Gamble Fish

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Take an artist who decided not to care about realism for a change (AT ALL) and have him draw the most outlandish hero set against the backdrop of a school whose students learn absolutely nothing in an environment of gambling with constant life-and-death stakes. Throw in the most laughably demented villain who would have to be gay is he wasn't so evil, lots of fanservice that doesn't apologize to anyone, and snappy writing that makes you think twice at every turn and what do you get?

Gamble Fish. This manga is so incredibly bad, it's awesome. And when I say awesome, I mean I can't WAIT ... for the next chapter.

Shirasagi Tomu is a genius gambler searching for his captured dad, so he enrolls in Shishidou, a gambler school, to find challenges and earn enough money to get him back. Turns out, the headmaster, a psycho nutcase that makes this story so great, is the one holding Tomu's dad prisoner. That's convenient right?

There's really nothing else to explain besides that. The manga is a series of arcs where Tomu goes up against the best of the best in gambling showdowns. Cards, pool, dice, riddles - it's all game and the author shows he's a master of wit and surprises.

Seriously, give this manga a shot. If you remember not to take it seriously, you're going to be hooked!

In a school composed of elitist students, which is dominated by gambling matches with very high stakes, Shirasagi, the mysterious transfer student, declares war upon the school by stating that he will bring ruin to it through a series of gambling matches. Who is he? What are his motives? Gamble Fish appears to use an interesting concept, but fails to transmit a coherent and realistic storyline with uninteresting characters.

The story of Gamble Fish is simple: Shirasagi, an extreme gambler, who transfers to the famous Shishidou elite school where he challenges students in his conquest to bring ruin to it. As stated earlier, there is a ... gist to the matches: the stakes are extremely high. The bets ranges from "harmless" unaffordable amounts of money to own body parts, subjection to slavery in case of loss, even their own lives. What makes these confrontations even more interesting is, that as the story progresses, more complicated games surges with intricate "death" constructions.

This appears to be appealing, but there problems associated with it: the variety of games remain steady, but the various deathtrap constructions do not. In fact, the pacing in which these are introduced throughout the manga is fine for the beginning of it, but this has as problem that it is not possible to keep up with this pacing. This causes to lose the novelty in these traps, consequently a bit in the games as well.

To keep the readers interested, the author decides to introduce a different direction for the manga into supernatural powers and myths nonsense, as well as introducing military forces in a game; this is where all realism left. This was a rather big drawback, as so far the mangaka managed to create a somewhat realistic story progression with believable matches, even though being won through sheer luck or plot convenience. Going back to the story, the author manages to represent an image of what he considers how a real gambler is: ruthless, unwavering, knowledgeable and with a lot of guts, which was a positive point to the manga.

The characters of Gamble Fish are varied, be it directors or tengu, yet lack any depth. Shirasagi is your typical badass shōnen character who is good in everything he does, is good looking and has immensely success with the ladies. He seems to have an intriguing past, yet little of it is displayed. Throughout the series of matches Shirasagi defeats countless opponents, be it male or female, yet all females fall in love for the protagonist for no real reason, even for harem standards it's pretty unreasonable.

There is Mizuhara, whose only purpose is to highlight the main character and remark and explain the games; then all the other females, who basically have no personality at all, being the only distinguishable feature their character design. Some background story has been provided, but no expansion onto it is provided. The villain Abidani was the most interesting character, being a ruthless and insane gambler, which further enhances the ruthlessness and craziness of the manga.

Gamble Fish's art style is distinct and clean, yet character designs have the same facial designs, and thus don't really provide any real distinction, besides of me personally not being a fan of the art. Nevertheless, the facial expressions alongside with good shading, makes the art shine, though some inconsistencies can be found.

Now the question is whether Gamble Fish is enjoyable. Yes, it is, to a certain degree. But is it good? No, it is not. It tried to display a realistic storyline which was accomplished in the beginning, however with the unsatisfying change in narration in order to keep the manga entertaining, as well as over the top challenges just didn't leave any satisfaction. Characters are dull and shallow with little development, with a debatable art style. Recommendable if you're fan of ecchi/harem with over the top games, though even on these terms it fails to a degree.

Thank you for reading.

Gamble Fish is about a boy and his quest for money. Lots of money. But unlike us humans who have to get an actual job and put in actual effort for our money, this 14 year old boy can gamble his way to fortune. This super human talent of his is what keeps you coming back for more.

