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I can't believe I'm wasting my first review on this show...

Ousama Game The Animation (King's Game in English) is a perfect example of how you can have good ideas and still write a terrible story. Honestly, that's the only way I can even recommend this show: if you want a case study in how to ruin a story, I can't think of a better example than this. I can't in good conscience advise watching King's Game for any other reason. It is a train-wreck from beginning to end, and only two things kept me watching until the end: it was admittedly really fun to join ... in on the episode discussions every week and talk about why this show is so bad, and I felt a morbid curiosity to see just how bad it could get and where the flaming wreckage would land. There were times when this show made me seriously question if I was suffering from some uncharacteristic streak of masochism...

Let me start with the good things:
The OP and ED songs are actually pretty good, it's a shame they had to be attached to this show. And there are some times when the show can actually be funny. It's not supposed to be funny at all, but the straight-faced absurdity of some parts is just too much to take remotely serious. Finally, there are times when you can see the spark of what could have been a really good idea, but...

And now the bad:
...That spark is, without fail, snuffed out, stomped into the dirt, and urinated on for good measure. And most of the time, it's because every single character in the show is either killed off without even being properly introduced, or so painfully devoid of any logical thought or consistency of character that it is impossible to care about them at all. The characters are easily the worst part of the show, and they consistently drag every other aspect of storytelling into the dirt with them. Personalities do a 180 turn at the drop of a hat, everyone is either unreasonably cruel or hopelessly pathetic, and characters constantly make choices so poor you have to wonder how they've managed to even survive long enough to be part of the game at all. But fear not, poor writing ensures that even in the rare instances that characters aren't being insufferably idiotic, the story still continues to fail at being any sort of horror or thriller and at best an uncompelling mystery with no payoff for the solution (so bad, in-fact, that even after the King's identity is explicitly revealed, some viewers still don't realize that there's nothing more to it, we really do have the complete, albeit absurd, answer; and I can't blame them for not getting it, because it doesn't actually make any sense or explain anything).

To summarize: King's Game is terrible, the characters are quite possibly the worst characters I've ever seen, and it completely fails at everything it has attempted to be and is instead closer to an unintentional comedy. And it's not even worth watching for that, because it's really not that funny very often. It only gets a 2 instead of a 1 because there were at least some good ideas underlying the show, which unfortunately could not reach even a fraction of their potential because of everything that was wrong with the show. I could bash the show for hours, but honestly it's wasted too much of my time already. Don't be like me, don't waste your time on King's Game.