I was not impressed by Squid Game. With all due respect to the fans of Alice in Borderland, though, I have to say that for me this series is even worse than the South Korean one.

The first four episodes were great, almost on the same level as Squid Game in terms of gore and intensity, and the characters were just as interesting. I found the main character, Arisu, to be more likeable than his Korean counterpart. He is a good, principled, and smart person, so I cared about him and wanted to know if he would survive. Furthermore, the games seemed to me to be more clever than the ones in Squid Game.

Then, in episode five, the story started going downhill at a rapid pace. I felt like I was suddenly watching a different series. What should have been a survival story began to resemble a badly written mafia movie. Instead of games, I was fed tragic backstories and unnecessarily dramatic dialogues, mostly from characters whom I was given no reason to sympathize with. If the scriptwriters thought that I would feel sorry for a crazy mass murderer who tried to rape a woman because he was bullied at school, they thought wrong. They should have at least put some effort into making those tragic backstories less clichéd. At some point, I started skipping most scenes.

Aside from Arisu, the other character who kept me watching through these absurd episodes was Chishiya. Morally gray, charismatic, and smart, he was intriguing. The fact that the scriptwriters did not assign him a tragic backstory made him even more appealing. Murakami Nijiro, who plays him, is a great actor. He nails the Cheshire Cat smirk.

The last episode made a relatively successful attempt to improve the story and reach the quality of the initial episodes, but the plot twist in the end was neither emotionally devastating nor particularly surprising.
What made the final plot twist in Squid Game so memorable for me was that the character who turned out to be evil had convinced me that he was harmless and good, and I had come to care about him. I felt betrayed, and I had missed the clues, which had been in front of me the whole time, partially because I did not want to believe that this character was capable of such evil.
Things were not so with this series. The character who was revealed to be the mastermind behind the games had almost no screen time, so I did not care about them any more than about the extras. There were not any hidden clues that would have pointed to them. At the same time, though, every time this character was shown they looked confident and slightly unhinged. It was not difficult to figure out that they were plotting something.

Overall, I think that fans of Squid Game might not enjoy its Japanese predecessor that much. The production team of Squid Game learned from the mistakes of this series and delivered a story that, while flawed, is more consistent and thrilling than this one.