When you hear the phrase “last wish murder,” it might sound like something out of a dark, twisted story—maybe a murderer that might grant his victims’ last wishes. But there’s so much more to it. Imagine a world where people in deep despair feel and come together because they think committing suicide after their last wish is fulfilled is better than continuing to suffer. That’s the heart of the story in The Victims’ Game on Netflix. The plot revolves around these complex emotions and desperate acts. It starts with a series of mysterious deaths. At first, it seems like these people are being murdered. But as we learn more, we find out that these people understand each other’s pain. They decide that dying on their own terms is better than living in misery. Captain Chao Cheng-Kuan is leading the investigation to solve these puzzling cases. The real twist comes with the unexpected team-up between forensic officer Fang Yi-Jen and investigative reporter Hsu Hai-Yin. Usually, police and reporters don’t get along, but these two work together to solve the mystery. Why do they team up? That’s a big part of the story. And here’s where it gets even juicier: by the end of season 1, Fang Yi-Jen gets arrested. What?! Is he somehow involved in these deaths? There are so many questions. With The Victims’ Game season 2 just around the corner, let’s dive back into the first season of Taiwanese show and get all the answers to what happened till now. Ready to solve the puzzle? Let’s get started!
Spoilers Ahead
What happened to singer So Ko-Yun?
The Victims’ Game starts with a strange case involving the death of a moderately famous singer, So Ko-Yun. She was found dead in a bathtub, her body dissolved by chemical burning and fentanyl injection. It was a bizarre case—why would anyone kill themselves in such a horrific way? Was it a murder or a suicide? Captain Chao Cheng-Kuan and his team were on the case, but the most intriguing part was the involvement of forensic officer Fang Yi-Jen. Fang Yi-Jen had a personal connection to the case. Even though the hotel crime scene showed no signs of murder or anyone entering the room through CCTV, there was a girl seen around the hotel—Chiang Hsiao-Meng, Fang Yi-Jen’s daughter. He had no idea where his daughter had been all these years until he saw her and her fingerprints at the crime scene. This discovery terrified him. What if she was involved in the murders? Fang Yi-Jen had Asperger’s, which made him prone to agitation. Years ago, while working on a case, a chemical he had at home accidentally burned his daughter. He blamed himself and left his family, as he thought he was the cause of their unhappiness. He didn’t know where his daughter was until he read an article by a reporter named Hsu Hai-Yin that revealed that his daughter worked at a hostess club. Desperate to find his daughter and solve the singer’s murder, Fang Yi-Jen went to the club but found nothing. He decided to seek help directly from Hsu Hai-Yin, an ambitious and secretive reporter. She gave him a video she had taken of his daughter while investigating the club.
In the video, they saw a boy named Yu Cheng-Hao who was close to Chiang Hsiao-Meng. Fang Yi-Jen believed Yu Cheng-Hao could lead him to his daughter. But there was another twist—the body found in the bathtub wasn’t So Ko-Yun’s; it was Yu Cheng-Hao’s. Shocked much? Actually, Fang Yi-Jen discovered this by noticing the body had male features, while So Ko-Yun had facial implants that were not found in the skull of the dead body. DNA tests confirmed it was Yu Cheng-Hao. You know the most twisted part? Yu Cheng-Hao’s death re-enacted the cover of So Ko-Yun’s last album while lying in the bathtub, dead. So Ko-Yun wanted her album to be a hit before she died and hoped people would remember her music rather than her troubled life. Before she died, people didn’t seem to care about her music. She became addicted to drugs, and even her producers didn’t want to take a risk with her anymore. Some tabloids printed news about her bloated face and body, which made her feel insecure. She thought people would only remember her for those things, not her music. She lost the will to live and wanted her last album to be successful as her final wish. To make her album successful, Yu Cheng-Hao decided to pretend to be So Ko-Yun to gain attention for the album. What did Yu Cheng-Hao get out of this?
After talking to his family, Hsu Hai-Yin and Fang Yi-Jen learned that Yu Cheng-Hao wanted to be a girl, but society and his family were against it. Even though Cheng-Hao had a man’s body, he always wanted to be a woman. He knew that living as a woman wasn’t possible for him, so he thought it was better to fulfill his wish by dying as a woman. This way, both of their wishes would be fulfilled. Now you might be wondering, What happened to the real So Ko-Yun? If the body in the bathtub wasn’t hers, was she still alive? Sadly, she wasn’t. She was found dead in the Yu Ping Apartments, burned, and with signs of fentanyl inhalation. The police found Chang Tsung-Chien’s ID card near her body. They tried to save her but couldn’t, and they thought it might be a series of murders with Chang Tsung-Chien as the next victim.
What happened to Chang Tsung-Chien, Chuang Ping-Jung, and Liu Kuang-Yung?
So, by now, you might have guessed that all the deaths were part of a series where each person helped fulfill someone else’s last wish before committing suicide. These people were each other’s confidants, allowing them to have their last wishes granted successfully. You might wonder why So Ko-Yun was found in the Yu Ping Apartments with Chang Tsung-Chien’s ID card. Chang Tsung-Chien was an employee at the Yu Ping Apartments. He had cancer and wanted to live with his father, who had dementia, to take care of him. But things didn’t go as planned. Chang Tsung-Chien hoped to get his sales bonus from the company, but they refused by saying the compensation was for long-term employees, not for someone who was going to die soon. Knowing he was going to die anyway, he wanted to become a whistleblower and expose Yu Ping’s exploitation of employees. So, to fulfill Chang Tsung-Chien’s last wish, So Ko-Yun died in the apartment to draw attention to the company’s wrongdoings. What happened to Chang Tsung-Chien? He was found dead in the woodworking factory of a famous artist named Chuang Ping-Yao. Why was he there?
