Kaiji - Ultimate Survivor S01E18-19 Review: But Fear Itself

Kaiji - Ultimate Survivor, Episode 18: Trifle; Episode 19: Limit

We continue the E-Card game, and episode 18 is... basically the 'Kaiji is fucked' episode. I don't have much to say about it, although it's not that the episode is bad. It's pretty damn tense as Kaiji gets confounded. Whatever he does, whether he tries to just play or if he tries to predict what Tonegawa is doing, he ends up getting fucked. And Tonegawa's mind games and how he just gets Kaiji to panic and fuck himself up is definitely well-delivered. It's a pretty tense battle, and it's clear that Tonegawa and his boss is stringing Kaiji along as, well, entertainment.

It's definitely a fun 20 minutes, even if I don't have much to say about it -- definitely a very effective slaughtering of Kaiji's fighting spirit. If I spoke even further, I would just detail every single round play-by-play, and that's not super fun to do.

In episode 19, though, by dumb luck, Kaiji pussies out of playing the emperor in the second round at the last second, causing Tonegawa to actually lose the game. And Tonegawa gets slapped by his still-unnamed boss, which gives Kaiji hope. Not just because of his victory, but also because of the sudden over-reaction of Tonegawa's boss.

I did like how Kaiji realizes how it's a slip of the tongue -- and the revelation that Tonegawa may be cheating, and not actually just a good poker-face reader. And, well, Kaiji realizes that he is being monitored via Tonegawa's watch, which he keeps looking at. And here we get a moment of classic 'oh yeah, this seemingly-inconsequential scene we were shown before' when Kaiji remembers how Tonegawa places a watch and talks about the amount of time each player has to put his card down. The whole 'eye or ear' thing is a feint with such a flashy gamble to put in a monitor to, well, monitor Kaiji's pulse.

What I didn't think was done well in the last leg of Kaiji was the introduction of a massive peanuts gallery of the people who were defeated in earlier rounds. It'd probably mean more if either Sahara or Ishida survived to serve this purpose, but I really have no connection or emotion to these faceless dudes who cheer for Kaiji and later talk to him in the bathroom. Hell, what assurances does Kaiji have that these guys are loyal, beyond the fact that they have no names, so clearly they're not important? And thus I feel like the moment when Kaiji rages in the bathroom and smashes the mirror would've had far more impact if he was pouring his heart out to a character that he or the audience knows instead of a literal random dude.