DYNASTIA

The review may contain spoilers found in the Netflix description.
I started watching this, at first, because the description for this anime was dumb enough to make me laugh, I expected something very shite.
I don't know if I would go as far as to call it great, but it is quite tense and sexualized, enough to keep me watching the two seasons.

We follow the journey of a girl who gets turned on by gambling, in a school where the pecking order is governed by the house. Everyone cheats, but she likes to play. She's smarter and more cunning than most, so she manages to outdo them, sometimes by mere luck. There lies the strength of the series when it comes to gambling, seeing a force of nature wrecking torment on her opponents.

If the series often gets compared to Kaiji, it's unjustified. Yumeko seems to share more of a semblance to Akagi. Both are near unbeatable figures who share a taste for risk and disdain towards those they deem too cowardly to match them. Kaiji turns out to be a mediocre man who is far too commonplace. Technically, most should be able to identify with Kaiji more easily and find him more endearing. But that would be forgetting one of the primordial points of attachment and identification in a narrative work: the will to identify oneself. Mysterious and extraordinary characters such as Akagi and Yumeko naturally guide the viewers to become more attached to their destinies. There is an exotic fascination around characters whose actions someone can't rationalize immediately.

But there's a catch, Kakegurui takes a different characteristic approach.
The anime is fast-paced, often covering a single game within one or two episodes. Nothing is explained through viewer exposition, visual hints often get more explicit if one rewatches an episode after seeing the outcome of the game. In earlier episodes, we often have Ryota being explained the tactics behind certain tricks. This serves to alienate the viewer, in a sense. Even if one can be familiar with the real references and psychological tricks the show loves to cite.
It's odd for a gambling show because we aren't really meant to feel the stakes from Yumeko's perspective but from her opponents.
They are the main characters of their own arcs, we are shown why they choose to play, what they stand to lose, and some are presented with sympathetic motivations.
We feel the anxiety that takes over them when Yumeko gets closer and closer to breaking them because they simply don't stand a chance. It's not Manichean as other gambling animes, there's little to no character who is truly villainous. At most, they are tools of a hierarchical system that can take everything away from them.

The series also holds particular interest, because it's morbid and sexual. The main cast is almost entirely feminine, and we see them openly masturbate over the impossible odds. We feel the pleasure that dominates them in possibly losing everything, a deadly desire that is both sexual and masochistic. The numerous shots of the cast's erogenous zones (ass, lips, boobs, thighs..) only exist to excessively sexualize these students. But the morbidity of their fetish and the expressions they pull counterpoises the overabundant fanservice. These are young women who are ready to die so they can feel fulfilled, for a taste of risk.

After a while, it becomes impossible to heighten the stakes. Once a character has taken part in a game of Russian roulette, the thrill is sort of gone. So the series makes the games more rational, we go from simple challenges in the first season to a full-on game of thrones, with trials that are more complex and mathematical. We start to get more of this addiction to risk, where there isn't even anything to gain anymore, just the possibility of losing all hope.

This council president arc still isn't resolved at the end of the second season, leaving me a bit disappointed. But the series is short, no filler, no useless character arcs, and we never spend five episodes on a steel beam. So my usual gripes about anime adaptations aren't an issue here.

I might see some real legs in the live-action series until then, who knows.