Actually, Chuang Ping-Yao’s brother, Chuang Ping-Jung, was a real artist but was blind. Chuang Ping-Yao pretended to be the artist to take advantage of his brother’s disability and reap all the benefits. Chuang Ping-Jung’s last wish was to die being credited for his own artwork and to expose his brother’s deceit. His wish was fulfilled by Chang Tsung-Chien died in the workshop arthouse, and Hsu Hai-Yin wrote a report about it, which made Chuang Ping-Jung even more famous. Later, Chuang Ping-Jung’s body was found near a bridge. Initially, it was thought to be Liu Kuang-Yung’s body, but it was actually Ping-Jung’s. Beside his body was a will dedicated to Peng’s daughter. Why? Liu Kuang-Yung murdered Peng when he was 17 years old and had gotten away with it for 39 years. Now, at 56, he felt guilty for breaking Peng’s family and causing their suffering. His last wish was to will his estate to Peng’s family, which was fulfilled by Chuang Ping-Jung. The police knew that Liu Kuang-Yung might still be alive, so they involved his wife to stop him from committing suicide. Despite him inhaling fentanyl secretly, the police took him to Anguang Hospital. They realized by now that these events weren’t a series of murders but a series of suicides, where the motive was fulfilling the last wishes of the victims. Liu Kuang-Yung’s wife tried to talk him out of it by expressing pride in the man he had become and acknowledging his repentance and desire to make amends. Lying in the hospital bed, Liu Kuang-Yung also began to think he might want to live after all. But who stopped it? Li Ya-Chun, the head nurse and cleaner of the hospital, forced him to take the fentanyl and murdered him, even though he wanted to live. After all this time, it turned out to be a murder instead of a suicide.
What was Li Ya-Chun and Chiang Hsiao-Meng’s motive?
Actually, all of these victims, including Chiang Hsiao-Meng and Li Ya-Chun, were connected through a suicide prevention center. But instead of preventing suicides, it turned into an assisted suicide center. The mastermind behind it all was Li Ya-Chun. After her husband’s death, Li Ya-Chun worked at Anguang Hospital, which lacked proper resources. Many patients died without receiving adequate treatment. Among them was a history teacher named Chou Yang, whom Li Ya-Chun fell deeply in love with. Chou Yang lost the will to live after a car accident left him paralyzed, and he couldn’t afford proper care. To prove her love, Li Ya-Chun decided to help him die. She gave him high doses of drugs by telling him they were vitamins, which eventually killed him. She believed that she was giving him the gift of choosing death over living in pain. From then on, helping people die became her mission. Li Ya-Chun believed she was doing the right thing, even when she killed Liu Kuang-Yung. She saw no problem with it and felt glad it happened. Chiang Hsiao-Meng got involved with Li Ya-Chun because of her mother, who was diagnosed with kidney cancer in its final stage. Chiang Hsiao-Meng didn’t want her mother to die, as she was all she had since her father, Fang Yi-Jen, was absent from her life. Li Ya-Chun convinced her that her mother would be better off dying than living in pain. Before her mother died, she wanted to visit a beach where the family had happy memories, but she was too ill to go. Following Li Ya-Chun’s advice, Meng helped kill her mother by removing her oxygen mask at the hospital. After her mother’s death, Chiang Hsiao-Meng formed the assisted suicide squad, starting by helping her friend Yu Cheng-Hao die as a woman. This set off a series of events where each person fulfilled the last wish of the next, which led to a chain of assisted suicides.
What happened to Chiang Hsiao-Meng?
By now, the police had uncovered all the information and identified the masterminds behind this sick game: Chiang Hsiao-Meng and Li Ya-Chun. They also discovered that their own Fang Yi-Jen was Meng’s father and had been hiding the truth to protect her. As a result, Fang Yi-Jen was arrested too. The police knew that, with all these deaths coming to light, Meng might be planning to commit suicide herself. And that’s exactly what happened. She was found at the beachside cliff, which her mother had wanted to visit before she died. She was about to jump off. Meng was shocked and hurt that her father, Fang Yi-Jen, finally came when she was about to die after all these years. Fang Yi-Jen admitted his mistakes and said that he should have been there for his family. He explained that he left because he thought he wasn’t cut out to be a proper father or husband due to his Asperger’s disease. He believed his condition would get the best of him, so he ran away. He had no idea it would lead to this, or he would never have left. But Meng thought it was too late to apologize and jumped off the cliff. Fang Yi-Jen’s protective father instincts kicked in, and he jumped off too. He managed to save his daughter, and while he was admitted to the hospital, he was saved at this well.
I think Instead of treating this as a game of suicide, the victims could have changed their perspective and found the will to live. They saw their situations as hopeless and thought that the only way out was through death. The real bravery lies in facing danger and fighting back against all odds, rather than being brainwashed by someone. However, I know it’s easier said than done, and I don’t want to come off as insensitive.
Anyway, at the end of The Victims’ Game season 1, we see that two years have passed since these events. Fang Yi-Jen left his job at the police forensic department and became a professor, teaching forensic science at a university. But Captain Chao Cheng-Kuan knows Fang Yi-Jen’s worth, and he can’t just let all his talent go to waste, right? So he approached him for help with a new, interesting case. We also see that during this course of events, Yi-Jen and Hsu Hai-Yin became good friends and went together to get Chiang Hsiao-Meng out of jail. It seems that Fang Yi-Jen is ready to give fatherhood a second chance and do a better job this time. In the next season, we will find out what’s in store for him and what new case he might be working on. Hsu Hai-Yin will likely help him solve the case, just like last time, but with more conviction and sincerity, I hope. After all, enemies have become friends, so it will be interesting to see how they work together.
