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Kpopalypse reviewed Squid Game 2 earlier this year, and since then, people have been keen to read about how I feel regarding Squid Game 3. Read on for all the trufax!
Kpopalypse.com generally does not investigate Korean TV shows, but I didn’t have much of a choice with Squid Game 2, because of the presence of not one but four k-pop people in it: T.O.P (ex-BigBang), Jo Yuri (ex-IZ*ONE, now solo artist), Im Siwan (ex-ZE:A) and Yang Donggeun (rapper YDG). I’d already seen the first series, which I quite enjoyed, so of course I had to check out the sequels. So let’s take a look at the final episodes of Squid Game to see how they compare!
Released: 2025
Running time: 6 x 50 minutes (approx)
So just as a warning this review is necessarily going to contain a few spoilers, as it’s hard to even discuss Squid Game 3 without talking about events in the previous series, mind you a lot of what goes on is… hey wait, that’s not the right image, hang on… just let me find the correct artwork… ah, here it is:
Released: 2025
Running time: 6 x 50 minutes (approx)
Okay, sorry about that. I’m not sure what happened there. No, I’m really sorry. Like, really really sorry. Anyway like I was saying, there’ll be lots of spoilers in this review and it really can’t be helped so if you just want to know if you should watch the damn thing because you liked the first two seasons, then yes, you probably should. I mean, you won’t be blown away by the third season and it’s certainly far from great, but at its worst it’s not any worse than the stupid gunfight at the end of the second season so if you sat through that crap you might as well sit through this too just to wrap it up. So there’s my short-ass review. If you haven’t seen it yet and were thinking about it, you can now stop reading this and go watch it and then come back. If you’re reading from here onward I’ll assume that you have already seen it or at least know what happens and don’t mind having some details spoilered, although I won’t give away everything, but certainly a great deal, otherwise this review will just be “things happen, people die, squids were gamed”. So how did they do with the series this time? Should you watch this?
Plot synopsis: Our story picks up from about halfway through the second series of games, where there was a big armed insurrection that died in the ass for incredibly stupid reasons because characters in this series can’t make logical decisions for some reason. Player 456 Seong Gihun (Lee Jungjae) is especially traumatised as his attempt to overthrow the game got a bunch of people killed, and spends most of this third series being basically quietly unhinged. Everyone else gets back to the business of playing the games and finding ways to try and not die. Meanwhile, there’s two other plot arcs, the one of Soldier 11 (Park Gyuyoung, by far the most charismatic character in this) trying to do… something or other, and detective Hwang Junho (Wi Jahoon) searching for the island with his team so he can bust the whole operation, or whatever.
Of course in between there’s lots of pointless voting on if the games will continue or not. At one stage one of the VIPs says something like “the voting is more interesting than the games themselves” but it really isn’t, especially because since most of the people who were against the games died in the insurrection it’s already obvious which way the voting is going to go each time these scenes come up, it’s even obvious to the characters this time, so if they think it’s a pointless chore, you can bet that you also will. Fortunately as there’s less players overall these scenes don’t drag on for quite as annoyingly long as they did in the second season. Oh, and the VIPs are back to watch the final games in person, although it’s a different group of VIPs to last time, and their acting is unbelievably bad, somehow even worse than the VIPs in the first series. There’s probably significantly better acting in all those “Squirt Game” films.
Appeal to average TV watchers: While I tried to avoid reading reviews to avoid spoilers, I did notice that Squid Game 3 did kind of fizzle out a bit compared to previous episodes just in terms of public reception, and the critical reception wasn’t all that great either. I guess it’s no longer a new, novel or shocking concept, everyone’s probably just a little bit over it at this point, and the dip in quality from the first to the second series may also have been a factor in making people feel less interested and invested in the third one. However I was actually for the most part reasonably happy with developments in the third series… at least at first, because at least the show dumped the action-movie silliness and got back to the games themselves, and also Gihun is mostly remorsefully silent which is a nice change from his constant exhausting protesting of the games in series 2. There’s still annoying things about the show though: characters doing more incredibly dumb shit for no reason, general predictability regarding who lives and who dies (because it’s kind of obvious who the “important” characters are that the script will hang onto for longer), and some characters are just too fucking annoying for words, like that shaman character – okay, I get it, the director is poking fun at religious bullshit and I definitely support that, but did he have to make the character THIS irritating? Goddamn.
However the main story arc hits a huge stumbling block with player 222 Kim Junhee (Jo Yuri), who as we know from the previous series is very late-stage pregnant. It’s pretty obvious what is going to happen to her at some point, and once that happens, it’s even more obvious how things will play out from there because no test audience anywhere is going to be okay with someone killing a baby, even if that character gets punished straight after. The VIP’s observation that the baby being involved makes the games much more interesting is definitely a lie, once it gets introduced there’s literally only one single way the main arc of the story can possibly play out, given that this is a TV series meant for mass audience consumption where people don’t enjoy seeing babies get stabbed or thrown off ledges, not a Kpopalypse book with sketchy morals where anything can happen. It’s the third series’ biggest weakness by far.
Oh and did I mention that the VIPs acting sucks? It sure does! Their scenes are quite entertaining (they provide a bit of lightness and comic relief which is needed now that Thanos is absent) but the execution of those scenes is pretty poor acting-wise. The VIPs speak mostly in English and they all sound like they’re reading from a script in a backstage reading session, with their phrases having weird unnatural gaps and stilted delivery. It could be partly the fault of the editing rather than the actors; perhaps the editor didn’t know how to edit the English dialogue smoothly due to their lack of English language familiarity, because the Korean-language scenes that make up the bulk of the series definitely don’t have this problem. Or maybe it was the casting director’s fault in not being English-language-fluent enough to pick English-speaking actors who could act their way out of a paper bag. Or maybe a little of both, who knows.
