Not Recommended
*spoilers* Being a complete, soul-crushing waste of time isn’t exactly a new and exciting development as far as bad anime is concerned, but what’s so infuriating about this show in particular is how it serves as perhaps the single most unholy combination of pointlessness and tediousness that has ever existed in television. The whole show is a giant torture chamber where your brain is numbed into submission, tasked with juggling endless exposition dumps, convoluted rule sets, and seemingly random plot twists, only to be told, in fact, everything you just mulled over was irrelevant, because God Yuichi is here to retroactively change the implications of everyscene which just flickered before your dry, reddish eyes. And who is God Yuichi, you ask? Well, strap in motherfuckers, because every meaningless conflict in this string of meaningless conflicts can all be traced directly back to the characters, who, I think it goes without saying, are all magnificently well-written.
Instead of taking the time to explain the Tomodachi Game in detail, I should probably just explain the fact that “tomodachi” is the Japanese word for “squid,” so the English title of “Friends Game” is actually quite deceptive. I know Japanese is kind of a confusing language to wrap your head around sometimes, but I think knowing the real title is “Squid Game” should get everyone on the same page. Anyway, the show begins with all the characters apparently suffering acute brain damage. God Yuichi and his friends, Tsundere Shiho, Glasses Tenji, Bleached Hair Shibe, and Yanderedere Kokorogi, are kidnapped and told they were all enlisted to play the game against their will when one of them secretly went behind everyone else’s back and applied to play because they were in serious debt. The idea is everyone takes on an equal share of the debt and plays through each round with the goal of working together to carry the load and incrementally decrease everyone’s debt at the same time, therefore supporting each other and ensuring everyone leaves with the group’s collective debt having been cleared (squids are known for being good friends fyi, very symbolic, very deep, yes, yes). However, if their bonds aren’t as deep or meaningful as they once thought, then betrayal and competition could lead to infighting that turns the Squid Game into a fierce contest wherein each player tries to saddle the others with their own debt to make sure they alone leave unscathed. The actual details of each game bounce between being utterly vague and misleading, to wildly meticulous and way too detailed for anyone to reasonably keep track of, but to even reach the games, the characters have to first consent to play. After all, whether they forgive them or not, they now know there’s a traitor among them, and they have to come to terms with that…and they do. Immediately. And the games begin.
By being so naive as to instantly forgive the traitor’s betrayal and undertake the games despite the doubts anyone with two brain cells would be rubbing together right about now, the group has essentially just confirmed there is no point in playing the game. They could just leave and take on the debt willingly to help their friend in need. Hell, the traitor could’ve just come out right then, apologized, and sincerely asked for financial support without having to go through this stressful and potentially dangerous game. Maybe if the kidnapper criminal showrunners are nice enough, they won’t even harvest the group’s organs or traffic them into sex slavery through some Laotian black market! But the anime needs to happen, so their intelligence briefly hangs itself and they decide to go forth. The characters are established as capable of being morons whenever the story demands it, and combined with the awfully constructed premises from which the games operate, the show is just hard to take seriously in general. Explaining the context for further lapses of intelligence would take forever, but I assure you they exist. By the way, this review was written as a team effort between two people. One of them is fluent in Japanese, and the other is not. In other news, both of them thought all the gameshow rule sets were either completely fucking retarded or totally impenetrable and way—WAY overly verbose. What’s worse is the characterization is effectively nonexistent, and you very quickly get the feeling that when I gave you that little factoid about squids being friendly creatures, I might’ve actually been full of shit. The introduction of each character is literally an on-screen text box that disappears after barely one second has time to pass, and while the thoughtlessness of this presentation speaks for itself, reading the text and actually trying to see these characters as people, let alone as friends, is completely disastrous.
Riveting personality traits such as, “seems to like anime and stuff,” are detailed within. I mean, holy fucking seriously?!?! There’s no way this is supposed to be from God Yuichi’s perspective, right? Was this a description of his best friend, or one-third of the nation of Japan?! Not only are these depictions inane, but they’re simply unnecessary, because there are absolutely ZERO relevant personality traits you need to know about any character to actually watch the show. These people are not friends nor are they people; they’re stock character templates whose job is to stand around passively while getting used or manipulated by God Yuichi without the slightest hint of having any agency of their own, completely sapping the conflicts of any excitement or worthwhile drama, all the while only committing to expressing themselves in the most generic mannerisms that their archetypes allow. I suppose the point is to make God Yuichi look cool so the viewers can use the series as some sort of sadistic self-insert power fantasy to get off on the idea of themselves being this much of an edgelord (please, get real, no one is as godly as God Yuichi), but this has the same effect as seeing LeBron James dunking on blind, deaf, disabled, amputee toddlers. Ultimately, these conflicts are meaningless because everyone just moves right onto the next equally tedious and overblown stage of the Squid Game while effectively nothing has changed or evolved in any real or emotional terms, and this is all true even despite the biggest puff of smoke the series insists on blowing up its own ass: the plot twists. The so-called plot twists in this show are completely empty and have no real bearing on the story in the same way that the conflict has no real bearing on the plot, and some of them—many of them, in fact—are invalidated within minutes. They exist purely for characters to have an excuse to make an edgy face.
