Sorry I'm late again, part of it was that I was out of town last week. The rest of it, well, we'll get into that. The anime we're looking at today appears at first to be a show about gambling, and that is entirely true. However, for those of you who often fall prey to the itch, a word of warning. This show takes it to entirely new levels as the protagonist takes increasingly more risky bets, and not just with money, we're talking lives and even corporal mutilation. This show is not for the faint of heart, and I can't argue if you don't want to go any further. But if you do, then we may as well get this over with. So get out your playing cards, and be ready to psyche out your opponents, today we're looking at
Gyakko Burai Kaiji: The Ultimate Survivor.
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Attention duelists! I swear, if some of the show were cut
out this could have been Yu-Gi-Oh! EXTREME! If the stakes
were less harsh, these might just be adult card games. |
If
Yu-Gi-Oh! somehow went through a trans-dimensional warp and ended up cross-pollinating with the Origami Killer's challenges from the video game
Heavy Rain, and maybe a little bit of the movie
Saw, not only would that be royally screwed up, but it might be somewhat close to what this show is. And that's not a good thing, especially for someone who didn't go in expecting such extremes. Most people who know me know I don't do so well with horror and extreme shock value anyway. But to the nitty gritty. The anime is based on the manga
Tobaku Mokushiroku Kaiji (lit. Gamblin Apocalypse Kaiji), which was written by Nobuyuki Fukumoto, and has been running intermittently in Young Magazine since it's first publishing in 1996. The anime was produced by Madhouse and ran on NTV between October of 2007 and April of 2008, though it has not seen any licensing over here. Along with this anime, which covers the first half of the series, it has produced a live-action film and a second season which is currently airing in Japan.
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Funny. Espoir apparently means hope, and yet the ship which
carries that name is such a hopeless place. The guy who runs
this place is not without a sense of irony. |
The story begins with a situation many an American has become sadly familiar with. The main character, Kaiji Itou, is a down on his luck waste of humanity. Unable to find gainful employment because of the Japanese recession of the 1990's, and reviled by everyone around him, he finds himself down an even deeper hole due to the fact that he'd cosigned for a loan that one of his friends had taken out. Because his friend disappeared, he gets landed with paying the full cost of the loan. Seeing as how you can't draw blood from a turnip, he's offered an alternative by Yujii Endou, the Yakuza-connected loan shark who gives him the news about the debt. In the near future, there's a gambling ship where people can go to try and win enough money to get their debts paid off. But there's a catch. If you lose, you end up disappearing, possibly off to a shady work camp to pay your debts off through labor. Ignoring the sane path of realizing the whole thing is probably horribly rigged and not going (which admittedly would make for a very short series), Kaiji boards the ship, determined to win at any cost.
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Another possible tagline for the show: "Dumb people gamble
on doing stupid things for debt relief." I swear, if this
guy hadn't made the wrong choices before, he wouldn't be in the
situation he's in. |
At first glance the world this takes place in is your standard 1990's Japan. No one's making that much money and everyone's grumpy about it because their finding their dreams of success slipping through their fingers. (It's not so funny when you're living it, I have to admit.) However, the deeper we get into the show, the more apparent it becomes that it is less realistic and more of a desperate nightmare. The police are no where in sight, the yakuza run amok, and those who are dumb enough to get involved with their desire to see other people suffer are little better off than animals being led to slaughter. It's not a very pleasant world, and there are some very unpleasant characters around. And that unpleasantness starts with the main character. Kaiji struck a very strong nerve with me, though it was less empathy, as it was a reaction of pure and utter revulsion. Maybe it was because the situation he was in at the beginning struck too close to home (I can relate to the not being gainfully employed and always being worried about financial concerns in a recession), or maybe because as crafty as he is, he's still doing some pretty dumb things. I don't know but something about him is like a train wreck. You want to look away, but I guess the schadenfreude-seeker in some of us just can't. Even if at times he had more backbone than some of the supporting cast, it wasn't the kind I particularly find redeeming. The supporting cast is about as one dimensional as they come. Just a bunch of scared guys who are in over their heads. It's true in the first part of the show when they play the card game Restricted Rock Paper Scissors on the Espoir (the ship), and it's true in the later parts of the show as well.
