Anime Column] 100 Anime to Watch by Keyword! 100 Anime to Watch No.20 "Gaket Kegurui" and more!

Drinking parties among anime fans tend to be a game of association. Whenever someone says, "XXX has XXX scene," someone else replies, "Speaking of XXX scene, don't forget XXX. Anime and animation are connected by invisible threads like this. Let's follow the "anime to watch" using keywords as clues.

Hyakkaou Academy is a private school known as a prestigious high school. However, it is a world of the weak and the strong, where students are ruled by a pecking order determined by gambling. If a student loses at gambling and is saddled with a large amount of debt, he or she is a "chattel. The members of the student council reign at the top of such students. The story begins when a beautiful black-haired girl, Jabami Yumeko, transfers to this Hyakkaou Academy.

This is the setting of " Gaket Kegurui " by Kawamoto Homura and Naomura Toru, which was adapted into an anime as a work for the July 2017 season.
As the title suggests, this work is about betting kegurui-gambling madness. Even Yumeko Snake Plumeko, who seems to be a quiet character who would not even kill an insect, reveals her true nature as a gambling fanatic who gets more passionate about high-risk gambles during the gambling shuraba.

Many of the gambles that appear are original.
The first one to appear in the first episode is "Voting Rock-paper-scissors. Classmates freely write Goo, Choki, or Par on their cards and vote; the two players draw three cards from the ballot box and play there. Episode 2 is a double nervous breakdown using two sets of playing cards. Episode 3 features a game called "Life or Death," which is a combination of roulette and gambling.
In each of these games, the chip rate is extremely high. For example, in "Voting Rock-paper-scissors," each card costs 10,000 yen. In "Double Nervous Breakdown," for example, each card costs 1,000,000 yen.

In fact, the appeal of gambling games lies not only in the thrill of the betting, but also in the pleasure of "running out" of one's fortune like it was hot water.
For example, in the first episode, Yumeko Snake-Eater, who seems to have been driven into a corner, challenges the game again by plunging a huge amount of cash into the game. This just barely balanced play with the temptation of "debauchery" is what makes "Kake Kegurui-" "Kake Kegurui-".

Thus, the theme of this issue is gambling.

Speaking of gambling, one can't miss the anime adaptations of Nobuyuki Fukumoto's manga "Gambling Revelation Kaiji" and "Gambling Breakthrough Kaiji ", "Gyakkou Muyo Kaiji " and " Gyakkou Muyo Kaiji: Breakthrough Kaiji Arc ".

This work, in which Kaiji, who has been living a life of self-indulgence, goes through various gambling hells in order to pay off his debts, is addictive in its tension that keeps Kaiji on the edge and on the edge of his seat.

The anime version would not be complete without Fumihiko Tachiki's high-octane narration. And Kaiji, he's having a grand old time! and other memorable lines from the original work are read with great effort, a style of narration that has since become so popular that it has even been used as a parody in variety shows.

Gambling anime tends to have less movement and a more subdued setting, but in this case, the narration adds to the flavor of the work. (In the anime "Kaket Kegurui," the so-called "face art," in which faces with a hint of madness are drawn, plays a role in the narration.)

On the other hand, " Mardock Scramble " depicts gambling in a high-class casino. The original work of the same title by Ubukata Tow is divided into three books: "Compression," "Combustion," and "Exhaust. The animation was produced as an animated film trilogy of one hour each of these. The casino scene appears in the third film, "Exhaust.

The main character, a young girl named Barot, infiltrates a casino in order to bring Shell, the man who put her out of her misery, to justice, aiming for the four million dollar chips with his data hidden inside. There, Barrot. She meets Belle Wing, a woman who is a casino spinner (a casino employee who throws in the ball and announces the winning numbers). Belle Wing talks to Barot about "life" and "luck," and her words deeply support Barot. Indeed, casinos are the perfect place to think about life and luck.
Incidentally, in addition to roulette, poker and blackjack appear as gambling games.

And finally, there is Summer Wars.
In order to defeat the Love Machine, a program that wreaks havoc in the Internet world, the heroine Natsuki challenges it to a game of Koikoi, a game of Hanafuda (Japanese playing cards) on the Internet. Koikoi is a game that Natsuki was taught by her grandmother. Here, the game is not about money, but about the 400 million account that was stolen by the Love Machine. The glamour of the hanafuda cards also contributes to the visual excitement of the climax of the game.

Gambling is the spice of life, and there is no doubt that the truth of life lies therein. That is why it is also the subject of animation.

Please do not let yourself be swallowed by the charm of "debauchery" in reality. ......

(Text by Ryota Fujitsu)

Recommended Articles