Hi, I’m just a Kdrama addict trying out a Japanese drama for the first time in my life after seeing this one advertised everywhere. Suffice it to say, I probably won’t be coming back, and here’s why. Since the very beginning, I felt no real connection with any of the characters. The only character I even remotely found myself liking was the FL and that was only because I thought her mountain climbing hobby was pretty dope. Still, I wouldn’t have minded if she died in this drama. The directors and writers tried to remedy this by working in some flashback scenes for individual characters, but at that point in the drama I just wanted to see how the final conflict would be resolved, not watch several minutes of an irrelevant side character’s sob story. It felt really forced and honestly ruined the flow of the action for me. After going from a pretty conservative style to korean dramas, I was entirely baffled by the amount of sex and nudity in this drama. To be honest, I rarely watch American TV, especially TV that is rated M or R, so seeing this in a Japanese thriller felt really out of place and reminded me of the days where I would watch anime that was disgustingly saturated in fanservice. While I’m on this topic, I have to say that the rape scene in the latter half of the drama felt absolutely unnecessary and completely uncalled for. It gave me a foul feeling because of the way that it was portrayed and the fact the FL quickly bounced back from the experience as if being almost raped was completely normal. Hell, even the rapist himself was justifying his act as “normal human behavior.” It disgusted me beyond belief. With that said, I did enjoy the premise of the drama. While it’s not original by any means, I’m a sucker for sadism and bloodshed (I watched too much TWD in my day), so this drama was mostly meant to be a mindless thriller that I can watch after a long day. It didn’t require much thinking on my part, which I appreciated, and it was quite nice to just watch people kill each other in a deadly arena, as sick as that sounds. My final words are: don’t expect much in the way of depth or character development from this because you won’t get it. Despite that, I say watch it for the cinematics and the awfully entertaining death scenes. This might not be for everyone though ;).