Kaiji
Sunday, May 4th, 2008 |
When Kaiji first came out, I was hesitant to watch. The first impressions weren’t so good. The artwork resembles some old, old anime. I thought the animation wouldn’t be up to standard so I completely skipped the title.
Weeks after, I stumbled upon a review of Kaiji. To my surprise Kaiji was a story of a gambler in distress. I became interested almost instantly. I searched for a batch download of all current episodes in a popular torrent site. Lucky for me, the anime wasn’t licensed yet. There number of seeders and leechers were very healthy, and I managed to finish downloading all 26 episodes within one week.
Episode 1 was a complete stunner. It portrayed Kaiji as the “suffering pariah” who is unemployed and lives on cheap beer. He survives on cheap gambles, so I assume he is either a somewhat lucky person or very skilled in common games such as blackjack or baccarat. Later on, he was approached by a member of the triads to settle a loan that his friend took. You see, Kaiji was fooled to be the guarantor. So when his friend disappeared, the triads look for Kaiji to settle the loan.
Kaiji didn’t have the money so the triad member offered him a place in a ship called Espoir. Espoir, in French, means “hope”. The ship was an opportunity for Kaiji to earn some money to repay the debt, and at the same time win some for himself. He almost immediately took the chance and boarded the ship soon after.
When he boarded the ship, he was surprised that the ship was full of debtors like him. They were all penniless desperados, all hoping to win a fortune on the ship. The catch here is that at most half on the ship will win some money and the other half on the ship will sink deeper in their debts, be imprisoned and forced to do manual labor. Players have to play each other to win among themselves. Who is to benefit from this? The triads. Before any actual gambling started, they loaned each player a some of money within the range of 1 million to 10 million. The interest of 1.5% compounds every 10 minutes, so the players will find themselves owing the triads millions within hours.
The first half of the season shows how Kaiji outsmart the other players and thus surviving the cruise. However, it was not all smooth sailing for Kaiji. He was betrayed, tricked and lied to in the beginning of the game. Difficult circumstances forced Kaiji to take desperate measures to tip the scale to his favor. In my opinion, the anime totally displayed the true human character. When one is desperate, one would do anything in his power to obtain something by hook or by crook. In this anime, it seemed that people opted to achieve something by crook more often.
The second half was the real kicker. While the penalty of the first gamble was only debts, debts and more debts; losing in the second gamble can end in death. Players were given a second shot at fortune, but this time the stakes were higher. Players are told to cross a bridge from one building to another. The catch is that the bridge becomes narrower with each step. Somewhere in the middle of the bridge, people started falling off, because they lost balance. Ultimately, only Kaiji survived the bridge, but due to the hosts’ nature of being extremely cunning, he didn’t get any cash from the ordeal.
Pissed, Kaiji was given another shot with a psychological game of E-card. In this game he was forced to wear a contraption that will drill either an eye or an ear. He chose to wear the ear contraption, because the fear or seeing the drill piercing the eye was too overwhelming. E-card was a simple card game, because it contains only three types of cards; the emperor, slave and citizens.
Here’s the catch. The contraption will drill nearer and nearer to Kaiji’s ear everytime he lost a game. He is required to bet by the millimeters. Once he loses 30 millimeters, the drill will pierce his eardrums and that will be the end of the game. Kaiji went for the impossible and bet 10 millimeters on the first and second games. Though he won pretty easily, it gave his opponent a good look at his expressions to gauge his cards in the coming rounds.
As a result? His opponent won about 8 or 9 games in a row. The drill ended up only 5 or 6 millimeters from his eardrum. At this point of time, Kaiji found out the real reason why the opponent managed to cough up that many wins in a row. It was the contraption that gave it away. It was sending information to his opponent’s watch. Information such as blood pressure and pulse rate were displayed clearly on his watch. There was no way for Kaiji to hide that information from his opponent.
So? In the end he tore his ear with contraption, and fooled his opponent for two games, netting him a win of 20.1 million. He used the 20.1 million to challenge the boss of the triads, as revenge for the players who died in the cause of the games. He came up with a raffle game. He decided to cheat in the game, for a big win of 100 million. The boss decides to value Kaiji’s fingers at 10 million each, so if he loses he would have to cut off his fingers. The psychological pressure makes it very difficult for Kaiji to maintain his cool.
In the end he lost, and had his fingers chopped off. The boss outwitted him and saw through his scheme right at the beginning. To be honest I was surprised with the ending because I was rooting for Kaiji.
As I did more research on the Internet, I realized that the manga version had gone pretty far ahead. This is probably why the boss survived the bet, and Kaiji will surely return to attempt another bite on the boss. There will be more games after this and I hope the second season will be released soon!
This is by far one of the best anime I’ve watched.
