Seasonal First Impressions is a column where I detail my thoughts, however brief or long, about a currently-airing anime’s first episode or so.
I hate saying that something “isn’t my genre.” Partly, it feels like an excuse. Surely any reasonably well-rounded critic should have an at least workable command of all major genres within their chosen medium?
Well, maybe so. But I’m not going to lie to you all and pretend I understand the whole “death game” genre. This isn’t technically a death game, as I’m sure some would hasten to point out. Instead, it’s a “debt game.” Similar names, but one only kills you indirectly. (And if you don’t think so, trying being poor for a few years.) I disclose this upfront because the truth of the matter is that I have no real idea what to make of Tomodachi Game. I certainly wasn’t impressed, but maybe that’s just because I don’t really know what I’m looking for.
The setup isn’t complicated, at least. Our core cast consists of five friends. I could introduce them, but the show pops these nice little on-screen intros up basically as soon as it starts, and since the effort was taken to subtitle them, why not just use those?
(Voiced by Tomohiro Oono, Satomi Amano, Daiki Hamano, and Yume Miyamoto, respectively, top to bottom.)
The only one not displayed here is Yuuichi Katagiri (Chiaki Kobayashi), our protagonist, who is portrayed as a hardworking but poor lad but who is probably hiding some skeletons in his closet. I base that guess on the fact that he shows up in the OP grinning like a maniac with money literally hanging out of his mouth.
In his guest verse on Nelly’s classic 2005 bling-rap track “Grillz,” rapper Big Gipp says he “has a bill in [his] mouth like [he’s] Hillary Rodham.” It’s such a viscerally unpleasant mental image that it’s bothered me for years, despite the fact that I love the song otherwise. And now I’m passing it on to you via an overlong image caption because the above picture kinda reminded me of it. Aren’t you glad you read this blog?
Our leads all attend the same high school, and the plot is kicked off when a collective funding pool for a class trip–two million Yen, all told, about $16,000 USD–goes missing, evidently stolen from Shiho’s locker. (You may ask why it was kept there to begin with and not, y’know, some kind of safe. I say just roll with it.)
Inevitably, there’s suspicion within the class, especially toward Shiho herself–she was the one holding on to it, after all–and Yuuichi, given his general poverty.
Eventually, a round of mysterious letters beckons our friend group to meet outside the school gates at 11PM. Inevitably, they are then knocked out, kidnapped, and hauled off to partake in some bizarre game for god-knows-what reason. No explanations are forthcoming this early on, which is fine. But it is kind of hilarious how abrupt all this feels. We’ve just met these characters, only just learned that they’re all friends, and now suddenly it’s time to do the thriller anime dance already. The extremely abrupt directing does the show no favors here. In general, there are tons of repeated cuts to the show’s “intermission card”, which is just the name of the series on a white background. You will get sick of this image fairly quickly, even with the couple variants the episode trots out.
When our heroes come to, they’re in an all-white, tiled room. I like to imagine this is somehow the same building that Cube 2: Hypercube takes place in. (Side note here; fuck that movie.) There, they’re introduced to the host of this “debt game,” one Manabu-kun (Minami Takayama), who takes the form of a small boy from an old children’s cartoon. He likes to, for instance, taunt Yuuichi about not trusting his friends. Sure, why not.
Manabu lays out the rules pretty plain; somebody among them owes a 2 million Yen debt. When they entered the game–which they allegedly all agreed to, even though none of them remember doing so–this debt was split up into 5 shares distributed equally to each of them. If they can win the game, their debt will be forgiven. If not, they’ll have to pay back whatever price of their share remains. (It will not shock you that we’re almost immediately introduced to rules that can change the amount of debt an individual person owes. Also; you’re allowed to tell people your debt, but not actually show them the electronic tag you’re forced to carry around which displays it numerically. Hmm.)
The first game–likely, one of many–that our cast have to play is a simple quiz involving a Kokkuri board. This scene forms the entire center of the episode. Thankfully; the core game as explained here is very straightforward. Our heroes need to answer some very basic yes/no questions by pushing a giant coin to one side or the other of the board (labeled Yes and No respectively.) But! The questions need to be answered with total consensus. If even one person disagrees with the others, the coin will favor the minority answer.
Even so, these are some seriously basic questions. We start with Japanese geography so simple even I knew the answers, and then move on to such brain-busters as “is one plus one two?” and “are there seven days in a week?” They only have to actually get one of these questions unanimously right to win the whole “debt game” outright, so this really seems like it should be easy.
Of course, Tomodachi Game would be totally pointless if our heroes just won outright this early. Thus, there’s the mandatory twist; someone pushes the coin toward “No” each time. Whether it’s the same person each time or not is left ambiguous, as is the question of why they’d want to do this in the first place. We get a hint, though; the fact that someone is clearly sabotaging things is enough to make Yuuichi consider doing the same. He doesn’t go through with it, but someone else pulls the coin toward “No” anyway. A pair of girls observing the game note that literally no team has ever gotten past this stage.
Thus betrayed, Yuuichi ends the episode on this note, before (presumably) sabotaging the last question himself. I must confess, this is one of the rare times an anime has ever put me at a total loss for words so early on.
Yes, that non-sequitur, delivered with total dead-seriousness, is how the episode ends. The closing shot is that ugly closeup of Yuuichi’s teeth.
I said this already, but death games–and their adjacent, related setups–are not my genre. I may simply be missing something here, but, if so, what? For all its bluster about how humans can’t endure hardship alone and the dichotomy between “money” versus “friends” being the most important thing in life. (Represented by flashbacks on Yuuichi’s part to conversations with people that appear to be his father and mother respectively.) The series feels much like any other adaption of a manga in this genre. Too edgy by half and ill-suited to the TV anime format.
I’m not comfortable simply writing the show off, mind you. Even the examples of this genre generally held up as all-time greats don’t make a ton of sense to me, and there are way too many things yet to be established for me to firmly claim this is just A Bad Show. But it’s definitely a series only for those of pretty specific tastes, and I don’t think I fall into that category this time.
The Takeaway: Genre fans should give it a look, but unless that describes you, you can safely skip this one.
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