A waste of a pretty good production budget.

Kakegurui pretty quickly presents itself as one of Mappa’s best-looking shows, but I do not for the life of me understand why this specific show got so much hype around it while it was airing, because its tone problems are immediate and seemingly insurmountable. I was almost willing to forget my prejudices at the door (being one of the many people who saw Mother’s Basement brutally take this one down) and give it a proper go, but Kakegurui runs on two things – sexuality and gambling, and it flushes both of them down the toilet right away.

The sexuality aspect was always going to be lost on me because I’m not attracted to women and get no excitement from watching them sadistically (metaphorically) go at it, but the gambling just goes right out the window in the very first matchup, which happens very quickly – you would ordinarily see a show with the “psychological” tag at least taking its time, but halfway through the runtime of the premiere, we’re already almost done with the first gambling event, and our protagonist has pretty clearly been playing her opponent from the very beginning. After seemingly losing everything, she casually presents the room with $100,000 and dresses down the girl on the other side of the table, an alpha bitch who has been low-key cheating, beating her easily and demonstrating that she was in control the entire time.

While I’m fine with overwhelming shows of force by protagonists proving themselves in a first episode (it’s a staple of shonen and sports shows, after all), in a show primarily focused on the thrill of gambling, we immediately make Jabami’s stakes unclear, which might be okay if it didn’t set the tone of what I already know to be a future of her pulling massive amounts of money out of her ass at the drop of a hat and proving that she never really loses. That sounds boring as hell to me, so I’ll be leaving this after episode one, thank you.

Final Score: 4/10.