Like Squid Game, Only With Samurai

With its second season getting over 126 million views in just 11 days, South Korea’s deadly survival drama Squid Game is an undeniable global hit. Previously, though, it was Japan that had a virtual monopoly on that genre. No surprise then that the birthplace of Battle Royale is serious about regaining the crown for shows about “a bunch of people competing in deadly contests.”

Japan’s latest attempt, released on Netflix on November 13, is Last Samurai Standing, which, instead of trying to improve on the winning formula of Squid Game, basically transplants its premise to 19th century Japan. How did that work out? Let’s find out.

A Samurai Version of Squid Game

In the early years of the Meiji period, after feudalism and the samurai class were abolished, many ex-warriors were struggling to survive in the modern world that discarded them after years of loyal service. In real life, this was one of the catalysts for the Satsuma Rebellion, the Tom Cruise-less last stand of the samurai.

In the Netflix show, however, it instead leads to a mysterious mastermind gathering disaffected fighters from all over Japan and pitting them against each other in a deadly contest of martial skills.

A few things place Last Samurai Standing right alongside Squid Game, looking over its shoulders and copying its homework. For one, there’s money involved: ¥100,000 to the winner of the “Kodoku” game. By a very rough estimate, that’s about $1.5 million in modern money.

Also, there are rich elites sipping expensive drinks, betting and watching smugly as snipers kill contestants who break the rules. For instance, everyone gets a wooden name tag, each tag is worth one point, and if you lose the tag for more than 10 seconds, your brain or heart get lethal lead poisoning.

Also, to win the game, you must travel from Kyoto to Tokyo via checkpoints that are only accessible with extra points. You can probably guess how the contestants are supposed to earn them. By this point, the military snipers might as well wear weird masks because there’s no use denying the Squid Game inspiration.

Embracing the Spectacle

If you told Last Samurai Standing that it’s a rip-off of Squid Game, it would tell you to be quiet and focus on the amazing action (more on that in a moment). If you pointed out that the series seems, somehow, even less historically accurate than The Last Samurai, it would tell you to stop talking and watch a legendary swordmaster go through 10 enemies like a knife through butter.

There is a real sense of self-awareness about Last Samurai Standing. It seems to know perfectly well that it’s historically inaccurate and riddled with plot holes, but instead of trying desperately to fix that, it embraces the faults of the source material and patches over the more visible cracks with some of the best TV action you have ever seen.

The insane fight scenes — many of them continuous shots — are clearly inspired by anime. The characters move with incredible speed without looking as if the footage was sped-up, which is quite the feat. The high-octane action is complemented with choice use of gore, giving viewers a gloriously brutal display of gratuitous violence, and not just with swords.

Last Samurai Standing leans heavily into the anime-esque nature of its action and peppers the primarily-samurai contestants of Kodoku with more varied Japanese warriors, from ninjas to archers, warrior monks with naginata glaives, and even a guy who dresses like a mountain troll and wields an actual zanbato “horse-slaying sword.” That’s just super fun.

More Than a Turn Your Brain Off Show

For all its flaws and the fact it clearly spent most of its budget on the action, Last Samurai Standing does have a lot of touching and genuinely emotional moments. Each primary cast member gets a tragic backstory that reveals the lives of people from all walks of life in early-modern Japan.

You have previously high-ranking samurai reduced to poverty due to modernization, forced to watch as their clan’s storied history is brought to an unceremonious end under their watch because someone somewhere signed a piece of paper.

There are also desperate shrine maidens who watch over children sick with cholera, lamenting that they can only offer them prayers that don’t seem to work. You have people with psyches shredded by war trying to justify picking up the sword again with all the good they’ll be able to do with the prize money. There is just so much human drama packed into the six episodes of the series, and none of it ever feels shoehorned or insincere.

Last Samurai Standing definitely lures you in with cartoonish yet gory action and its colorful characters, but it keeps you watching because there is always something more to each episode. Sometimes it’s a heart-wrenching character backstory. Other times, it’s just a feeling that the people behind Last Samurai Standing had a blast working on it, and that love for a project is both palpable and infectious.

By the end of the first episode, you find yourself totally onboard this nonsensical festival of violence, having buckets of fun and not even thinking about Squid Game.