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This guy may seem imposing, but Tonegawa is just the
dragon who serves a much more evil master. |
The villains are even more ridiculous and one dimensional. Both the obvious villains, Yukio Tonegawa and his boss who remains nameless until right at the end of the show are only conducting these gambles because of some sick desire to watch others suffer for money. In that sense, based on what their history seems to be, and how many calculated unnamed victims they've claimed with their various games, I'd say they're both up there with the Vlad the Impaler. To call them sadists, may be too kind. The events they put together that Kaiji ends up taking part in are often used as entertainment for the parties of the super rich (presumably of the illegal variety) and many of the challenges are quite cruel, encouraging the players to hurt each other, as in the second challenge which involves the participants crossing a steel girder in a race, which encourages them to push each other off, usually with painful and highly injurious consequences when they hit the ground. This nihilisitic view on the world quickly turns many of the participants into little more than violent animals, trying to claw their way to a hopeless victory as the onlookers snicker, and it only gets worse.
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At this level, you'd actually survive if you fall. You're lucky
I didn't decide to show any of the worse stuff from later. |
There was only one redeeming quality about the show, and that was Kaiji's sense of courage, in the face of adversity, later in the the show. Even that was not enough to save it from the rest of the criteria from which I'm viewing it. I know there are some people out there who love horror and love to see characters receive horrible (maybe even crippling) setbacks, but even so, I fail to understand why some people thought this show was good. It creates a picture of the world where the worst is expected of everyone, and the have-nots are only trying to get back at the haves for what they perceive as their unjust circumstances. And the cost of failure is not only horrific, but at some points, nightmarish. In the latter half of the show, after crossing two of those girder bridges (the second being higher up and electrified) Kaiji is forced to wager first his ear on a card game, (which he eventually cuts off himself to win. Dear Lord, there was blood was everywhere!) and then the fingers on his left hand in the increasingly high stakes gambles. At the point where he wagered the ear, he was given the choice between that and his eye. Thank goodness he opted out of the
eye scream. I don't think I could have taken that. It was bad enough watching Tonegawa get his face burned off when he lost. This is after Kaiji faces betrayal after betrayal in the earlier parts of the show, which only ends after his climactic (and traumatic) face-off with Tonegawa's boss, and then, in a very unsatisfactory conclusion involving the loss of his fingers. (Fortunately, they did not show it.)
In terms of presentation, the art is heavily stylized with long noses and very distinctive faces, but they serve as nightmarish reminders of how unreal the whole situation is. Even so, the animation is actually not bad, considering the genre. In terms of the music, it was something of a mixed bag. There were some more dramatic pieces that I liked, and others that were kind of annoying, but not
hing outright horrible. That changes with the opening theme song, "Mirai wa Bokura no Te no Naka" by the Rebourn Cherries. While appreciated the sentiment of the song, the title of which literally says "the future is in our hands" I absolutely hated the song, as it was loud, obnoxious and had no melody at all. The ending theme "Makeinutatsu no Requiem" by Hakuryuu, had a much bluesier feel which was somewhat helpful bu not enough to save the show. The cast is led by Masato Hagiwara as Kaiji, and he does a decent job of playing the character, but just because he pulled off the character isn't a guarantee of likability, and Kaiji, from my position has none. I hated this guy's guts, I was wishing he'd just go to the labor camp and disappear, and that he'd stop doing dumb stuff, and there were parts of the show where I didn't want to keep going, which is the other reason I took so long to get this review up. I hated this show, I hated most of the stuff about it, and I hope I never roll the second season because I never want to see Kaiji again! And that's the tiger's two cents.
Images taken from Gyakko Burai Kaiji: The Ultimate Survivor.