At least this time the ending doesn’t suck; the third series is apparently the final one (and I think the studio will remain true to that promise given how much it flopped), and to that end it does do a pretty good job of wrapping things up in a satisfying way. It feels like a proper resolution, while still heavily implying that the societal problems that allow the Squid Games to exist in the first place are far from resolved. I noticed that some of the criticism from Korea about the ending was that they should have gone for something more people-pleasing instead of something artsy and message-driven, but for me that would dilute the point. The idea of the general public in Korea wanting their media to suck even more corporate cock than it already does, that for me just underlines the point of why the series exists at all, so the director is vindicated there I suppose.
Appeal to k-pop fans: Right, so speaking of sucking corporate cock – enough about the quality of the series, what about the k-pop people? So T.O.P is barely even in this one, as he met his demise in Squid Game 2 and only appears in this third series for some very brief flashbacks. That makes the main k-pop folks Jo Yuri, Siwan and YDG, all of whom have a fair bit of screentime. Jo Yuri just sort of cries and whimpers a lot and then cries and whimpers some more, and especially cries and whimpers and stands around doing nothing when she should be doing things like walking two steps to save herself. Her constant lack of ability to actually do stuff in general is really grating, constantly pausing and staring into space instead of doing the most basic actions necessary for self preservation. I’m not sure if it’s realistic or not, or if it’s good acting or not, but it sure is a chore to watch. Siwan’s crypto-bro character is somewhat better this time around, actually showing a fair degree of intelligence and becoming quite a pivotal character, although of course he too falls prey to doing incredibly illogical dumb stuff that anyone with two brain cells to rub together probably wouldn’t do in his situation. YDG’s character is much the same as last time, and he’s definitely a good actor because he plays the over-coddled mummy’s boy character quite convincingly and once again he’s kind of irritating but I guess he’s supposed to be so I can let it slide.
Appeal to k-pop fappers: So as you might expect, the popularity of Squid Game porn parodies has exploded even more since my Squid Game 2 review, with everyone now getting in on the act on what has truly become a porn fetish category. If you want to see people in pink jumpsuits fucking people in green and white tracksuits, there’s never been a better time to be alive. For those who want to see gay male Squid Game action there’s now a Euro-gay “Squirt Game” film from Staxus (cover shown above), as well as a British “Sexpig Game”, also “Spunk Game” both by the same studio HungYoungBrit, for those who want to see girls and guys together you’re even more spoiled for choice; on top of DASS-534, RAS-0107 and RAS-0108 there’s now Taiwanese MDL-0010-1 from Model Media, a Peruvian “Squirt Game” from Inkasex, a Greek one from Sugarbabes TV and lots more, and that’s not even counting all the hentai/anime versions and amateurs donning Squid Game cosplay for OnlyFans/ManyVids etc or their own private sites. (For the lesbian readers which is quite a large Kpopalypse reader demographic, I haven’t found any lesbian Squirt Games yet, but I’ll keep looking for you.) Why am I telling you all this? Because there’s absolutely zero chance you’re going to fap to anything in the third series itself, so you can forget about it basically. T.O.P is barely even in it at all, Jo Yuri is absolutely too morose to rub one out to, and Siwan and YDG both look various shades of angsty, miserable and definitely not somewhere you want to go with your genitals. There’s also no sexual scenes in the story (unless you count the one person who tries to arrange a rendezvous with Soldier 11, with predictable results) so if Squid Games turn you on you really are better off going for the cheap porn knockoffs, if nothing else it’s always amusing to see how much each one manages to botch the outfits.
One other thing that my girlfriend noticed as we watched this series together, is that as the episodes dragged on more and more, the cast definitely became more and more of a sausage-fest. There’s relatively few female characters, and a high percentage of those that exist seem to get bumped off in an early game where you hear lots of female screaming out of camera view, but almost no male screaming. I suppose you could argue that this is realistic, and whether it’s a good, bad or neutral thing is up to you, but it got frustrating for her after a while, she wanted to hear some men getting stabbed off camera but it was not to be. I guess the horror film sample packs they were using for the background screams only had girls doing it.
Conclusion: Squid Game 2 was characterised by great quality in the first couple of episodes and then a slow steady descent into tired action-movie shit, whereas Squid Game 3 is neither as good as the heights of part 2, nor as annoying as its worst sections, it’s more consistently average overall. However as they were made together, it’s worth thinking about Squid Game 2 and 3 in much the same way as parts 2 and 3 of The Matrix, or parts 1 and 2 of Kill Bill – they’re clearly two halves of the same creation, and clearly distinct from the first Squid Game, so they should be seen together. Whether you want to bother is up to you, but if you wasted your time with the second one, you might as well waste it even more with this just so you can have some resolution. However if you stopped watching at the end of the first series, taking the plunge on the rest is a harder sell. Overall it’s still decent, but it’s too predictable to really put you on the edge of your seat like the first series did.
Final score: 3 squirts out of 5, but remove a squirt if the idea of a dog being shot and the shooter facing no consequences at all, what the fuck other than a few days in the lockup pisses you the fuck off, justice for the dog let’s start a petition fuck it
English (US) · 