Japan · Drama · 2020
Alice in Borderland
Binge Brief
- Season 1 came out on Netflix on 10 December 2020 with eight episodes, season 2 on 22 December 2022 with eight and season 3 on 25 September 2025 with six.
- It adapts Haro Aso's manga, which ran in Shogakukan magazines from November 2010 to March 2016 and fills 18 volumes.
- Netflix's report on the second half of 2025, published in January 2026, called season 3 the third and final season and counted 25 million views for it.
- At the 2021 Asian Academy Creative Awards it won Best Direction (Fiction) for Shinsuke Sato and Best Cinematography for Taro Kawazu.
Synopsis
Alice in Borderland is a Japanese survival thriller from Netflix, adapted from Haro Aso's manga of the same name. Ryohei Arisu is out of work and drifting when he and his friends Karube and Chota step out of a Shibuya toilet cubicle and find Tokyo emptied of almost everyone. The trains, shops and screens are exactly as they were. The people are gone.
What is Alice in Borderland about? Staying alive. The few people left, the players, each hold a visa that lasts a few days, and the only way to extend it is to enter a game and win. Every game is marked by a playing card. The suit tells the players what kind of game it is: spades test the body, clubs need teamwork, diamonds test the mind and hearts play on feelings and trust. The number shows how hard it will be. Lose a game, or let the visa run out, and a laser from the sky ends it.
Season 1, released on 10 December 2020 with eight episodes, follows Arisu as the games take his friends from him, as he teams up with Yuzuha Usagi and as the two of them reach the Beach, a hotel where a community of players pools the cards it wins in the hope of collecting the whole deck and going home. The Beach has rules, ranks and armed guards, and it turns out to be as dangerous as the games.
Season 2, released on 22 December 2022 with another eight episodes, opens the face card games. Each king, queen and jack is a citizen of the Borderland who plays against the visitors, and the games get longer, stranger and more personal. Arisu and Usagi are joined by Chishiya, Kuina, Ann and others who survived the Beach, and every round asks who the citizens are and why the players were brought here at all.
Season 3 arrived on 25 September 2025 with six episodes and the Joker card at its centre. It picks up after the events of season 2, brings Arisu and Usagi back to the Borderland and adds new players, among them Ryuji. Netflix has since described it as the end of the story: its engagement report for the second half of 2025, published in January 2026, called it the third and final season and counted 25 million views.
Alice in Borderland manga and what the series adapts
The series is based on Haro Aso's manga, published by Shogakukan, and takes its Japanese title, Imawa no Kuni no Arisu, from it. The manga began in Shōnen Sunday S on 25 November 2010, moved to Weekly Shōnen Sunday in April 2015 and ended there on 2 March 2016, and it was collected in 18 volumes. Viz Media published it in English as nine two-in-one volumes between March 2022 and March 2024.
Aso also wrote a spin-off, Alice on Border Road, which ran from 2015 to 2018, and a short sequel, Alice in Borderland Retry, published from October 2020 to January 2021, the months around the release of the first Netflix season. The manga had already been animated once: three OVA episodes made by Silver Link and Connect and directed by Hideki Tachibana, released in 2014 and 2015.
Why it still gets watched
Alice in Borderland keeps drawing viewers back because each season landed on Netflix's own charts with real numbers behind it. Season 1 reached the top 10 in nearly 40 countries within weeks of its December 2020 release, and season 2 went further, reaching the top 10 in more than 90 countries, taking the number one spot in 17 of them and racking up 200 million viewing hours worldwide within four weeks, the most of any Japanese-made Netflix title at that point.
Season 3 kept that momentum going: What's on Netflix reported an opening week of 8.5 million views in late September 2025, ahead of season 2's 7.2 million-view start. Critics matched the audience response, with Rotten Tomatoes scoring season 1 at 82% and season 2 at 91% from reviewers. Since the story now runs start to finish across all three seasons, with Netflix confirming season 3 as the finale, new viewers can watch the whole trilogy without waiting on a renewal.
Alice in Borderland cast
Best scenes
Spoilers aheadThe moments people come back for, and where to find them. Episode numbers and outcomes are named, so come back to this one after watching if you would rather not know.
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The empty Shibuya reveal Episode 1
Arisu and his friends step out of a station bathroom into a deserted Shibuya Crossing in a single take that runs past four minutes. Production company Robot Communications says only the road and the station's east ticket gate in that shot are real; everything else was added with CG through green screen compositing.
