Two episodes of high stakes gambles and I do feel that I am going to run out of things to say about this one fast. I suppose I will start with the elephant in the room and address what could be Kakegurui’s most detrimental feature. The fact that it’s set in a school setting and the story goes out of it’s way to try and ignore that. Personally it’s a detail I find makes it hard to get invested in the setting as the more ridiculous the bets get then the harder it becomes to refuse to acknowledge the schools actual management. It’s a common trope of anime to elevate the status of the student council to some major governing party when the reality as I surmise it is that they are little more than a makeshift union leader with no real power. So when I hear of the student council president arranging for construction on the school and changing rules I just have to ask are the principal and teachers alright with this? I mean it’s rather ridiculous to give this level of power over the school to a teenager but this story does seem to be going out of it’s way to refuse to consider the existence of those in a higher position. Really as you consider it more and more than the setting of this series makes no sense at all. After all why would the government clearly overlook what is most definitely illegal gambling on school premises? As well as what idiot of a parent would allow their teenager child to attend a school where they can potentially take up a debt in the millions?
Perhaps there are explanations for these things in the future but right now it feels like Kakegurui has chained itself down with it’s setting. I honestly think it would be better to abandon the school setting entirely and just set it in a gambling city like las Vegas. It might be harder to keep the cast teenagers but hey, we could a more diversely aged group, not have character designs chained to the school uniform and with a city setting you could really get insane with the gambling setups. Let me put it this way, Imagine if No Game, No Life set itself in a school. It wouldn’t be nearly as entertaining as part of what made it good was the level of insanity and stakes behind each game. In Kakegurui’s case though no matter how much it builds up the antagonists, they are still just high school students. Not the best of the best but a bunch of brats playing Casino Royale. Nonetheless the safety net of having such a setting is that Yumeko can lose a bet. If she won every time it would be rather dull and even if she loses the that just means she needs to take a higher stakes bet to crawl out of the gutter. Which means that the bets can truly stay unpredictable.
What this series really does well is in portraying the mindset of someone truly willing to put everything on the line for a game of chance. The antagonists Yumeko faces are indeed insane but Yumeko is far more insane than any of them. A big part of the bet’s so far is Yumeko noticing that the enemy is cheating in some fashion and then working to remove the safety net they have set up for themselves. Yumeko is a girl that truly only wants a fair gamble where both participants are putting everything on the line which truly makes her insanity and ecstasy over the gamble a intimidating madness. She makes it a fair game and then pushes them into gamble with their lives on the line. In truth she isn’t really a hero of sorts but rather a devil outsmarting lesser devils. Though they do tend to go a bit overboard with the expressions sometimes, even the most normal individuals seem to transform into massive caricatures at the drop of a hat.
Ah, but dear fellow, for me the allure of the manga was the character faces.