Kaiji, Ultimate Survivor, Episode 1: Departure
So, under recommendation by UmTois, one of the visitors to this blog, I've started watching Kaiji: Ultimate Survivor, the first season to Nobuyuki Fukumoto's manga, Gambling Apocalypse Kaiji. I know literally nothing about the manga series, other than it's about gambling. But hey, it's only around 26 episodes and a single season, and I've got a bit of a burnout reviewing weekly chapters of manga, so why not review an anime? If nothing else, the freshness of the concept is going to be refreshing for me. One of the advantages of reviewing this as opposed to the anime of JoJo's Bizarre Adventure that this time around, I'm going to be talking about something new that will take me through all the plot developments that a piece of fiction will, and not just be my running commentary on 'oh yeah, I remember this from the manga'.
After this episode, I'll probably be doing reviews of Kaiji in two-episode chunks so they won't be super-short (and also so I can get to actually watching the episodes instead of stopping to jot down notes about the episode after every 20 minutes). Basically, this first episode's pretty slow-paced. We're introduced to our hero, Kaiji Itou, who's your regular single uncommitted Japanese young man... oh, who's also a delinquent who goes around losing money on gambling and vandalizing rich people's cars because he's a dick. Of course, the latest car he vandalizes apparently belongs to a loan shark... who's in the area looking for him. So yeah, straight-up we don't get a super-lovely impression of him. Which is honestly not a good way to make your protagonist likable or relatable.
What quickly gets him into a more likable character (or at least one I sympathize with) is the situation that the anime quickly thrusts him in. The yakuza loan shark dude tells him to come along, and tells him that his buddy, Furuhata, who had put his name as his benefactor or whatever, has disappeared without a trace, and Kaiji has to pay back the loan of... a fuck-ton of money, I don't really remember. (Don't expect me to ever remember the amounts of money won or lost, or the percentages of probability or somesuch) But the loan shark dudes makes it clear that with the accumulated interest it's going to take around 11 years for Kaiji to pay them completely.
And then, he quickly goes to the premise of the show, and tries to sell it to both Kaiji and the audience. There's this gambling boat, and the loan shark wants Kaiji to get on it. He's going there, he's going to gamble, and if he loses he gets made into a slave or some shit, but if he wins, he's going to return with lots of money. The yakuza does some neat bits of emotional manipulation by faking a phone call as if doing Kaiji a favour, and he ends up agreeing to, yes, go on this ship Espoir and gamble. The threats to his family probably didn't help either, though.
So yeah. Kaiji's a dude that's thrust into a pretty shit situation by things that is honestly out of his control, which is definitely something I can sympathize with. We're quickly set on to the ship, and there's a bit of introdumps on how they have to borrow 1 million as a loan, and only Kaiji and one other man who I bet is going to be important realizes that even with the 10-minute interest rate (!) the loaned money is resources for whatever secret tournament that's to come, and take the highest allowed rate.
I am so, so glad when I realized the whole 'gambling' thing isn't just elaborate poker, by the way, because that might just make me quit the whole anime after the first episode. It's one thing why I never quite got into sports mangas -- I find things like basketball or football or poker uninteresting already, if I wanted to read a work of fiction, why would I read about things like that? -- we don't actually learn about the entire rules of the game, but as Kaiji opens the envelope and the episode winds out to an honestly not-very-impressive credits sequence, we learn that they're to battle in a game of... 'Restricted Rock Paper Scissors', as they're dealt a set of rocks, papers and scissors within an envelope. As much as I have flashbacks to another game featuring rock paper scissors, Kami-sama no Iutoori, I'm definitely a bit more excited now than I was when I begun the episode.
So yeah. The first episode's far more introdump-y than I would've liked, but considering it has a mere runtime of 20 minutes and not 40 minutes like American live-action TV, it's definitely okay. So yeah, looking forward to more.
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