Kakegurui / 賭ケグルイ

Oh, Kakegurui...

It’s stylish, sexy, and over-the-top. It’s become relatively well-known, giving some much-needed exposure to the psychological/games genre. Unfortunately, as far as psychological/games anime go, it’s pretty bad.

Yumeko Jabami has just transferred to Hyakkaou Private Academy. Everyone at Hyakkaou Private Academy likes to gamble. This is good for Yumeko, because Yumeko likes to gamble.

Actually, that might not be the right way to describe it.

Yumeko loves to gamble.

...Actually, that might not be the right way to describe it.

Yumeko’s entire being is consumed purely by the compulsion to gamble.

On top of this, not only is every student at Hyakkaou obsessed with gambling, but they’re also all filthy stinking rich, as Hyakkaou is an elite school for the children of the wealthy and powerful. This set-up allows us to have high-stakes gambles despite the fact that we’re dealing with teenagers, but also leads to one of Kakegurui’s major flaws (which I’ll cover later).

Kakegurui follows Yumeko’s adventures competing in some crazy gambles with the crazy students.

Currently, there are two seasons to the anime. In the first season, Yumeko arrives at Hyakkaou and engages in various gambles against members of the student council, who (as is standard in school-based anime) rule the school and are regarded as the strongest gamblers. In the second season, the student council president initiates a gambling tournament with the student council president seat as the top prize, and invites other members of her family to the school to compete in the tournament.

First, let’s discuss Kakegurui as a gambling anime.

I’ll start with the flaw I alluded to earlier: stakes. Stakes are the core of any gambling manga. While it’s possible to enjoy a game or two for the sake of it, stakes are what keep us invested in the story and make us want to have the protagonist win. We don’t want Nao and Akiyama to go horrendously into debt in Liar Game, we don’t want Zero to get injured or killed in Gambling Emperor Legend Zero, and we don’t want Tom to fail to avenge his father in Gamble Fish.

In Kakegurui, the students gamble for absurdly large amounts of money... and yet we still do not have compelling stakes. The issue is that we don’t know what this money means to the students. In Liar Game, Nao is just an ordinary girl, so going $1 million into debt would be life-shattering. In Kakegurui, they might have a gamble for $1 million, which sounds like a lot—but if the student’s family runs a billion-dollar company, it’s not. If the student only has $10 million, then $1 million is fairly sizable.

But we don’t know any student’s net worth! The characters constantly throw huge bets around when gambling, but without any sense of each character’s wealth and ability to pay, these are nothing more than meaningless numbers. Even worse, Yumeko herself is absurdly rich, even in comparison to the other characters, so the “massive” gambles mean next to nothing to her. We don’t find this out until later, but it invalidates basically all monetary stakes Yumeko has in the plot, which is not great for an anime all about gambling over money. There are some gambles for more than just money, which does help a bit, but a lack of compelling stakes is definitely a persistent flaw in Kakegurui.

The other major flaw is that Kakegurui fails to deliver on the fundamental promise of a “games” manga, although this is much more of a problem in season 1.

“Games” manga are essentially detective stories. This might sound a bit strange at first, but I firmly believe it’s true. In the taxonomy of genres, “games” are closer to classic detective fiction than any other genre—even those typically grouped under the general “mystery” umbrella.

The reason for this is that “games” stories and detective fiction draw their appeal from the exact same place: the clever and clued solution to a logical problem. In detective fiction, the problem is the truth behind a crime, and the solution is constrained by the evidence we discover. In “games” stories, the problem is how to win the game, and the solution is constrained by the rules of the game. In both, we expect the protagonist to solve the problem at issue, and to do so with style and by using the established facts known to the audience.

But if “games” manga are functionally equivalent to detective fiction, Kakegurui is a thriller rather than a golden age detective story.

Yumeko is OP. That’s what it comes down to.

In most stories, our protagonist is the underdog. While power fantasies can be fun, we are usually much more interested in and satisfied by watching someone overcome a challenge than win from a pure power imbalance. While the protagonist in a “games” story is nearly guaranteed to be incredibly smart, they often have no further special skill than that, and are also often put into disadvantaged positions from which they have to come back from. For instance, in Liar Game, while we don’t meet a character to challenge Akiyama’s intelligence until the fourth game, in both the first and third game, Nao puts herself into the worst possible position before Akiyama gets involved.

Instead of putting the protagonist in a disadvantageous position, a “games” manga can create challenge for the protagonist by giving their opponent a unique or rare skill that increases their ability at the game. One of the opponents in Liar Game has incredible dynamic visual acuity, allowing them to follow cards as they’re shuffled in a card game. Gamble Fish is rife with characters with crazy abilities, including a character who essentially can mind control people. But, as ridiculous as it gets, I think it’s fine! Even though Gamble Fish essentially has magic powers, it still follows the fundamental promise of “games” stories for two reasons: it tells us what the powers are, and Tom (the protagonist) himself never gets any powers. If Gamble Fish didn’t explain the abilities, then the “solutions” would stop being based on established facts. If Tom had powers of his own (besides intelligence), the solutions would stop being clever.

