The Spring 2024 Anime Preview Guide

Gods' Games We Play

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When the gods grow bored, they decide to spice up their eternal existence by challenging all takers in an ultimate battle of wits. Of course, these deities are capricious, unfair, and incomprehensible at the best of times, so winning is virtually impossible for a mere mortal. Even so, things are bound to get interesting when a former goddess and a genius human boy team up in a bid to win the game to end all games.

Gods' Games We Play is based on a light novel series written by Kei Sazane and illustrated by Toiro Tomose. The anime series is streaming on Crunchyroll on Mondays.

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James Beckett
Rating:

I will give Gods' Game We Play credit for one thing, which is that it had the courtesy to premiere with an English dub. This is a boon not because the dub is exceptional or anything—it's perfectly fine—but because God's Game We Play is an incredibly dull and mediocre production and the dub allowed me to salvage a few brain cells by getting through the premiere without the additional labor of reading the subtitles.

In truth, I have a hard time understanding how so many anime can still be screwing up one of the most fundamental laws of stories about characters playing a bunch of random parlor games: Absolutely nobody on this earth likes to have the rules of a game laboriously explained to them instead of just getting to play the game themselves. Aunty Donna did a whole skit on the concept! This is why the good anime about dicking around with silly card games, shows like Yu-Gi-Oh! and No Game, No Life, make sure to spice up the otherwise stilted proceedings with wild visuals, campy storytelling, and increasingly ludicrous stakes. Gods' Games We Play doesn't do any of these things, despite featuring a premise that is literally dependent on the involvement of gods and magic. Instead, our guy Fay and the goddess Leoleshea just stand around in tiny room and play the most “Killing time at grandma's house” games imaginable. It's nothing but a bunch of flat medium- and close-up shots of two disinteresting characters sitting at a disinteresting table talking ad nauseum about disinterring games.

Unfortunately, no amount of lifeless exposition concerning the supposed stakes of these games can make up for the complete lack of life in the story itself, and the presence of some floating playing cards don't make the proceedings feel magical in any way, no matter how much the show wants to trick you into thinking otherwise. This is one of those startlingly unremarkable filler shows that seemingly exists to fill a box on some production company's production schedule spreadsheet. I'm not convinced that even the people who made it will have any memory of its existence by the time the season is done.

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Richard Eisenbeis
Rating:

The first half of this episode is pretty rough. We're thrown into the deep end and hit with a barrage of proper nouns that we have no reference for. If this weren't confusing enough, we're given a world that seems to have both magic and modern cities (and it's not even clear whether this is supposed to be Earth or not). Then we see that people are playing twisted versions of childhood games (like Hide and Seek) against monsters in another world—and the games are being live streamed… It's a lot to take in.

Things do get a bit more grounded as the episode goes along—however, the show still asks you to suspend serious amounts of disbelief even as it explains itself and its world. (You're telling me humanity was able to rise to the level of a modern technological society despite only having access to 7% of the planet?)

Luckily, when we get to the “game-of-the-week” for the episode, things become rather enjoyable. The classic “Memory” card game is a fantastic choice—it's a game everyone already knows so the twists we get in this version are easily understood. Moreover, the twist on the rules gives our character both a credible reason for catching the viewers up on the situation and serves to show off the intelligence and skills of our protagonist pair.

But honestly, what impressed me the most about this episode? The fact that Fay, our hero and the “strongest gamer of all humanity” lost. There was no come-from-behind victory—no clever trap. He was simply outplayed by Leoleshea in the end. However, while he lost, that doesn't mean he appears weak. He knew from the start what the true point of the game was: gathering useful information. Who has the most card pairs at the end was meaningless—whoever gets to ask a completely open-ended question is the true winner. She simply found those cards first.

From No Game, No Life to Liar Liar, I've been known to watch a game-centric anime or two in my time. Will I continue watching this one in the long run? Probably not. But I'll give it a second episode just to be sure.

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Rebecca Silverman
Rating:

I hope you like characters casually sitting and talking to “themselves” as a way to throw an entire series' worth of lore at you, because that is definitely the way that Gods' Games We Play is operating in its inaugural episode. Forget “show not tell,” because this episode does not trust its viewers to be able to put the pieces together on their own, with the most egregious example being a section in the middle where Miranda just sits staring at her own screen nattering away about the entire deal with gods, apostles, and games, laying out how the whole thing works even though she's an administrator of some kind and absolutely knows all of this. There's no conceivable reason for her explanation other than clumsy info dumping for the viewers.

The games are, sadly, no different, although the stakes do look like they may change significantly in future episodes. This one, however, focuses on a variation of that old standby “Memory.” Fay, our preternaturally gifted protagonist, is brought to the goddess Leoleshea to alleviate her boredom (and to see if he's worthy of helping her, presumably), and then rapidly proves his worth by letting his amazing memorization skills slip. Not interested in cheating Leshea out of a good game, he agrees to her fancy moving variant of Memory, which the show acts like is fully new and not something I've seen in at least four different hidden object games – the cards move, making it harder to remember where they are. (At least, harder if you're not Fay!) But we're still treated to an exhaustive explanation of the way the game works and how awesome at it Fay is, because why trust your audience when you can beat them over the head with information?

I do like that the games are traditionally low-stakes card games and children's games. Too many people immediately think of video games when the word “game” is brought up, and while there are some video game aspects to this, it's also a good reminder that board, card, and outside games can be just as engrossing and tense. Sadly, that's the only thing this really has going for it, although I can answer Leshea's question about underwear: it's meant to protect your clothes from your body, stemming from the days when laundry was much more exhausting. But that that moment is the one I remember most clearly from this episode says that most of it left me uninvolved and disinterested. It may get better, but I don't feel like sticking around to find out.

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Nicholas Dupree
Rating:
There's a certain thrill to breaking down games of any kind. Whether it's analyzing the rules for loopholes, or just discerning the game-makers' intent through the stipulations, it's fun to see people really push at the boundaries of even simple things like card games. Series like Kakegurui can even turn into high-stakes detective mysteries, where character and audience try to figure out the trick behind a game before it's too late. That's obviously what this premiere is going for, but sadly it lacks any of the verve or wit that makes the best of this sub-genre work.

For one, it's really boring. Despite this episode's central game featuring a literal god on one side of the card table, there's not real stakes because the introductory game of Gussied-Up Old Maid is just here to deliver exposition. Our purportedly brilliant characters take great pains analyzing the rules so they can find out information both of them already know, but would be useful to the audience. They make attempts at witty banter that falls flat because neither character really has a personality outside of really liking games as a concept. The cards floating in the air instead of resting on a table can't disguise that 75% of this premiere is two characters standing still in a room and having really banal conversations. Even the few attempts at fanservice feel lifeless, included solely to keep the attention of people bored by basic game theory lectures.

It's just a dull watch, since there's nothing at stake, nothing interesting happening, and all the exposition feels like thin excuses for justifying our heroes playing a series of supernatural games that they will inevitably conquer by figuring out the trick behind it. That would be fine if our characters had any personality, but the meager attempts they make at rapport are equally weak. Raye likes games and is looking for a mysterious red-headed woman from his past. Leshea likes games and is a dragon goddess who doesn't wear underwear. They both have the same perspective on games and agree with everything the other says for 15 minutes. Woo. If you are really hard-up for this particular kind of story, you could certainly do worse (Anyone remember Liar Liar from last year?) but there's also far better versions with more interesting characters too.

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