Due to this being a Moments page as well as the Anyone Can Die nature of the series, all spoilers are unmarked. Read at your own risk.
The series
- The scenes of the characters wandering around a completely empty Tokyo. It's incredibly eerie to see cars stopped in the middle of the road, still-warm food sitting on tables, and streets without a single person in sight.
- In the first game the protagonists play, a high school girl joins them. Stressed from the time limit and lack of clear reasoning, she rushes through the ‘Live’ door. She’s immediately struck down by a laser through the head. You see the aftermath, and it isn’t pretty. It also helps set up the violent nature of the series.
- That game, which is unique to the live-action version, is an example of disturbing in-universe Guide Dang It!!. The logic required to solve the game without resorting to sacrifice or a blind 50/50 choice is very complicated, and wouldn’t be easy to figure out for someone without Arisu’s specific knowledge. Without that logic, they would have quickly been weeded out and killed before even learning about the world.
- After clearing their first game, Arisu and the others collect their thoughts, only to be interrupted by a man getting shot through the head by a laser. They now know that they only have a certain number of days between games, or they will suffer the same fate. A wider shot of the city shows dozens of other lasers finding their targets.
- The second game that Arisu and Karube participate in is a deadly game of tag. The larger group of participants being killed off, as well as the new knowledge that the Dealers are other players, makes it a very suspenseful and scary episode.
- Chota’s backstory. It’s unsettling on its own, but the fact that he begins having flashbacks while Shibuki has sex with him makes it worse. It’s made even less sexy by how she has been shown to approach sex in the past— she used it as currency to be promoted at her job, and it’s heavily implied that she is using it here to make Chota more loyal to her.
- The third episode, shockingly, kills off three of the four main characters.
- In the manga, Saori, along with Karube and Chota, sacrificed herself willingly (after a bit of a struggle, of course) for Arisu to move on. In the show, up until seconds before her death, she is still attempting to kill him. It’s actually very disturbing to see her being held down and forced to give up her life for him.
- While staying at the Beach, Arisu and Usagi do some investigation into how the ‘paradise’ functions. Arisu quickly finds a dumpster of rotting bodies, showing that Hatter was serious about ‘death to betrayers’.
- The Witch Hunt game at the Beach is this. Imagine, you are recruited into a large group of players, so you always have help in the games. Sure, the entire place is about openness and not keeping secrets, but you don’t have to worry about going hungry, having a place to sleep, or being alone. Moreover, you can party and do whatever you want. And then, all of a sudden, it turns on its head. You find out that the safe haven you were promised was a death-trap in disguise, meant to lure everyone in for a game. A girl has been murdered, a knife plunged deep into her chest. And the murderer is one of the people you have been playing alongside. Your friends, your comrades. And you have to find out just who it is…and kill them.
- The King of Spades is pure nightmare fuel. A cold-blooded killer who's game lacks any complexity beyond surviving his manhunt across the city. From the moment he arrives, he pursues the heroes with lethal precision, mercilessly cutting down dozens of survivors in the first few minutes alone. What's worse, he always seems to know where someone is hiding; when Aguni sets his trap in the middle of the forest, the King of Spades inexplicably manages to find them, showing up out of the darkness and stalking his prey like a supernatural predator. The thought of being hunted by a merciless killer is bad enough, but being hunted by one who will always manage to find you no matter where you go? Absolutely terrifying. It's no wonder just about everyone puts off facing him until the other games are completed.
- J♥ Solitary Confinement takes the Paranoia Fuel of Witch Hunt and dramatically ramps up the difficulty. The twenty players are confined to a prison, each wearing a bomb collar with a card suit illuminated on the back that changes each round. With reflective surfaces banned, the only way for a player to identify their suit is to trust the word of other players. On every hour, the players must enter a prison cell and call out their suit, with an incorrect answer immediately detonating the collar. While the uncertainty and paranoia is bad enough, the clear condition requires the Jack of Hearts be tricked into detonating their own collar, leading to a inevitable Dwindling Party as the players begin condemning innocent teammates to death in wild guesses at the identity of the Jack. On top of this, the prison's supplies are well stocked ahead of time allowing for the game to continue for months if needed.