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The flooded tunnel and the panther Episode 4
The panther that stalks Arisu and Usagi through the flooding underpass in this game was designed by Digital Frontier's artists after they studied a real animal's movement and fur at a zoo, and Netflix's own production notes say the whole sequence was mapped out with previsualization before the shoot.
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The tiger duel Episode 5
A tiger is worked into one of the games Arisu's group has to survive. The effect was supervised by Erik-Jan de Boer, the Academy Award winning visual effects artist behind the tiger in Life of Pi, built by the Indian studio Anibrain with teams in Japan, Singapore, the United States and India working together.
Filming locations
The deserted Shibuya scenes were filmed on an open set of the Shibuya crossing at Ashikaga Scramble City Studio, about 100 kilometres from Tokyo. Other scenes were shot in Yokohama and Kobe.
Visual design and costumes
Director Shinsuke Sato told Screen Anarchy in December 2020 that he treated the first season as "one very, very long film" and wanted the violence to land "like a thorn that really gets you when you're not paying attention." Production company Robot Communications describes how that look was built: on the Shibuya Crossing set, "everything but the road and the ticket gate at the east entrance was produced with computer graphics (CG) through green screen compositing," and the visual effects team even recreated the shadows the real Tokyu Building would cast at that time of day to keep the empty city convincing.
Themes and messages
The premise puts Arisu and the other players through games where losing means death, so every episode turns on what people choose when survival is on the line. Director Shinsuke Sato said in a December 2020 interview that the series is "about the characters finding hope in a desperate world, really struggling with a lot of things to find and choose how they're going to live their life," and that the message he wants viewers to take away is "what it means to live with hope." Netflix's own description of the show points at the same idea from a wider angle, framing the story as an exploration of "profound themes of humanity, sacrifice, and the pursuit of a meaningful existence." The face card and Joker structure that runs through the later games turns that theme into a concrete choice each round: cooperate with the group or turn on them to stay alive.
Interesting facts
Manga creator Haro Aso based the two leads on different sides of himself. In Netflix's own production notes from December 2020, he said Arisu reflects his lack of direction around age 20, while Usagi reflects his more independent, self-reliant side, a point he repeated to Time Out Tokyo in February 2021.
Episodes
| Ep | Title | Air date | Status | Rating |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Season 1, episode 1 Jobless Arisu, Karube and Chota come out of a Shibuya toilet cubicle to a Tokyo with no one in it, and before the night is over they are players in their first deadly game. | 10 Dec 2020 | Aired | |
| 2 | Season 1, episode 2 Now the three know the card suit sets the type of game and the number sets its difficulty, and that knowledge is put to work in a game of tag where getting caught is fatal. | 10 Dec 2020 | Aired | |
| 3 | Season 1, episode 3 A game of hide-and-seek that lets only one player out alive turns the three old friends into rivals, and the episode ends with Arisu carrying the cost alone. | 10 Dec 2020 | Aired | |
| 4 | Season 1, episode 4 Paired with Usagi, Arisu has to wade through a flooded tunnel while a panther roams the dark, in a game that rewards distance travelled. | 10 Dec 2020 | Aired | |
| 5 | Season 1, episode 5 Arisu and Usagi find the Beach, a hotel run like a resort where the players pool the cards they win in the hope of completing the deck. | 10 Dec 2020 | Aired | |
| 6 | Season 1, episode 6 At the Beach the Hatter is killed, the armed faction moves to seize control, a plan to steal the card collection goes ahead and a witch hunt game is declared. | 10 Dec 2020 | Aired | |
| 7 | Season 1, episode 7 Fire spreads through the Beach during the witch hunt, and the survivors have to work out who the witch is before the timer runs out. | 10 Dec 2020 | Aired | |
| 8 | Season 1, episode 8 The witch hunt is settled, the game masters are found dead at their base, and Mira announces that the face card games start next. | 10 Dec 2020 | Aired | |
| 9 | Season 2, episode 1 Season 2 opens with a gunman playing the King of Spades, and Arisu starts to believe that clearing every face card is the way home. | 22 Dec 2022 | Aired | |
