Tomodachi Game

TV (12 eps)
3.963 out of 5 from 5,171 votes
Rank #1,173

High school student Katagiri Yuichi, who values friendship above all else, enjoys a fulfilling life with his close friends Sawagiri Shiho, Mikasa Tenji, Shibe Makoto, and Kokorogi Yutori. However, after a particular incident, they're dragged into a debt repayment game. The only way to beat the "Tomodachi Game" is to not doubt their friends. Bound together by solid friendships, the game should've been easy, but– The hugely popular comic that sold over two million copies is finally becoming an anime! Will they trust or betray their precious friends? The true nature of humanity is exposed in the ultimate psychological game!

Source: Crunchyroll

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Reviews

daisy113
5

I fondly refer to this one as "Discount Squid Games, the anime." This title pulls in concepts of popular high-stakes games psycological thrillers with some skill, but completely lacks any wow factors that made popular titles like Squid Games good. The rules of each game are written to be extra convoluted (read, several rules, up to about 10 per game) so even if you're pretty smart you can't memorize the rules immediately. Which is just convoluted enough that the MC magically finds a loophole he can use to manipulate people, and then we find out he's maybe not an amazing person, which, duh. The loopholes and solutions used are convoluted enough that they wrote in game observers specifically to reiterate why the solution was so amazing and how he pulled it off, so it's no fun trying to guess the solution, which takes a lot of the fun out of watching. Then by the time anything with serious repurcussions happens, it's not shocking, it's just like, yup this seems like a logical thing that would happen now. None of the side characters seem to have any redeeming qualities when playing the games, and we never get a lot of context. One is a complete follower of the MC because they get targeted by the betrayer, another is incapable of making a decision, another tries to solve every problem with their daddy's money, another incites fights within the group to make everything harder. Seriously, all of them are written to be as useless as possible to be a manipulation point for the MC. Any plot around having a betrayer in the friend group becomes a big nothing as far as plot goes. Obvious spoiler, the betrayer does get found out by the MC. Once identified, the betrayer moves on to the next round with the MC and effectively serves a plot point to drop less interesting and frankly not well fleshed out characters. All in all, outside of the MC the characters are poorly written and have zero depth. I knew when paragraph-long bios were part of introductions to each character in episode 1 that it would be bad, but geez. The most you learn about any side character is in those paragraph long-bios flashed for 0.2 seconds when they are first introduced, and half of them have no screen time for half of the anime. 12 episodes in, I have no idea why this group of people call themselves friends.  The one redeeming quality of this title is that they know how to use a good cliffhanger. I got baited by the cliffhangers and kept watching hoping it would get better. It didn't.

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