I was on the same boat watching it thinking how Kaiji did most of this stuff better. Gi Hun is a cool enough dude, I suppose. He clearly survives due to dumb luck and charisma more than smarts, but that's a way of doing things. The rest of the main cast are alright, and the very tiny character development Sae Byok had was cute and all, but Kaiji built a much more interesting narrative with a lot less.
The games absolutely matter, I feel. You're betting your life on something so it instantly becomes an emotional rollercoaster. I did dislike how they played Even or Odd with marbles, and I disliked that episode mostly on the grounds that the very obvious incoming twist had me screaming at my screen like old terror movies sometimes did. The series had a great rollercoaster thing going on with Red Light Green Light and Tug of War. Honeycomb felt somewhat tense, but not all that exciting compared to the rest of games. The bridge is just Steel Beam Crossing from Kaiji but -meh-. It just feels super weird that nobody tried to balance and kick out the next platform, or balance on the beams across, and how everyone just jumped with all they had to the next platform. So many ways to game the system and they tried none of them. Last game was an alright excuse for an all out brawl, and the character development and resolution ended up making a bad premise pretty intetesting.
In the end Kaiji and Squid Game aren't trying to do the same thing at all, Squid Game is clearly more about the characters and social commentary than finding a way to rig the odds in your favour, but I just found Kaiji's premise of bet your life, and do anything to win much more enticing than bet your life yet stick honorably to the rules and conventions even if it means losing it. Even though there was an obsession with fairness on the part of the organizers, it seems like they're also totally cool with people skirting the rules to a crazy extent, which just makes them seem schizophrenic. Byeong Gi the doctor wasn't any worse than Deok Su but he got aced pretty quickly. Yet when Deok Su flat out refuses to play, which is against the core rules of the game, absolutely nothing happens until some other participant takes matters into her own hands.
After everything, the social commentary was good but a little weak. From what I think, sadly, most of the people betting their pretty much forfeit to debt lives would be actually fucking thankful to even have the chance or a swift death to deliver them from the pain, not really raging against their aristos masters. Sick as that would be. It was really nice to see that they did revolt, realism be damned.
Season 1's a good watch all in all. I don't think this show has a lot more stories left to tell unless they just focus on an entirely new group of people per season, and even then it'd be rough if it all must be Korean children's games. But yeah, even though it loses steam in the end, like other people have said, it's a good series.
