Kakegurui: Compulsive Gambler Review

Description: This show is set in a school called Hyakkaou Private Academy which is filled with rich kids who gamble all the time after class. The students are ranked within the school based on how large their debts to each other and to the school are. People with the highest debts are placed at the lowest of the school’s ranks. This makes gambling a way to climb the hierarchy and achieve notoriety within the school and beyond. The academy is owned by wealthy adults who can either make or break the student’s lives based on how well they do gambling, so most students take their debts quite seriously.

These adults are hardly ever mentioned, and instead the school seems to be run by the student council (big surprise) who are the most elite gamblers in the school. Money is power, so the kids with the richest parents are able to climb the hierarchy quickly. This is all interrupted when a mysterious new transfer student named Yumeko Jabami enters the school and tries her luck in the gambling scene. Unlike the other students she doesn’t care about her ranking and is ACTUALLY just there to gamble… compulsively. She’s the compulsive gambler and she’s pretty good at what she does.

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Overall Review: Ok here’s the review~

This show scratched an itch that I didn’t know I had. When I hear about gambling I think of casinos, people in tremendous debt, and those tacky online gambling sites that look designed to be virus-ridden. Until seeing this show I hadn’t given gambling much more thought than that, but by the end I was holding my breath waiting for outcomes of bets that could alter people’s lives. That must be why people gamble right? For a chance to alter their life. Gain immaculate possessions all at the whim of one card, or a set of dice. To put the weight of your life on something as mundane as a few pieces of plastic being rattled in a cup. That’s the feeling this show gave me a peek at, and I had no idea what to do with it.

Anyway, this anime addresses gambling as an elegant sport that these students play after class. At least that’s what it looks like on the surface. Once Yumeko, the daring new transfer student, joins in on the fun it becomes obvious that these games are much more. The weight of each game is drastic to these students because their place in the school hierarchy is determined by their debt, so they need to gamble well to climb the ranks. Students at the bottom of the school ranking are labelled as “pets” and must listen to every wish of the superior students. While most gamble to avoid becoming pets, Yumeko starts to unravel the twisted intentions of other students who gamble for much darker reasons. The students must have parents that work at fortune 500 companies because some of the bets placed are unfathomably large to any normal high schooler, even to adults with decent salaries. Watching the new transfer student gamble with no care for money or status made her seem invincible and kind of like a Robin Hood figure. Throughout the course of the show she moves mountains of cash all just because she loves gambling, knocking out rich kids left and right in her wake. All of which was pretty satisfying to watch.

Overall I really enjoyed this show. It kept me engaged and wanting more all the way up to the end. The bets got bigger and riskier throughout the series and I couldn’t help but binge-watch to see how far they would be willing to go (it’s pretty damn far).

Storyline: I think the story of this anime is clean and easy to follow, as well as exciting and downright twisted at times. All of these are good things. The story starts with Yumeko transferring to the school and immediately sizing up one of the biggest gamblers on campus, Saotome Mary. Yumeko shows off her strategic ability by intentionally allowing Mary to win multiple times to figure out how she was using lesser-ranked students to cheat for her, then immediately making a giant bet and crushing Mary on her first day. This also reveals to the viewer that cheating is a big part of this show, as from this point on pretty much every game involves some kind of cheating. Yumeko’s triumph stirs up the entire school and suddenly everyone wants a piece of the new girl. Over the course of the next several episodes Yumeko consistently plays games with unwavering amounts of cunning and strategy working her way up to the school council. These upper echelon students are much darker and instead of playing for money a few of them insist on gambling for the removal of the loser’s finger and toenails, and even a bullet to the head.

This makes for a frenzied spiral towards twisted desires as the bets escalate past money and power and start to actually be life or death. Along the way Yumeko befriends a few of the people she has beaten as well as Ryota Suzui, who I had almost forgotten about until just now. Suzui accompanies Yumeko for the whole show and is not a great gambler. He’s basically just there to tell her how the school works and watch her gamble. He helps her with some of the games along the way, but is highlighted in the last episode where he gambles for Yumeko’s place at the school, the biggest bet of all (nope, the several millions of dollars worth of bets wane in comparison to attending this school). Ah, this is a good point to talk about the characters.

Characters: In this show I feel that the main characters are pretty decently fleshed out and interesting. We meet most of the characters and learn about them as Yumeko meets them and destroys them at gambling games. This pattern goes up to the student council members as well, who turn out to be quite uhm… disturbed. As I have said and will probably say again, there were literally no adults in this show so all of the characters were school kids with unreasonable amounts of money and debt. In this regard the characters aren’t super believable, but I won’t dig to deeply into that since after all: it is an anime.

Animation Quality: Pretty good. There are some cool effects and transitions but the animation quality was pretty standard. The most interesting animation effect was with the characters faces as they became more twisted and crazy, often with sweat or spit and showing their mouths with crooked evil smiles. I wasn’t expecting it and it definitely gave a darker and twisted tone to the series. The show is set in a school, and is also about gambling, so there weren’t a whole lot of dynamic action scenes, but they handled the games nicely with dice and card animations that didn’t disappoint.

Immersion: This show succeeded in immersing me most when it focused on the actual wagers and games the students were betting on. They adequately played up how much was on the line for each party and I truly felt for these kids, often cheering on Yumeko when she did something crazy. Where the immersion is lost for me is on the adults, or I suppose the absence of adults. Some pretty radical things go on in this show that I don’t feel would be possible if an actual sane adult were there, but hey it’s a cool story anyway. The lack of adults seems like a necessary condition for all the insanity that happens at the school.

Fanservice: There was not really a lot of blatant fanservice in this show, which is to be expected. There were many moments where Yumeko and other characters would get quite “worked up” over their bets though…

Best Waifu: I gotta give this one to Saotome Mary. She was immediately destroyed by Yumeko and then developed a ton as a character and ended up helping her later in the show. Seeing her grow and develop gave me good vibes about her even though she was kind of a cheater. I am also a sucker for Mary’s tsundere moments throughout the series…

Anbu’s Rating: 4/5 – Pretty darn good~

Would I Re-watch?: Yeah I’d definitely give it a re-watch, especially since there is also a season 2. I binged this show a while ago and am just finishing up this review (I know, I’ve been slacking 😖) so I will definitely have to at least skim season 1 before starting the second. This first season was pretty interesting on its own, so I am eager to see what they do with the second season.

~Thanks for reading! If you agree or disagree or want to say hi or just like typing, make sure to leave a comment!