This Week in Anime

The Worst Game to Play With Your Tomodachi

Nicky
Damn, and I had a whole folder of Monokumas at my disposal. A shame, really. Upupupupu.

Same image.

Okay, but I bet my money that they would both lose to the "You know I had to do it to 'em" guy. And that's conveniently the exact kind of energy Tomodachi Game wishes it had.

Death games, gambling matches, and survival mystery thrillers where you quickly learn to trust no one, not even yourself, are a niche but well-known suspense genre in both anime and western media. We tend to get what feels like one or two big hits every few years. The most notably recent being Netflix's Squid Game (which I still haven't seen).

That said, for every big show about testing your wits against a system rigged into getting the contestants to destroy each other to survive, we also get a dozen crappy imitators. These things get pretty formulaic even if you've only seen one of them, leaving little room for mediocre ones.

It's a bit of a cursed genre since it has big shoes to fill while having all the trappings of bad thriller AND schlock horror! I thought maybe it could be at least be an entertaining trash-watch for me like an opossum in your garbage can, but that still involves having something chewy and substantive.

T/N Note: "Tomodachi" means "Friends."

I feel like death games with complete strangers have more introduction than these supposed "friends."

From a dramatic perspective, it might not be bad knowing as little as possible before going in to see how the characters unravel during the game itself, but since the biggest stakes are "Our Friendship," it's a hard sell when the show just decides to jump right into it. In fact, it only made me sure that I have no reason to trust any of these hormonal clowns. I would quicker trust a serial killer trying to murder me with my life than your average high schooler.

Did I mention that there isn't even any murder in this premise?

Yeah, you can make severe and life-destroying debt by itself interesting, and if you're an adult, your financial situation can say a lot about the state of society. Kaiji does this very well. I don't really expect teenagers to have any concept of it. So emotionally, the debt doesn't mean anything and it's more of a number to slap onto the levels of betrayal some of them are willing to go through to screw over someone else.

The overall outstanding 20 million yen debt is about US$153,669, btw! Maybe a lot for a teenager, though less than a house, or, frankly, some peoples' college loans. Taking loans for art school might even cost more than that over time.

Tell me how your friendship lasts when you bring out a deck of Uno with house rules. Have you ever played your friends in Mario Kart? These things are viscous.

They start with a game of Kokkuri which I can only describe as trying to get everyone recreate an Ouija board with a dime. Each contestant gets a question in which everyone in the group has to answer "True" or "False." So they all have to agree to get the answer correctly, but somehow the scales are tipped towards the minority? And as it turns out, someone keeps disagreeing.

Obviously, the point of most of these games are that they're all actually just rigged. But this doesn't even give us the fun of figuring out how. I thought it would be easy to say that the coin itself was being rigged to boil tensions, given how it's already kinda funky in that it supposedly favors the minority. And yeah, these guys just exist to add more exposition with no hint of what their actual goal or motive might be. Also, our "Tomodachi" aren't even the only group playing the game.

Their biggest crime is that they're not even funny. There's very little levity in this show, even the sick and twisted kind.

As for Yuuichi himself, he might actually become the most despicable one out of all of them but that's probably because he's the only one with a personality. His background could be pretty interesting given that he's poor after losing both his parents and it's somewhat implied he envies his friends or that they secretly look down on him because of his circumstances. He's probably smarter and a little slimier than your average potato-kun, but his deductions aren't that impressive because that would involve better writing.

He doesn't seem like he contributes anything to the friend group other than girls like him, I guess?

These are also just glimpses, btw. We don't get any other context behind these two moral stances. It would be more understandable if Yuuichi had his own motivations for wanting money or affection to compensate for his own loss, but instead I guess he has to be told things by other people. We don't get any of his own opinion.

It's also implied that some people in the group might also have their own hidden reasons, including someone with a big enough existing debt to sell out their friends in the first place.

Suspecting them would involve having to know things about them. And most of the characters just barely fall into archetypes. Kokorogi's a nice soft girl that Yuuichi's interested in, Sawaragi is the dependable and respectable girl with a crush for Yuuichi that he's too dense to realize. Tenji is smart, cool-headed, and noble. Shibe deserves to be punched at every opportunity for his idiocy. I don't think their friendship is worth salvaging.

I didn't notice that but now it's gonna bother me and everyone else reading this. The curse of knowledge.

I think most of the show looks "okay," honestly, given it's more realistic aims. But I consider most anime to just look insanely cheap now. It's snappy enough that I can't say there's no directional tone holding this thing together, but that tone is also pretty grounded for a genre known for being way over-the-top for max audience claps.

So the goal is to badmouth your pals and then the audience decides how many spaces they take based on the audience's votes. The person who gets to the end first loses. Stepping on certain spaces can also accumulate more debt, while surviving 'til the end gets you a bonus.

Man, forget what I said about Uno, these guys wouldn't last a round of Jackbox. What's the point of being friends if you don't even know how to roast them properly? At first, no one tries to write anything and they all take penalties. But if everyone wrote something stupid, it probably wouldn't be as tense when one of them decided to air the other's dirty laundry.

We also get no clue what Yuuichi's plan is this time unlike last time. Personally, I found this game premise less fun because there's even LESS potential for the game to be rigged.

"The house always wins element" is really important in gambling tension; it's more than just playing against your opponents, it also gives a larger enemy/entity that the characters can face up against and sometimes even overcome together when they're smart enough to figure out how it's rigged. But here, it's really just about emphasizing the betrayal.

It's also the episode where we get Kokorogi's uncomfortable compensated dating turned rape backstory after getting bullied in middle school. It's very trashy and sometimes leers but it honestly could've been even less tasteful in terms of this kind of misery. It was nice to have the two seconds to suspect why someone would fall victim to the whole scheme before it completely gives away the gambit by the end of the episode.

I want to believe that this is Yuuichi's one act of being a good dude here if I also still didn't trust him with a ten-foot pole just like everyone else.

Amazingly, the security cam clubhouse did say something correct. Y'know, before going back to being boring misanthropes!!

We know nothing else about them other than they might be the closest thing to an authorial voice without a hint of irony. It's just played completely straight the whole time AND they're constantly explaining the plot without letting Yuichi or the audience figure that out themselves. It's such a bad example of tell-don't-show when we have no choice but to listen to the bad guys without any kind of opposition or tone dissonance because the show distrusts the audience that much.

Which granted, these gals are likely psychopaths too, but we don't know shit to tell us otherwise even though they're obvious baddies. The characters haven't done anything to prove them wrong, philosophically.

It would've been good if that was all used to set up for why each of them had their very own reasons for playing this game and leave that mystery stewing. But it already blew it and it's all because Tenji couldn't get over his childhood crush on Shiho!

It totally kneecaps the second game for the audience when you figure out all the big lies are just coming from the same person. The penny game in Kaguya-sama had more mystery and setup.

And yet, I still don't give a damn about any of their friendships. It really feels like nothing of value is lost here when all you've seen is the bad. There's very little that would make you feel warm or fuzzy enough about these characters to make you feel like they deserve to be happy or that they were even very good friends to begin with.

I had very close friends in high school, but even I think that a majority of school friendships are shallow relationships formed by general proximity compared to bonds formed through common goals or shared interests.

It's probably the biggest reason I actually found this show mostly bearable even if it's not enough for its premise. Even if the show started feeling a little smarter and tried to up the stakes, it wouldn't be enough to justify the previous episodes of slog. A good OP, at least, can make any show just a little better.