Story - Pretty basic. The main character, Shirasagi, goes through a series of matches, picking up a new girl when he wins. There's a little bit of his past revealed after each victory, which only seems to spark more questions about where he came from. All of this ... is interesting, but it's during Shirasagi's matches that the manga really shines. The boy's extraordinary skill and intellect is, as I said, super human. But all his tricks and schemes would, in theory, work in real life. This makes it fun to read about the impossible corner he's gotten himself into and wonder to yourself: "How's he going to get out of this one?" Exactly how he does is always revealed after his victory.

Art - Nothing to complain about here. It's sharp, well drawn, and looks like it should. Sometimes the people in the stands look like the little critters in Wii baseball, which is to say it lacks detail. But unless you really study the pages, your eyes will be happy with the art.

Character - The main character is, as I said, brilliant. This mystery surrounding him and his circumstances is slowly being revealed as new chapters are released. The many side characters could definitely benefit from some development, but since there's been only 29 chapters so far, I'm holding back criticism on this one.

Enjoyment - I would pick this up while you wait for new chapters of your favorite manga to come out. Is this going to eclipse your current favorite? Probably not. But you'll find yourself engrossed in Shirasagi's world of professional gambling long enough to forget your want of that next chapter for a while. Go ahead; give it a try. You won't regret it.

Art
Unstable, acceptable mostly but the first chapter cover made me wonder if the cover girl did not have goldfish somewhere up her family tree.
I would say the drawing is very subjective, some people love it and others hate it.
Also, the comic has a lot of unnecessary fanservice, and i mean a lot. Definitely a guy (or lesbian) comic.

Conclusion placed here for readers to avoid spoilers.
Conclusion, unsuitable for reading this comic seriously as it is weak and shallow, unsuitable for reading it lightly as it has a serious tone. Half-ass comic from a half-ass writer who doesn't give a hoot. If you are looking ... for a good read, try any of the 4 recommendations, they are much better than this. If you just want something to while your time, then why not try this? At the very least, it's readable.




WARNING! SPOILERS!WARNING! SPOILERS! STOP HERE TO AVOID SPOILERS!



I WARNED YOU!!







Poor plot,
Hardly anything is said about the main character's motives, making it difficult to side with the character. In fact, the main characters are hardly developed at all. The main character is just a swindler, who comes from a family of swindler and is 15. Why he swindles is apparently because it runs in the family. This goes on for at least 18 chapters.

Weak character motives,
it is mostly the various character's actions that drives this story, so weak character motives in this case would equate to weak plot.
The story runs based on the other characters' poorly explained action of challenging the main character to a gamble. For example, one of the challenger challenges the main character because he pulled of a party trick (party trick in ch 3) and this gets so unexplainedly serious that the main character had his own finger cut off and his challenger was willing to cut off 4 of her fingers, just to...prove a point? Also that point was that party tricks insults magicians. (WTF!?)

Mostly predictable swindling strategy
example, the first game, the coin game, the main character finds the coin through process of elimination. What?! Seriously? The coin is soo small, and there was only 20 places for him to eliminate, while there are probably a few thousand places to hide the coin and yet he manages to find it? Also, one of the places to eliminate was, "the coin was hidden in the student desks" the desks? not telling which one? So he could just eliminate all the desks in one fell swoop? There must have been like, at least 40 desks, that makes at least 40 hiding places, what kind of lousy game and solution is this?

All these and it relies on the loophole that gambling would be allowed in any school in such a public manner (various committee members and even a teacher is involved) especially since the school is apparently well known and prestigious.

A bit about me. I am a fan of mind-games, gambling strategies and trickery. Knowing this, you can probably see why this unusually titled manga piqued my curiosity. I began racing through the series, bubbling with excitement and anticipation. However, after reading it, I must make a modification to those criteria. I am now a fan of mind-games, gambling strategies and trickery that make sense.

Yes, Gamble Fish is a very flawed attempt at creating a high octane manga centred around gambling, steadily getting more and more ridiculous until it begins to feel like a bizarre parody of the genre. It had potential until it became ... absolutely saturated with cheap gimmicks, hackneyed writing, awful characters and general ennui after the manga’s repetitive tricks lose their charm.

There is an overall plot here, which loosely strings together the gauntlet of gambling games the main characters must go through. It is simple and forgettable and mainly has to do with the protagonist, Shirasagi Tomu, trying to rescue his kidnapped father by joining an elite school known for its prowess for gambling. We can sense that Shirasagi cares about his father, but this set-up fails because it is never given any real emotional weight. Adding emotional weight to this scenario would have not been difficult at all; it could have been something as simple as showing a flashback of Shirasagi’s life before being traumatically separated from his dad, but the author only puts the bare minimum amount of effort into this whole set-up. This dictates to us that the author doesn’t want us to care at all about the overall plot; just sit back and enjoy the delicious, juicy, psychological gambling games. There is nothing particularly wrong about an underdeveloped set-up in a genre like this, as the quality of the games should be able to compensate for this. The problem is that the games are nowhere near as juicy as they should be. On the surface they look very appetising and you will be eager to sink your teeth into them, but you’ll be disappointed to find that they are dry, undercooked and will probably end up leaving a bad taste in your mouth. I’m not sure why I went for an extended food-related metaphor here, but it seems to summarize my feelings about the games the author has devised.