And this is why Yumeko being overpowered is an issue. She seems has superhuman ability in nearly every category. Giving the protagonist unique powers can work if they’re established and clearly defined, but Yumeko just pulls out whatever skill she needs whenever she needs it. Instead of winning the gambles with a clever strategy, Yumeko breezes through it because she has a perfect sense of time, or temperature, or weight, or whatever is needed for her to win the game.

Imagine a story where the protagonist beats an Olympic-level sprinter in a footrace, and then we find out the protagonist is actually The Flash. He didn’t win from any particular effort or strategy, he just happened to have a special skill that gave him the ultimate edge in their method of conflict, and in fact the skill gap between the protagonist and his competitor was so great that was never even any real competition to begin with. This is essentially what happens in Kakegurui with Yumeko.

With these two massive flaws cutting directly against the core of what makes “games” manga appealing, I have no choice but to give Kakegurui my whole-hearted endorsement.

Is Kakegurui a good “games” anime? No. Is it a fun show? Well... yeah.

While the stakes issue is consistent throughout the series, the second season comes a long way in rectifying Yumeko’s issues. Due to the story, the nature of the games change in the second season compared to the first, alleviating much of the problem. I don’t think this was an intentional change, but I’m fine with it.

The first season is very much about “gambling.” Every game but one is (arguably) one-on-one, and every game involves random chance. This is because the first season is about introducing Yumeko and the student council members, so the games mostly pit Yumeko against the student council member of the week.

The second season is about “games.” Only one game is one-on-one, and three of the games involve no random chance whatsoever. The second season introduces the student council president’s clan members, but still needs to give screen-time to the existing characters. As a result, the games typically involve one or two new characters, one or two existing characters, and Yumeko. With three-to-five player games rather than one-on-one gambles, the second season of Kakegurui feels a lot more like a traditional “games” manga than the first season.

On top of this, in the second season, Yumeko just kind of... stops doing things. She’s still a participant in most of the games, but she’s seldom the driving force behind the game’s resolution. The games in the second season are meant to showcase the new characters and the student council members, so they’re the ones who pull off most of the action. As a result, the games feel more “fair,” since these characters do win using established facts, rather than random superhuman abilities.

The show is also fun to watch, just from a visual standpoint. The bright color palette and detailed animation keep the visuals pretty and engaging. And then we have the faces. If you somehow haven’t seen pictures of them, Kakegurui will often grossly exaggerate its characters faces at moments of extreme emotionality, whether that emotion is positive or negative. Especially when the characters feel triumphant, things can get a bit... risqué.

I actually think this is a really neat stylistic choice. In action-based scenes, a show can convey the power of an attack with size, color, timing, sound, and animation. But the feeling of a successful intellectual attack is much harder to convey. The extreme facial expressions show the depth of the characters’ feelings, which might not otherwise be conveyed, and the tying of the intellectual satisfaction of winning a gamble to the primal feeling of sexual gratification provides an avenue to understanding the characters’ euphoria.

The cast consists of a wide variety of ridiculous, visually striking teenagers, each with their own quirk or two. Since each character (besides Yumeko) gets basically only one game a season, they each get limited characterization, but the exaggerated designs and personalities help keep them distinct. Kakegurui does sometimes try to explore the characters through the games, and it’s... hit-or-miss. Sometimes we do get a decent character study, and other times it’s just nonsense.

Yumeko herself is fairly unique. Her main personality point is that she is obsessed with gambling. This may sound pretty standard, especially for a “games” story, but she takes this way beyond any other character I’ve seen. Also, she is obsessed with “gambling” itself—not with “winning gambles.” Yumeko is in it purely for the thrill of the unknown result; she’d hate a game rigged to guarantee her victory as much as—if not more than—a game rigged to guarantee her defeat. This doesn’t actually affect the way she plays the games that much, but it heavily influences her interactions with some of the characters, and leads to some counterintuitive and entertaining relationships.

At the end of the day, Kakegurui feels like it was made for mass consumption and appeal. There are cute anime schoolgirls! In sexy poses! There’s a large cast of characters, so none of them get particularly deep or interesting characterization, but there’s enough of them that at least one will probably appeal to you. The resolutions to the games are sure to surprise you (because they typically aren’t clued very well). They also might not stand up to close scrutiny, but who thinks too deeply about them anyway?

I’m fine with all this. Kakegurui has serious flaws as a “games” anime, but those issues make Kakegurui entertaining in other ways. For someone who hasn’t explored the genre, Kakegurui could serve as a gateway to more serious “games” manga like Liar Game or FKMT, and for experienced viewers Kakegurui can be the equivalent of junk food. Regardless of your background, as long as you don’t go in expecting anything too serious, a good time with Kakegurui is a safe bet.