Kaiji: The Ultimate Survivor (52 EP total) Review

Can an anime with bad art really tell a good story? Yes it can, and Kaiji is a prime example. Kaiji made me realize how luck is never on your side when gambling, and that one has to make his own road in life, whether that be through cheating or pain. However, people should never turn their back on their friends. That is something that even Kakashi from Naruto taught me at a young age:

"Those who break the rules are scum, that's true, but those who abandon their friends are worse than scum." -Hatake Kakashi

Look, I try to treat my friends equally, but sometimes it just doesn't work out. Sometimes, and I try to naïvely avoid this, there will come moments when two of my friendships are tested, and I will have to pick a side in the war, or be torn down completely. Those times are the hardest times. Digressions aside (or not), Itou Kaiji is a compulsive gambler who is in a great deal of debt. In the first season, he boards the ship Espoir and plays an intense multiplayer game of rock-paper-scissors in order to alleviate his debts. Instead, he ends up giving up his freedom for someone else, someone he only spoke a few words to. That moment of the anime was probably one of the most emotional moments for me. For Kaiji to give up his freedom to someone he had just met, Ishida-san, was so noble of him. I'll admit it, I bawled my eyes out. Great selfless sacrifice always gets me. Kaiji ends up being sent to an underground concentration camp where all he does is slave away in hopes of settling his debt of over a million yen.

In the second season, Kaiji gets a break when he learns of playing chinchiro, a dice game, with the head honchos of the underground camps. He skillfully defeats the Ootsuki, the group leader, taking all of Ootsuki's money earned from cheating at chinchiro. He buys a twenty day furlow, thus embarking on yet another journey, this time to make enough money to both settle his debts and free his friends who he made while plotting how outwit the head honcho at chinchiro, a game less based on luck the closer one looks. Finally aboveground, Kaiji finds out about the Bog, a legendary pachinko machine in one of the Company's gambling casinos, headed my Ichijou. By teaming up with Endou-san and Sakazaki, he manages to beat the odds and destroy the Bog. At the end, he is celebrating his new found freedom with his underground pals.

In the end, what drew me to love this anime was obviously not the horrendous, laughable art-style, but the stories. The noble actions of our lazy genius main character, the analogies that heighten tension like no other show I've watched, the booming voice of the narrator who makes every life-death situation Kaiji gets into seem so realistic, and the revelation of the true side of gambling (losing everything and being poor) these all make Kaiji one of my favorite animes ever.