Kaiji - Ultimate Survivor S01E08 Review: Kaiji vs Funai

Kaiji: Ultimate Survivor, Episode 8: The Iron Hammer

A single-episode review this time around -- not sure how often I'll do these sort of things. I guess when there's a lot to talk in the episode. It's a neat little episode that builds up to a final confrontation between Kaiji and Funai, and it's actually pretty neat in subverting that expectations, because the Kaiji-Funai battle only lasts until around the halfway mark.

But the Kaiji/Funai confrontation is pretty cool. Kaiji knows Funai's card, and Funai doesn't want to risk the 3 stars that Kaiji demands from him, convinced that he can at least get rid of his card and at the worst a star by battling 'X', the unknown quantity that holds the three scissors cards... and it's a pretty tense bit. X has been mentioned throughout the past few episodes, and it's honestly a clever, if slightly anticlimactic, plot twist to reveal to us that 'X' is actually a person we've seen before. The dude that flushed all his cards down the toilet. The destroyed cards are just not tabulated on the screen.

And Funai ends up being forced to agree to play against Kaiji and he ends up losing, which is definitely well-played, and displays Funai's fall from grace pretty amazingly. Funai definitely gets the biggest hate-sink at this moment for general douchebagginess, so it's definitely great to see him be forced to kowtow and give a bunch of stars to Kaiji and his group.

However, X's missing cards does mean that there's an odd number of cards, and part of why Kaiji's so intense is because he knows that there's going to be one card left-over, so even after they get an adequate number of stars one of them still has to be dragged off to the room-of-doom, and Kaiji is very much ready to make the sacrifice. And it's this super-cocky 'well, I'm going to die anyway, I'll drag you with me' mentality that ends up causing Funai to eventually fold, because Kaiji literally has nothing else to lose. He expects that his allies can buy him back at the end of the proceedings, and puts trust in them. After all, hasn't Furuhata and Ando been steadfast allies through this all?

And we get this very humiliating scene as Kaiji is stripped down and thrown into a room with all the others who had been likewise striped. Nothing is erotic of fanservicey about all this, and really highlights their value -- or lack thereof. Kaiji ends up discovering that, yes, the white-suited dude with sunglasses (apparently named Sakai) is indeed cheating, and the one-way mirror that the prison room has allows those inside to basically signal their allies outside. Of course, Sakai, being an obvious douchebag, has fooled his partner, an uncle called Ishida, who ends up being a chump.

Sakai is a repeater, which is why he knows the ins and outs of the Espoir ship's system. And it's pretty cool how the scroundel-looking toothy dude in the room, Okabayashi, basically dissects Ishida and Kaiji's arguments. Okabayashi is a cocky bastard who rains all over Kaiji's confidence that his friends will save him, talking about how loyalty and friendship are pointless.

And, indeed, as Okabayashi and Kaiji expects, there's a buy-back moment at the end of the whole thing, and Sakai, of course, is nowhere to be seen, dooming Ishida to the room. Okabayashi, meanwhile, is bought back by his allies, because he's holding on to a crapton of money and that's his insurance to make sure his friends will get him out. Kaiji, on the other hand, trusts his allies so much that he entrusts them with all his money and stars... and as Furuhata gets ready to buy Kaiji back, it's honestly a bit of a 'eh, of course he will'. I mean, wasn't the whole point of the Kaiji-vs-Kitami fight to show how Kaiji's friendship with Furuhata and Ando is the real deal, and they trust each other?

Except it honestly wasn't. Kaiji hasn't been super-truthful or open with his allies, telling them to 'trust me!' and basically do things while the two of them are complaining and whining behind his backs. Furuhata and Ando has likewise gone and splurged their way through several impulsive moments of panic, and Furuhata himself was the reason Kaiji was in this situation. And thus while Furuhata's doormat tendencies means that I totally buy that he'll want to save Kaiji at first... Ando's betrayal was surprising but not at all something that doesn't make sense. And anyway, he's going to get a lot of money from it all, by selling the extra stars to the random people that need stars to get off the ship. It's definitely very interesting to see what's going to go on, and how Kaiji will get his way out of the pickle he's found himself in.