Gamble Fish

thor123 Jan 23, 2015

5.1

Review edited after completing the manga  Story and characters Gamble Fish tells the story of a mysterious transfer student called Tomu Shirasagi, a guy who will later on be called an "extreme gambler" because he plays all kinds of ridiculous games to get money, to defend his gambler's honour, to show how you can cheat at games in ridiculous ways and to get to play a game against the "villain" of the story. It's basically like yu-gi-oh's "season zero" (so before it was all about the card games): random games, often cheats, and a main character who will always find a ridiculous way to pull through. Although some games/cheats/characters (see Abidani) are kind of ridiculous (even though Abidani was ridiculous in a cool way), I was always interested in seeing what kind of cheats the author would think of now, and I found the story (although there's more games than storyline) to be interesting anyway. It kinda derails towards the end and gets kinda ridiculous though - suspension of disbelief can only go so far, and this series went far beyond that limit. The deadly games become more complicated, but the pacing made them feel less interesting. This seems to be the reason why the authors decided to throw in some supernatural (or at least very far-fetched science fiction) stuff - in the form of Abidani and his backstory - as well as military themes (why hello there mister President, and hi there special forces who have to fight teenagers). All this nonsense makes Shirasagi's struggle feel like an afterthought, and with his basic shounen personality this makes him not all that interesting. In fact, most of the characters are uninteresting: be it the members of Shirasagi's harem, the little "Mushroom", or some of the annoying cheaters that get their asses whupped by Shirasagi: they're all so bland. Some of them only serve to explain the games, while others don't have any function except for fanservice.  This leaves only 2 interesting characters: the director of the school Shirasagi transfers to, and Abidani. Taking a look at my score of 4/10 for the characters, I have to say that 2 of those 4 points are there because Abidani was goddamn awesome. Art While I am no expert in rating art in manga, the art in Gamble Fish seemed mostly okay for me, although not great either. Shading was often well done, but I have huge problems with the way female eyes were portrayed: especially in later chapters, they're all gooey like in shoujo-manga, which felt very misplaced. Overall I really like these kind of manga about games, which is why I still got some enjoyment out of this manga although it's not very good. You have to be able to tolerate the fanservice though: the ecchi tag is well-deserved, to the point where one would start doubting if this isn't some hentai/ero manga (with depictions of female orgasms in front of a crowd... )  TL;DR came for the plot, stayed for the games and boobs (and also butts of course)