Yeah, I've been lazy lately. And writer's blocked when I'm not feeling lazy! Astro Toy comes out of me like clockwork, on the other hand, cause if you pay me I get workin'! (EMPLOYERS!)
Anyway, you can tell I've been lazy because there have been big things going on. Things I care about. Things like Kaiji coming back.Did you know? Kaiji came back. Like, two months ago. The first arc is already over, and here I am telling you to watch it.
Depending on how you think about it, it's kind of a mercy that I'm telling you to watch Kaiji only now that a story arc with a definite ending has come to a close, because this show is viciously suspenseful. Nobuyuki Fukumoto's original manga is mean enough, but Madhouse's TV adaptations actually amplify the suspense. It doesn't reallly matter that I've read the entire second Kaiji manga fan-translated: I am on the edge of my seat for every single anime episode even though I know exactly what is going to happen. This stuff just has a pull.
Kaiji is a story of one young man's endless battle on the front lines of a bizarre class war: in this world the evil Teiai corporation spends most of its time hatching countless schemes in which to ensnare the favorite prey of the crazy old men who run the place: poor guys who have nothing to lose. Kaiji Itou is our relatable hero: a sloth and a loser so long as he isn't teetering directly on the line between life and death, at which point he becomes a genius trickster. So smart and yet so, so stupid, Kaiji works himself out of every predicament just in time to screw up royally, plunging himself into the next one. Last season Kaiji got himself in a deadly rock-paper-scissors tournament, a deadly game of cards, a deadly... basically if you can bet on it and if you can be killed for losing, Kaiji will play it.
This season he's in an underground prison camp playing dice for a ticket to the outside world, and just like the last time he did something this mundane, the show makes it gripping. It's the tension, the zawazawa, that booming narrator who absolutely shoves it all into your face. This isn't subtle stuff. If "he hates it," that narrator will tell you five or six times in a row that "HE HATES IT!" The dice battle takes about nine episodes, and by the end it's the closest you could actually get to murdering someone with dice.
The next arc is about pachinko, and it's even crazier. I'll leave it to you to find out, because you'll never guess the progressively more insane secrets behind the legendary "bog", a pachinko machine with a minimum investment of a couple hundred grand. In the manga it's ten books long, so I have to assume that this season of Kaiji will be 26 episodes long. If you haven't seen Kaiji at all, you could jump in on this season, but you'd be missing so much good stuff. Don't do that. Just watch it from the beginning. You won't want to stop, anyway.
Glad to hear it gets more crazy with the "bog", can't wait to see what tricks both sides have up their sleeves.
Posted by: Groove-A | June 21, 2011 at 02:10 AM