The first episode of Game of Fraud premiered on Sunday night.
Until then, almost no one in the Japanese television industry had taken the series seriously. Of course, it was not unusual for writers from the animation world to try their hand at live-action dramas. Some had even achieved respectable results. The problem was that Sora's situation this season was far too unusual.
He was already overseeing Steins;Gate and AD at the same time. Under those circumstances, the fact that he had somehow found time to write the script for a drama called Game of Fraud made it seem impossible, at least in the eyes of many people, for the project to have any real quality. No matter how talented he was, his energy could not be limitless.
Information traveled quickly through Japan's television industry. Competition between stations never stopped employees from rival networks from gathering on weekends to drink, eat, and complain about their bosses. Because of that, many people knew the script had reached Kōchi Alliance TV barely a month before filming began, after Kantoku Ryo Yukishiro had practically gone to Sora begging for help.
And according to the rumors, Sora had spent less than two weeks creating the entire structure of the drama.
Because of that, the four major Tokyo networks simply did not treat it as a real threat.
But reality took a different turn.
After the premiere, the approval rating for the first episode of Game of Fraud exceeded the expectations of those networks by a wide margin.
The opening plot was not especially complex. Since it served as the introductory episode, there were no absurdly cerebral rules or traps that were too intricate to follow. The story followed Chizuru, an honest, upright, and somewhat naive young woman who returned home from work one day only to find ten million yen in cash inside her apartment.
Along with the money, there was a videotape.
In the recording, she was invited to participate in a game built around money and deception.
The rules were simple. She and another person dragged into the game would each receive ten million yen from the organization running it. Over the next thirty days, both participants had only one objective: deceive the other player and take their money, no matter what method they used.
The organization guaranteed that any act of fraud committed during the process would not be considered illegal. Money obtained through deception would become the player's profit. On the other hand, if someone was deceived, the amount lost would become a debt. And once that debt existed, the organization would collect it from the debtor by any means necessary. Even if they had to tear every last yen out of them, they would never leave the debt unpaid.
The rules were easy to understand.
For an ordinary person, being dragged into such a dangerous game should mean, first and foremost, trusting absolutely no one. There was even an obvious way to survive unharmed: do not give in to greed, protect your own money, and wait for the thirty days to end. That way, you would earn nothing, but you would lose nothing either. The game would end without any major consequences.
But the truth was something else entirely.
If a powerful force created an environment where deceiving someone carried no legal punishment; if every bit of money gained through fraud was treated as legitimate profit; if even the initial capital needed to carry out the deception - those ten million yen - had been provided by the organization itself, what would you do?
Would you remain a docile sheep, bound by the rules?
Or would you release the darkness hidden inside you and become a starving wolf, ready to betray anyone?
Chizuru, the heroine, was far too honest. And far too naive. That was why her first choice was to call the police.
That development caught many viewers by surprise.
But the police officers also belonged to the organization. They convinced her to take the money back home and told her she should only act if something truly happened.
With no other option, Chizuru decided to do nothing. She would not deceive anyone, but she would not allow herself to be deceived either.
Unfortunately, her opponent was the teacher she had respected most in high school.
With cruel ease, the man she trusted took all of her money from her. And Chizuru, on top of that, was actually grateful, believing her teacher had only done it to protect her from that illegal organization.
The first half of the episode showed exactly how Chizuru lost her ten million yen to the former teacher she admired so deeply.
The second half, however, marked the arrival of Shindō, the male lead - and the most shamelessly charismatic show-off in the entire work.
He was the one who helped Chizuru recover the "twenty million" from her teacher's hands.
The structure of the first episode was relatively simple. The rules, traps, and methods of deception were all presented clearly, without demanding excessive effort from the audience. It was not a story designed to make viewers feel lost from the very beginning. It worked as an entrance into the world of the series.
Even so, the moment that format appeared on television, it fiercely awakened the curiosity of Kōchi Alliance TV's viewers.
A teacher and student deceiving each other.
The heroine being tricked out of ten million yen, only to counterattack and recover twenty million.
And above all, the final twist.
For an entire month, the teacher had kept the twenty million yen inside his home. He slept hugging the money, with a knife nearby, terrified that someone might steal it. However, Shindō forged a letter from the game's organization and altered the scheduled time for collecting the funds, changing the visit from six in the evening to five.
Then he sent people pretending to be staff from the organization to collect the money. Taking advantage of the one-hour gap before the real collectors arrived, he had the fake employees take the cash first. In doing so, he deceived the teacher and successfully avenged Chizuru.
That kind of plot struck directly at the empty hearts of drama fans.
After so many sugary romances, forced love stories, domineering presidents falling for divorced women with three children, and wealthy heiresses willing to marry unemployed forty-year-old men with no home, no car, and no future, many Japanese viewers were already on the verge of collapse from the lack of anything genuinely interesting to watch.
At that moment, the arrival of Game of Fraud was like a heavenly meal offered to starving people.
And Shindō's character only strengthened that feeling.
Cold, calculating, intelligent, poisonous with his words, yet still someone with a clear moral line.
Within just a few days of its premiere, the name Game of Fraud began spreading among Japanese drama fans.