The games are at least quite varied. We get a lot of card-games and dice-games, some of them rigged in interesting ways, and others played straight. Not every game is played at a table-top, with one of the more ambitious games being essentially a massive game of Capture the Flag; allowing for a change in scenery and change in tactics. In short, the author knows not to stay on one type of game for too long, he thankfully experiments greatly with all the possibilities which works in this manga’s favour. Unfortunately, none of these games are stellar. They essentially range from “good-enough” to “absolute garbage”. You will often find interesting tricks and strategies being used to win, but most of these, if not all, are riddled with massive holes that make the believability take a serious hit. The tricks are certainly creative and it is interesting to ponder how one author can come up with so many weird strategies, but the fatal issue is that they simply do not hold water. They are revealed in flashy ways but about two-seconds of thinking will uncover the overall silliness of the strategies. It feels like the author thought up many interesting strategies and winning tricks, but he invested zero thought into making them seem probable. For every strategy presented there are always unconsidered variables and plenty of things that could have gone wrong, which definitely make the clever gimmicks go to waste. At some points, the games forget to even include any kind of gimmicky strategy; instead we have to watch Shirasagi get a ridiculous winning streak with absolutely no kind of strategy to it at all. On the extreme end, Shirasagi can sometimes bend the rules so badly that we wonder why the adjudicators would ever allow it. Towards the second half especially, nearly every game suffers from shoehorned fan-service and/or artificial ways of increasing the level of danger the characters are facing. Fan-service wise, the author really does go out of his way to include it in any way possible. From the female characters having to bet their clothes, or female characters being paralysed and having their naked bodies used as a card-table, or female characters having to stand in a pool full of orgasm-inducing fish (yes, that actually happens), the fan-service is forced into the games in any way possible. Now I have no problem with fan-service, as long as it does not disrupt the tone or the plot. Unfortunately, the ridiculous fan-service DOES affect the tone greatly; turning games that could have been genuinely suspenseful into grotesque wank-material, leaving us no room to get emotionally invested into the drama of the game. Perhaps in a weak attempt to salvage the ruined suspense, the author always makes sure to write some gruesome way for the characters to die should they fail. Again, these constantly come across as artificial and contrived, and get increasingly goofy. A good example of a life-threatening game is E-Card from Kaiji, where the amount of danger is proportional to the reward and the danger arises naturally from the scenario. The deadly traps that Gamble Fish comes up with feels like an 11 year old marathoned the Saw franchise and tried coming up with own cheesy traps while on an energy drink buzz. In short, they are pretty bad. Additionally, the author never explains why these deadly gambling competitions are even legal, and what kind of people would be flocking to an arena to see this stuff. In general, it is disappointing to see the quality of the games rapidly beginning to go into a death spiral as the series continues. The games will still manage to impress you with their grandiose set-ups and overall flair, but in the end they all came across as underwhelming in various ways.

The point where the games really go down the gutter is when super-natural abilities are introduced out of nowhere. It completely disrupts the established tone of the manga and ruins the main thing it had going for it. Before then, the manga was tolerable because the strategies and gimmicks that author came up with, despite being improbable and contrived, at least felt creative. Shoehorning in characters with bullshit abilities ruins this element, and subsequently these parts become the worst bits of the entire manga. Thankfully, these moments are few and far between.

