Alternative title(s): TASUKETSU -Fate of the Majority-
Manga Adaptation by Satelight
Streaming on Crunchyroll

Premise

Saneatsu is a painfully ordinary high school student when one day he’s roped unwillingly into a life-or-death game which has already killed more than half of the population of Tokyo. The survivors must continue to answer questions set for them by a mysterious and seemingly all-powerful ‘Emperor’.

Zigg’s verdict: Coin Flip

Tasuketsu is, fittingly, something of a binary show. While the premise of the ‘death game’ is a well-worn cliche in multiple forms of media at this point, I think it still has potential if done correctly, and Tasuketsu has some stuff going for it in that regard. The sheer scale of the incident, as well as how distant and oblique the information we’re given about it is, all help in conveying a sense of intense intrigue and a threatening mood. The most important thing to do in a mystery story is to make that mystery compelling and something the audience want to see investigated, so they’re off to a good start on that front.

Unfortunately, the show is less good at making us invested in our protagonists. My immediate impression of Saneatsu and the people surrounding him is bland, boring and largely cliched. They’re not helped by some extremely leaden dialogue and related clumsy, on-the-nose exposition which kind of just makes you feel they’re running through all the genre cliches. Sudo’s rampage with a gun, for example, comes out of almost nowhere, opens a bunch of plot holes, and seems crowbarred in purely to fulfill the classic ‘one member of the team was a secret psycho!’ trope.

There’s also the unavoidable fact that this show looks bad. Even by the standards of anime, a medium which has always emphasised a limited amount of animation, there’s an almost shocking lack of movement or motion to a lot of these scenes – Sano being kicked in the groin and just absolutely not reacting in any way is an especially notable example. The character design and general visual aesthetic is also very ‘early 2000s’, by which I mean flat and simplistic. It occasionally gives a pleasant retro twinge to affairs, but more often it’s just plain and ugly.

Despite all that, I’m probably going to give Tasuketsu another episode. I’m just a sucker for a good puzzle box show I guess, and it’s not like this season is overflowing with quality alternatives. That said, I can only recommend this in the most tentative way, at least for now.