Kaiji - Ultimate Survivor S01E20-21 Review: Killing Tonegawa

Kaiji - Ultimate Survivor, Season 1, Episode 20: Demon God; Episode 21: Heart's Blood

So these two episodes is basically,  well, one drawn-out fight between Kaiji and Tonegawa. And it's definitely entertaining as all hell, for the simple fact that the concept of mind games in a card game is a personal favourite topic of mine. We get to see how fucking sadistic the old man (who still isn't named, and I'll call 'director' for the rest of the episode) is, and clearly he draws only pleasure from how desperate Kaiji gets and how he's going to suffer terribly with the ear-drill blowing up his brain and stuff.

And we get to see that after the end of episode 19, Kaiji did something... bloody, and some random dude is crying in the bathroom. Notably, he's holding his ear throughout the game, and Tonegawa assumes he tried to dig out the machine... but he's actually fucking cut off his own ear with the shard of glass in the bathroom, and told the random dude to hold the blood pressure monitor in his hand, keeping it calm throughout and causing Tonegawa to be unable to get a read through the watch.

And Kaiji ends up winning that round, with the slave card, and causing Tonegawa to think that Kaiji's bluffing with his expression. And of course the director is fucking pissed off at Tonegawa. It's a bit surprising that the director and Tonegawa didn't jut disqualify Kaiji for cutting off the device, nor did they actually, y'know, check it... but considering they cheated, I guess one cheat is worth another? Still, tense as all hell.

And episode 21 has Kaiji plan something with the bloodstains on his cards from the blood dripping from his wounds. The director apparently likes Kaiji risking his life (and cutting off his ear), and orders Tonegawa to play fairly. The watch is removed, and Kaiji gets the ear drill put back on... and, well, now we get to see the entire episode from Tonegawa's mentality. Without the confidence of reading the heart rate monitor, he's second guessing every single one of his guesses.

And he ends up second-guessing even more when he sees that some of the cards have blood-stains, and notes that it's impossible for Kaiji to actually overlook it. Tonegawa assumes Kaiji does a bit of a cheating himself because he actually sees Kaiji mucking around with a card under his hand earlier after the previous round, and he goes on this whole tirade of the percentages that the bloodstained card could be 50% slave, and 50% citizen... but on the other hand, if Kaiji had replaced his cards and stained two citizens instead to mind-game him... it's great stuff, tense as all hell, and the deconstruction of Tonegawa being fucked over by trying to figure out how Kaiji cheated -- or even if he had cheated -- is definitely well done. Of course, we don't actually get to see the conclusion in this episode.

I probably should be a bit angry that this is taking so long, but Tonegawa and Kaiji's writing are both done pretty well, and I'm definitely a huge fan of the whole mind-games thing. So yeah.