are long-lost sisters, and are the Sole Survivors of the village where the first King's Game took place.
  • The King isn't a person, but a virus spread around that even got turned into a computer virus. This also means that all the deaths (including spontaneous combustion) were possession-induced suicides.
  • Nobuaki, instead of choosing to die and end the King's Game for good (or so he thought, at least), chose to survive and let the same thing happen to another class.
  • Natsuko was in love with Nobuaki all along...even though she was spending pretty much the whole series trying to kill him!
  • The King's Game doesn't have a winner... everyone has to die or the virus will keep going, infecting other groups of people the survivor is around and forcing them to play the Game as well.
• Awesome Art: Renda Hitori's art for the manga is very expressive, which is important for selling the intensity of the story elements and the reactions from the cast.
• Awesome Music: The opening theme of the anime, "FEED THE FIRE" by coldrain, and "Lost Paradise" by Pile, the ending theme; despite the anime's numerous flaws, they're both considered to be great songs even by the series' detractors.
• Bile Fascination: Perhaps the only other worthy reason to watch the anime besides the opening and ending song is how mind-bogglingly stupid the plot and characters become. It's entertaining, but not for the reasons the creators intended.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Ria, mainly for having a cool design and being the only character in the show to point out just how stupid Nobuaki's ideas and actions are, and how ridiculous the rest of the cast is being. Her voice actress also performs the anime's ending theme, which is widely considered to be Awesome Music and one of the anime's few good points.
• Fan-Disliked Explanation: Readers didn't take kindly to the identity of the King. Mainly, they find the concept of an organic virus that somehow became a computer virus which kills with hypnotic suggestion far too absurd and underwhelming a reveal.
• Ham and Cheese: Bryn Apprill clearly knew what kind of character she signed up for when playing Natsuko. Every line that drips from her mouth is her absolutely hamming it up as a psychotic, sadistic, self-serving Manipulative Bitch, and her ability to switch personalities like a true sociopath would actually makes it that much more impressive.
• Narm:
  • The series, in all of its forms, is pretty hard to take seriously. It's somewhat understandable that everyone would be panicking because they're all about to potentially die in 24 hours, but every line is stuffed with scenery, people turn on each other on a dime, the various victims' deaths — while sounding scary in concept — are depicted in ways that range from the silly to the absurd, and the situations are too fantastical and downright ridiculous to even think about in a practical manner. And the anime somehow manages to take this up a notch, with the mediocre production values and the characters' ridiculously over-the-top expressions frequently ruining scenes that are meant to be serious.
  • Kana's sequence of events are hysterical when she loses a popular vote as part of the current order to Naoya, literally reading her name on part of the final slip and cheering at false hope before being told she didn't read all of it. She then immediately leaps out a window to kill herself before she's punished, only to barely survive as the rest are told she had the punishment of.. confessing to someone she liked. The story only gets (relatively) "dramatic" again after she dies of her injuries shortly before midnight, forcing the next order onto Naoya that begins the real Sanity Slippage of the main characters.
  • The scene where Riona chainsaws Natsuko in the back really wants to be a dramatic Big Damn Heroes moment. It's a lot less dramatic due to the fact that they show her yelling and swinging her chainsaw into the camera twice before she connects, as if they wanted her to do two takes and left both of them in.
  • The moments before Ria's death in the anime. When she bursts into flames, she... has little reaction at all, treating the fact that she is literally on fire as a minor inconvenience, and continues going about her business while Chiemi and Nobuaki watch. One could easily compare her to the dog from the "This is Fine" meme.
  • Towards the end of the anime when some of the characters are decapitated, the stumps on their necks is oddly censored with a black blob, making it seem like their wounds resulted in clean black holes popping up out of nowhere.
    • Ryou breaking down in denial that Teruaki is dead is supposed to be heartbreaking; unfortunately in the anime, him showing up and asking "Why's Teru on the ground?" in an upbeat tone when the dead character's head is several feet from the rest of the corpse then Ryou giving Teru's corpse the matching hat he'd just bought for him and sticking it on the neck stump only for it to immediately bleed through it is something a lot of viewers found more hilarious than anything else.
  • Naoya's death in the anime, where his limbs spontaneously detach themselves could be horrifying, but it quickly becomes ridiculous to the point of hilarity when his legs pop off while he's still standing, leaving his torso momentarily floating in mid-air before falling to the ground. Nobuaki cradling his limbless torso and begging for Naoya to speak to him doesn't help.
• The Scrappy:
  • Chiemi in the anime, who in the present is nothing but The Lost Lenore, and who in the past was nothing but a Satellite Love Interest. She's much better received in the manga and film adaptations of the first book, where she plays a central role in discovering the truth about the King's Game.
  • Natsuko has been called "the world's worst Manipulative Bitch", who has only managed to keep her position as the resident string-puller due to everyone else grabbing the Idiot Ball. Not helping matters is that she deliberately acted as a Hate Sink (which she succeeded at too well) because she was a bog-standard Yandere who didn't want anyone else to be with Nobuaki, which makes absolutely no sense if you recall that she both gave out a False Rape Accusation against him and also wanted Mizuki to send him a text that will kill him as early as the second episode.
• Spiritual Adaptation: Basically the anime version of Chain Letter (2010).
• Superlative Dubbing: While the Japanese original is full of talented actors who Took the Bad Film Seriously, the English dub instead knows it's not making high art and lets its actors go the Ham and Cheese route, and is typically agreed to offer the more entertaining version of the show.
• Too Bleak, Stopped Caring: With several rather unlikable and very dim-witted characters, an Anyone Can Die situation and it seeming like nothing is working out and several of the characters being unnecessarily cruel to each other, the series can fall into this for some viewers. Granted, plenty of people can also find the series unintentionally hilarious with how hard it tries and fails to be edgy.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic: Ryou's death is painted to make it seem like he pulled a Heroic Suicide to save his friends and to prove how strong he is. In reality, it just proves how dumb he is. Instead of using a chainsaw to murder Natsuko (which Riona ends up doing later anyway), he instead...saws off his own leg and dies of shock/blood loss. Ryou could've easily killed Natsuko—a burden that he would have to live with for the rest of his life, something a strong person Ryou claims to be could do—but instead chooses to kill himself, knowing full well Natsuko would attempt to kill the remaining survivors later. Granted, he obviously wasn't mentally stable after Teruaki died, but it's really hard to sympathize with him for doing this, and it comes off as him trying to glorify his suicide.

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