Things will be moving toward the single OBVIOUS direction, someone will randomly pop in with some utter buffoon shit which, in the mind of any reasonable fucking person on the planet, would only make themselves seem more suspicious than the person they’re accusing, but everyone will just be like, “OMG that’s so smart! I didn’t even think of it like that! So let’s all adopt that line of thinking now and go the complete opposite direction so the contrivance that is this stupid fucking game can keep being turned into a shitty anime!” It’s SO all over the place with who is and isn’t playing 4D chess! In one set-up, one character will be a smirking, Machiavellian edgelord engineering the psychology of everyone around them, and in the next, it’s someone completely different. Whoever needs to be the devil on the shoulder of whichever character can successfully become so instantly, and if the person they need to manipulate actually had their wits about them in previous scenes, their wits will very quickly be not-so-about them, and they’ll prance blindly into whatever trap they need to prance into to keep the contrivance train rolling. The resulting mess is too frustrating for words, and while the characters are all horribly written, I guess the show succeeded in making you emotionally engage with them anyway, because their braindead decision-making will—I promise—make you want to tear your Goddamn eyes out. Whether a character is saying something totally daft and unreasonable while everyone else is treating them like the prophet, or for no reason refusing to say the ONE expectable and reasonable thing any real human being would say in their situation while everyone else is acting like their behavior is a legitimate smoking gun, the level of contrivance required for conflict makes every character feel downright detached and confusing whenever you actually try putting yourself in their shoes.
But forget about our cast of miserable non-characters for just a minute and let it sink in how stupid this is purely from a plot perspective. For example, in one episode they’re playing a game where they get to anonymously expose awful things about one another, and the live audience moves each of them closer toward final condemnation by voting for who they hate as they grow to dislike each of the characters based on what’s revealed about them. At one point, they enter a gambit where one character is presented with an opportunity to nominate another character to have something horrendous revealed about them by the showrunners. In other words, it’s not just some gossip being revealed by another character, but rather a piece of damning information which the organizers of the Tomodachi Game themselves have privately investigated with whatever resources they have at their disposal, implying, “Your friends may know some dirty shit about you, but we know EVERYTHING about you, including your deepest, darkest, most well-kept secrets.” Immediately after this gambit is resolved, someone gives a fake piece of information about the person who was JUST EXPOSED in the gambit, that person insists the information is false, and Manabu, the hideous CG Front Man, says, “lol how do we know that’s fake information? Prove it, retard.” AS IF HE DIDN’T JUST IMPLY THE PREVIOUS GAMBIT WOULD’VE ALREADY REVEALED HIS DARKEST SECRET! Every reveal is completely dependent on wherever God Yuichi is in whatever master plan he happens to be engaged in at any given moment, and if that means even the almightily showrunners themselves have to look surprised or incompetent, then so be it. Every character is made to be fooled, every rule is made to be broken, and everything is made to bend to God Yuichi’s sadistic, malicious will. There can only be one true edgelord to rule them all.
Then there’s the themes, which are not only pathetic, but also, perhaps unintentionally, weird and off-putting. Occasionally, one of the showrunners pretentiously applies a generic observation of human behavior onto some event which is only broadly relevant. Anyone who’s gone outdoors for three seconds of their fucking life and has interacted with humans for at least one of those seconds could conjure up similar commentary. Most of the time the characters being commented on are forced into the scenario anyway, and that leads into a more subtle issue with the show—and that’s how dishonest it is. The big, prominent theme is supposed to be choosing between friends or money, and the fact each friend was willing to go into crippling debt to help their friend who just betrayed them should be enough to prove where their loyalties lie. Yet no one ever mentions how this is a misrepresentation of the actual choice being presented, because not being in debt isn’t really the same thing as winning money. These pathetic attempts at theming are rather obvious if you ask me, but the weird and off-putting themes are less so. As discussed, real examinations of friendship don’t matter. But if that’s the case, then what drives conflict? You guessed it—classic teen melodrama. It turns out both girls like God Yuichi, and both of the other guys like one of the girls, so no one will ever trust one another or be truly in the same boat, and it has nothing to do with any wannabe-deep statements about the nature of greed or the social science of monetary corruption and, instead, everything to do with who wants to fuck who. Even when the first arc ends and our group of established “friends” gets replaced by a new shallow cast of characters to populate the following arc, the conflict STILL continues to erupt and revolve around inserting women into men’s relationships to sow the seeds of jealousy and resentment.
