This is a Netflix exclusive so of course it was featured in my region very prominently. I don't know if that will be the case everywhere in the world because regions tend to be very different in their offerings and Asian films and shows might only be "featured" if you tend to watch that sort of things so you may have to dig for it a bit.
As always I have tried to keep this as spoiler-free as possible, but if you are super-sensitive about that sort of thing just know that I find this show to be worth watching as long as you can endure the fact that you have to read the subtitles (assuming you aren't fluent in Japanese.)
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So I haven't finished the entire first (and only) season yet, but in the first 3 (of 8) episodes that I have seen it is quickly established what the overall story is and by the end of the very first episode it becomes evident what all of the episodes are going to be like.
We are introduced at the very start to a slacker of a teenager / young adult who has a massive collection of video games in his room as he is playing some sort of first person shooter whilst getting very sweaty doing so.
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After he loses in a game we see that he is interrupted by his brother and father who are disappointed in him because he didn't turn up for a hard-fought job interview they had arranged for him. We also find out that he is a college dropout and generally nobody expects anything of him. He meets up with his 2 best friends and they act silly and have a good time regardless.
Then some weird stuff happens and they are somehow transported through some sort of unseen portal that results in them being in a completely abandoned downtown Tokyo.
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They aren't there for very long before we are made to know that this Tokyo replica is actually a giant coliseum of sorts where live action "games" are taking place only when you lose, you lose your life for real with no reset button.
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The games themselves end up being the real star of each episode and I am not going to spoil what any of those are. However, the 3 boys end up realizing very quickly that there are other people in this game world as well and sometimes the games create a situation where the games become PvP instead of PvE or puzzle solving.
So in that regard this show is a bit like if you mixed Hunger Games and Saw into a blender and added a layer of lack of understanding as to why whoever is doing these games is bothering to do so.
The show is based on manga books and was later made into an animated series, both of which were very popular in Japan and other parts of Asia. As far as I know, this is the first time they have made much of an attempt to attract an international audience for the franchise.
Should I watch it?
Well I can't speak about the overall story just yet because I am only 3 episodes in but I can say from my own perspective that it is very rare that I will watch 3, 45-minute episodes of something in a row without taking my eyes off the screen or getting bored and then changing over to something else. I was able to do this easily with Alice in Borderland and am looking forward to watching more episodes today. You do have to endure reading the subtitles but do yourself a favor and do not turn on the overdubbing in English because it, like any other overdubbing I have ever seen, is just terrible.