| 10 | Season 2, episode 2 In the King of Clubs game the players face a group of former band members, now citizens of the Borderland, in a contest decided on points. | 22 Dec 2022 | Aired | |
| 11 | Season 2, episode 3 A handshake is the unlikely key Arisu finds for the King of Clubs, while Tatta is left with injuries he cannot recover from. | 22 Dec 2022 | Aired | |
| 12 | Season 2, episode 4 Chishiya wins a card game played inside a prison block, and the King of Spades turns up at the players' camp and scatters them. | 22 Dec 2022 | Aired | |
| 13 | Season 2, episode 5 Heiya, who has already lost a leg, rejoins the group as the surviving players meet again for the Queen of Spades game of tag. | 22 Dec 2022 | Aired | |
| 14 | Season 2, episode 6 Usagi argues rival players into working together, and in the King of Diamonds logic game Chishiya plays for the win. | 22 Dec 2022 | Aired | |
| 15 | Season 2, episode 7 Kuina and Ann find each other again, the King of Spades is finally brought down, and only the Queen of Hearts remains. | 22 Dec 2022 | Aired | |
| 16 | Season 2, episode 8 Mira steps forward as the Queen of Hearts and turns the last game into a battle over what Arisu believes is real. | 22 Dec 2022 | Aired | |
| 17 | Season 3, episode 1 Season 3 moves the story on: Ryuji crosses paths with Banda, Usagi vanishes and returns pregnant, and the games switch back on. | 25 Sep 2025 | Aired | |
| 18 | Season 3, episode 2 Arisu goes back into the Borderland of his own accord, solves riddles in the game called Fortunes and is pulled into a Zombie Hunt. | 25 Sep 2025 | Aired | |
| 19 | Season 3, episode 3 Arisu quietly infects his own allies to change the Zombie Hunt, while Usagi and others wear gas masks through the Runaway Train game. | 25 Sep 2025 | Aired | |
| 20 | Season 3, episode 4 Usagi gets clear of the train, climbs Tokyo Tower, and Ryuji keeps a secret meeting with Banda. | 25 Sep 2025 | Aired | |
| 21 | Season 3, episode 5 Future Sugoroku, the last game, puts every player through choices about the life they want, and only eight are still standing when it ends. | 25 Sep 2025 | Aired | |
| 22 | Season 3, episode 6 The series finale settles who leaves the Borderland, what Ryuji will do about Usagi and what the Watchman says the Joker card stands for. | 25 Sep 2025 | Aired |
Soundtrack
Starting the player loads Spotify, which sets its own cookies.
| Track | Artist |
|---|---|
| Alice in Borderland Original Soundtrack, season 1 (38 tracks) | Yutaka Yamada, 2020 |
| Alice in Borderland 2, soundtrack from the Netflix series (33 tracks) | Yutaka Yamada, 2023 |
| Alice in Borderland 3, soundtrack from the Netflix series (20 tracks) | Yutaka Yamada, 2025 |
Awards
| Year | Ceremony | Category | Recipient | Result |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2021 | Asian Academy Creative Awards | Best Direction (Fiction) | Shinsuke Sato | Won |
| 2021 | Asian Academy Creative Awards | Best Cinematography | Taro Kawazu | Won |
| 2021 | Asian Academy Creative Awards | Best Visual or Special VFX in TV Series or Feature Film | Alice in Borderland | Won |
| 2021 | 3rd Asia Contents Awards | Creative Beyond Border | Alice in Borderland | Won |
| 2021 | 3rd Asia Contents Awards | Best Actress | Tao Tsuchiya | Nominated |
Frequently asked questions
What is Alice in Borderland about?
Alice in Borderland is a Japanese Netflix series about young people stranded in an empty Tokyo who must win deadly games, each marked by a playing card, to extend the visa that keeps them alive.
How many seasons and episodes does Alice in Borderland have?
Alice in Borderland has three seasons and 22 episodes: eight in season 1 (10 December 2020), eight in season 2 (22 December 2022) and six in season 3 (25 September 2025).
Will there be an Alice in Borderland season 4?
No season 4 has been announced. Netflix's engagement report for the second half of 2025, published on 20 January 2026, described season 3 of Alice in Borderland as the third and final season.
Is Alice in Borderland based on a manga?
Yes. Alice in Borderland adapts Haro Aso's manga, published by Shogakukan from 2010 to 2016 in 18 volumes and in English by Viz Media.
What is the meaning of the cards in Alice in Borderland?
In Alice in Borderland the suit tells players the kind of game: spades are physical, clubs need teamwork, diamonds test intelligence and hearts play on emotions. The number shows how difficult the game is.
Where can I watch Alice in Borderland?
Alice in Borderland is a Netflix original and streams on Netflix, which carries all three seasons.
Who is in the cast of Alice in Borderland?
Kento Yamazaki plays Ryohei Arisu and Tao Tsuchiya plays Yuzuha Usagi in Alice in Borderland. Nijiro Murakami, Aya Asahina, Dori Sakurada, Ayaka Miyoshi and Keita Machida are among the regular cast, and Kento Kaku joins in season 3.
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