After all, works with fresh premises always had a natural advantage when it came to generating conversation.
The media specializing in television had been critical of Steins;Gate, one of Sora's works that season. The general consensus was that the anime was too difficult to understand, even boring at times, and below the standard expected from him.
As for AD, the reception was more positive, but still restrained. The anime had beautiful characters, appealing designs, an excellent soundtrack, and wonderfully crafted backgrounds. Even so, because it was a romance, its true performance would depend on how the story developed later. In the worst case, it might end up being just another popular anime without ever achieving an impact comparable to Re:Zero.
But when it came to Game of Fraud, the press did not hold back its praise.
In various reviews covering the winter season premieres, several outlets strongly recommended that Japanese drama fans follow the series.
And just like that, the first week of the winter season came to an end.
On Friday of the second week, the second episode of Steins;Gate aired smoothly, and the story continued laying its groundwork.
Suzuha Amane, the energetic part-time warrior girl.
Moeka Kiryū, the melancholic older woman.
Ruka Urushibara, the beautiful boy with a feminine appearance who liked wearing women's clothing and had feelings for the protagonist.
Faris, the wealthy young lady obsessed with otaku culture and two-dimensional fantasy.
All of these characters made their first appearances.
Anime adaptations from GAGA often had this kind of weakness: in their early episodes, they had to devote a large amount of time to introducing the cast. Steins;Gate was like that. AD was the same.
There was no way around it.
AD handled it slightly better because it was a romance. Even if the early story was not particularly striking, its cute heroines were enough to calm the impatience of anime fans.
With Steins;Gate, things were different.
In the second episode, besides spending a great deal of time introducing important characters, the work also unloaded a series of scientific concepts and background explanations. World line divergence, time machines, theories upon theories.
Many viewers finished the episode with their heads throbbing.
Only after all those explanations did the plot move forward to Rentarō's discovery.
The mysterious "John," who had been spreading those ideas online, no longer matched his memories.
In Rentarō's memory, John had appeared overseas ten years earlier, claiming to be a time traveler from the future. But when he searched again for information related to that man, the results showed something completely different: John had never gone ten years into the past.
If Rentarō's memory was not mistaken, and if John truly was a time traveler, then there was only one possibility.
The world line had changed.
The world had shifted away from the line where John traveled ten years into the past and Makise died. Now, it had become a line where John never made that trip, and Makise had not been murdered because a satellite had fallen during the conference.
On top of that, information appeared about an essential item for the story: an old computer that had been out of production for decades.
Then came a new change in the experiments conducted by the protagonist and his friends.
The strange banana placed inside the microwave vanished on its own.
Afterward, it returned to the table in the form of a gelatinous banana.
The second episode of Steins;Gate drifted further and further into a cerebral, cold, and increasingly difficult kind of science fiction.
As for the numbers, they perfectly reflected the market's reaction: the viewership dropped to 5.01%, and the rating fell to 8.6.
No matter how much Sora insisted that the anime needed time to warm up, fans' patience would not grow overnight.
On NatsuYume, opinions about the work began to split sharply.
"I don't get it. I don't get anything."
"It doesn't feel like hard sci-fi, but it doesn't feel like soft sci-fi either. Honestly, I'm losing patience."
"Did none of you find it interesting? I liked it quite a bit. Kantoku Sora is doing what he always does in the second episode: setting the stage. More and more information is showing up."
"People who don't understand it should think a little harder. It's obvious that the message sent by the protagonist, Rentarō, caused a change in the world line, turning the world where Makise died into a world where she survived. By the same logic, in this new line, John, who claimed to be a time traveler, also never used a time machine to go ten years into the past, which is why he remains active in the protagonist's present. As for the microwave banana, if it disappeared from inside the microwave and returned to the table in a gelatinous state, it's reasonable to assume the microwave can make the banana leap through time, moving it from the moment it entered the appliance back to the moment when it was still on the table. But why did the protagonist's phone call cause a change in the timeline? Why can the microwave trigger that time leap? And most importantly, if everyone's memories are reset when the world line shifts, why is the protagonist the only one who doesn't forget? Those are the biggest mysteries in the anime so far."
"…"
"…"
"Did we watch the same anime? How did I not notice any of that?"
"Exactly. I thought the second episode was pretty boring while watching it, but after reading that explanation, it suddenly sounds kind of interesting."
"World line shifts, memory resets, the time traveler John, and that old computer that appeared in the second episode… Kantoku Sora is setting up something huge. An opening with this many details and hints can only end in one of two ways: either the later story becomes so brilliant that everyone starts slamming the table in excitement, or it collapses completely and becomes a joke across the entire anime industry."
"I believe in Kantoku Sora's ability. An anime he invested more than ninety million yen into can't possibly be a joke."
"Hopefully. But this narrative style in Steins;Gate, along with such a slow-burning plot, probably means its final results won't be that good in terms of viewership."
"I agree. If Kantoku Sora can close every mystery introduced so far, this work could become an excellent, highly rated anime. But surpassing Re:Zero in viewership? That's practically impossible. Slow-burn works demand patience, and very few anime fans are willing to wait that long."
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