English Dub Season Review: Kakegurui Season One

Kakegurui isn’t exactly playing with a full deck.

What do you get when you take a high school harem anime, make it about gambling, and give it a full-throttle injection of crazy pills? Why, Kakegurui, of course! The latest attempt by Netflix to get into the anime game, and boy oh boy, this one’s a real doozy.

Welcome to Hyakkou Private Academy, a high school (Because it’s always a high school) full of rich kids where everyone is obsessed with gambling. Your status, your success at the school, and even your ability to succeed later in life is all determined by your ability to kick the proverbial asses of your fellow classmates at gambling. Everyone’s rank in school is represented by their gambling winnings, and those at the top crush the losers at the bottom beneath their respective bootheels. Lose too much money, and you’re labeled as a house pet, and what’s worse, everyone at school will call you by a new name: Fido if you’re a boy, and Mittens if you’re a girl. Yikes. Lost in this world is our protagonist, Ryouta Suzui, who at the start of the series has lost it all to Meari, something of a queen bee at the school. However, Ryouta makes friends with a beautiful and mysterious transfer student, Yumeko Jabami, who trounces Meari and pays off Ryouta’s debt, earning his loyalty forever. The rest of the season focuses on Yumeko going up against the Hyakkou student council, beating them one by one at gambling and trying to get to the top.

If this sounds somewhat insane to you, that’s because it is. It’s a ludicrous idea, and you don’t have to be a genius to see that the plot is mostly a cheap setup for an episodic formula: Yumeko plays against a new game against a new character, figures out the cheat involved in the game, turn the tables, and wins. Wash, rinse, repeat. And then, of course, there’s the elephant in the room: the show’s “unique” sense of aesthetic. Yumeko does not just like gambling, she gets off on gambling, quite literally. Basically, what “Shokugeki no Souma” did for food, Kakegurui does for gambling.

But its anime, right? Its okay to be weird. Its okay to be eccentric; goodness knows I’ve fallen in love with shows like “Girls Und Panzer” that had ridiculous premises but were a fun watch. So, knowing that, is it any good?

No. No, it is not.

The main issue, like most stories of this type, is its characters. They’re nothing more than cardboard cutouts of characters we’ve all seen before. Yumeko is the insanely hot poster child of the show, Meari is an insane, uptight arrogant chick, Ryouta is a hapless, demographically-relatable young man. And, of course, each new villain of the week has some gimmick or singular defining personality trait to push things along. You’ve seen this setup before, and it’s tiresome.

But this would be okay if one could enjoy the spectacle of the gambling each episode, but even there, things feel half-baked. The show fails to preserve tension because after you’ve watched the first couple of episodes, you’ve figured out the shtick of the show. The game is always rigged with some kind of a cheat, Yumeko will initially lose, but figure out the cheat and turn things around with her impossible gambling abilities, and then turn the tables on her foe to take the win. Woooo. It gets old, fast. Gambling shows are sort of like mysteries in that we’re supposed to bear witness to a show of creative thinking, of cunning and strategy that pushes our characters to their limits while they try to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. But that isn’t present here, Yumeko is too amazing, too good at gambling, and too mad for any human to have empathy for. Without that empathy, there’s no stake, no conflict. All we’re left with is well-animated soft core pornography taking place at a poker table.

That does lead us to one of the show’s stronger points, however; its animation. While I consider it to be an uncreative use of talent, the show does take the time (And I assume, the budget) to make highly detailed facial expressions and body anatomy. It’s clear that’s where the creative development behind this show went, and that is something to note in the name of impartiality.

I would also like to note that, even though its a Netflix original, this show does not do anything interesting with the format of being an entire season available right from the get-go. Episodic anime are usually made to get repeat viewers on a weekly basis, but a show on Netflix doesn’t have to do this. Why it would confine itself to such a limiting format instead of doing something creatively interesting is completely beyond me.

I love a good gambling anime; I can still go back and watch “Kaiji” and enjoy each painful second of it. I can honestly say that I’ve enjoyed a few good harems too, “High School of the Dead” and “Baka to Test”, for example, but each of these shows had a certain something that made them stand out. This genre walks a fine line between “creative” and “shock”, and Kakegurui, despite its all its talk of gambling, is a bust. Don’t waste your time with this one.