But why is this relevant to weird and off-putting themes? Well, for the same reason it was odd to see the aforementioned live audience vote Tsundere Shiho as being “100% unforgivable” after it was revealed she liked God Yuichi after having dated Glasses Tenji in the past. Glasses Tenji himself (who was the original traitor by the way) explains how he entered everyone into the Squid Game for the purpose of destroying the organization behind the games, and to potentially expose Tsundere Shiho for being connected to them. Why entering the games would lead to either of those things is completely lost on me, but this seems totally reasonable to Glasses Tenji. However, the real can of worms we’re cracking open here is why he suspects her. He suspects her because she “destroyed” his friendship between him and his old BFFs by seducing them and causing them to become jealous of one another…but all she did, literally, was say “hi” one time. If you don’t see where this is going, let’s just say that in this show, the hour hand, the minute hand, and the second hand are always pointed squarely on incel o’clock. Casual, throwaway lines not relevant to the plot include:
“She sold her body to adult men? For someone who isn’t a virgin, you sure seem innocent.”
“I guess this guy’s experience with women has made him really cautious around them.”
“All women are capable of putting on an act to get what they want.”
I could go on, but you get the point. The amount of subliminal and not-so-subliminal women hating in this show is truly epic, based, and redpilled. Needless to say, Tomodachi Game is a truly brilliant anime that always stays on message.
These degenerate themes and farcical friendships reach their meager peak during the end of the first arc. After God Yuichi lays out the oh-so ingenious manner in which he enacted his master plan to oust Glasses Tenji as the traitor, Glasses Tenji calls him out, saying he couldn’t have possibly been sure of his conclusion with the logic he presented, and God Yuichi concedes. “Indeed,” he says, “but the real Tomodachi Game was the friends we made along the way, old buddy. I knew you were the traitor simply because we’re friends, and I knew something was off as soon as the game began.” In any well-written anime, this would’ve been a really powerful and emotional moment that could’ve convincingly and empathetically offered Glasses Tenji an off-ramp to redemption and reintegration into the friend group, but in this show, it just makes you roll your fucking eyes, because the whole problem with it in the first place is that these peoples’ “friendship” doesn’t exist. The show tells us they’re friends, but we never got to actually see them being friends. We never got to know any of them, and their—I hesitate to use the word—personalities don’t play off each other with any more chemistry than you’d expect considering the archetypes they embody. They’re just stock character templates with voice actors and actresses transforming them into cardboard cutouts that just happen to have the ability to speak.
Actually, wrong metaphor there, because cardboard cutouts wouldn’t be off-model nearly as much as these fucking people, and by “people,” I mean crimes against art, and by “art,” I mean shit, and by “shit,” I mean this fucking show. Hopefully you weren’t expecting this show to be well-produced or technically competent, because it isn’t. You’ll probably get used to the hideousness of the visuals just by virtue of how easily your eyes will glaze over, but they still occasionally devolve from unengaging to completely and totally embarrassing, perhaps just to be honest and remind you of the fact you’re watching trash. Every instance of visual flair comes from zooming in on someone's face while they give their biggest, baddest edgelord smile, then applying some digital effect. The incongruity between the staleness of the show and the ridiculously overblown edginess makes for some great laughs, honestly. Of course, I would be remiss if I didn’t give Manabu, the useless CG Front Man accompanying the characters, the resounding “fuck you” he deserves. He doesn’t just settle for being the most intrusive piece of CG my eyes have suffered through in a long time, but he also goes the extra mile with shameless animation errors, like losing his shadow during episode two (11:07) or his saber handguard being attached the wrong way during the third game. Episode three was the first time the show fully gave up and started rereading its exposition dumps because it knows half the audience forgot the rules from the previous episode, and I very quickly began contemplating the benefits and drawbacks of buying a gun and painting my walls with bubblegum. There is truly no reason to watch Tomodachi Game, something that clearly exists only to milk money from sales and capitalize on the resurgence of the death game market. Even if you can tolerate its mountain of sins, your kindness won’t stop it from burning in hell.
If you find yourself disappointed and looking for a more exciting and engaging thriller to watch, I would recommend flipping a coin to guess tomorrow’s weather. Compared to the paradox of maddening frustration and excruciating boredom that is Tomodachi Game, the anticipation of that 50/50 might be enough to literally fucking kill you.
Thank you for reading. (This review was proofread and revised by SingleH.)