Probably the biggest problem with this series is the god-awful characters. I will begin with the main character, Shirasagi Tomu, who ends up being an unconvincing portrayal of a “genius gambler”. Shirasagi is supposed to be the fearless badass who does not flinch at the prospect of betting his life on various gambles. This kind of character has been pulled off successfully in the past, the best example being Akagi Shigeru from the titular Mahjong centred series. You would expect a character with such little regard for his own life to be somewhat mentally unhinged, and as expected, Akagi Shigeru is an asocial, potentially sociopathic recluse; character traits that bring believability to this kind of nihilistic personality. Shirasagi seemingly does not care much at all about his own life, but the rest of his character does nothing to sell the former aspect. He is a normal looking and normal acting guy for the most part, and has enough social functionality to constantly be adding members to his harem of groupies (more on this later). We don’t even get a sense of why he is okay with being so careless with his life, another strike against the believability of his character. In Akagi, we see that Akagi gets a rush out of betting his own life on Mahjong. Here, it keeps happening just to make him look cool and edgy. The writer treats his “edginess” like a tap that he can turn on and off as it suits him and the story. Normal guy one second, insane edge-lord the very next. There is absolutely zero consistency in Shirasagi’s character and it really makes the manga suffer. Similar to his edginess, Shirasagi has a certain cocky self-assuredness to his character, which works to a degree but also is very inconsistent. He often taunts and challenges his opponents, which can be fun to watch, but at the beginning of the manga he only does it if he actually has some kind of good plan up his sleeve. Later on in the manga, he literally tells a character who is pointing a gun at his head to “go ahead, shoot, I bet it will misfire!” There is absolutely no reason for him to believe that the gun will misfire, so moments like this come across as absolutely idiotic, and only serve as a cheap way to rile up the audience and make Shirasagi look cooler.

If Shirasagi is not betting his own life on a game, he is likely instead betting either huge amounts of money or even his own body parts. Neither of these are handled well at all, in the end just coming across as cheap thrills. Allow me to elucidate. Almost from the get-go, Shirasagi is betting large amounts of money on these games; something that should at the very least result in sweaty palms and a slightly elevated heart-rate. The problem is that we never get a good sense of how much money Shirasagi has in the first place, so we don’t know if losing a million yen is even an issue for him. The money being wagered in this series has absolutely no weight to it, a massive oversight for a series that wants us to feel the tension of each and every gamble. When the series begins to introduce bodily mutilation as a consequence of losing, the games get interesting again…but only briefly. Again, the series does not give enough weight to the idea of being physically mutilated, and when it does happen there are no long term consequences for the characters. It is frustrating to see punctured ear-drums and severed fingers being shrugged off so easily in this series, essentially doing nothing to increase the tension or to make the games more interesting. In the end, this element simply comes across as cheap gore and shock factor.

The rest of the cast is no better. We have a generic self-insert side-kick who gets bullied by other characters but then completely trounces some of these bullies in various gambles, sure to make the beta 14-year-olds cream in their pants. We have Abidani, a villain so cartoonishly monstrous and over-the-top that he actually looks like a monster; with goblin ears, a pointy nose and shark-like teeth. I could rant about this character for at least a few paragraphs, but instead I will focus on an even more asinine aspect of the cast: Shirasagi’s harem. This only consists of boring one-dimensional characters but somehow the very existence of this harem causes tectonic shifts that cause massive cracks and holes all across the rest of the series, in unpredictable locations. Most of these females begin as Shirasagi’s sworn enemies (for pretty arbitrary reasons), and being the gamblers they are, they don’t hesitate to challenge him to various games. After being invariably beaten by Shirasagi, they inexplicably become completely infatuated with him and are literally willing to lay down their lives for him. No, really. These girls are completely okay with, no, they actually BEG to be used as his betting chips. We never get a sense of why they love him so goddamn much, and it feels goddamn stupid every time one of them says she’s okay with giving up her own life for him. At one point in the series, Shirasagi has a dramatic speech where he proclaims that he would never put anyone else’s life in danger with his gambles. Well, that rule is kind of constantly broken throughout the series, but I guess it’s okay if those people consent? Screw it; this series is consistently inconsistent, why stop now? This harem element means that Shirasagi is constantly getting involved in gambles that have nothing to do with his main goal; they simply serve to add a gambling girl to his harem so he can use them as betting chips or so that he can benefit at convenient times from their assorted Chekov’s Skills. This element of the series definitely needed some better execution behind it or outright removal.

Despite the multitude of flaws I have pointed out in this review (I am only scratching the surface here), I think it is still possible to get a lot of enjoyment out of this manga, and that is if you try to enjoy it in a tongue-in-cheek manner. As I mentioned before, there are points where this manga can begin to feel like a bizarre parody of gambling manga. At points like these, it’s wholly possible to switch off your brain and try to soak in all the unintentional comedy that this series offers. Unfortunately, this method had limited mileage for me. I’d just like to end this rather negative review by instilling the reader with a small glimmer of hope; it IS definitely possible to squeeze quite a bit of enjoyment out of this manga with the right mindset. In fact, there were bits in this manga where I was laughing quite heartily by taking on this mindset; which surprisingly increases my overall rating of this manga by at least a point. Still, that’s not nearly enough to salvage this train-wreck.

The story is set in a school, because that's the easiest way to start a story nowadays. The MC is an overpowered alpha fantasy, surrounded with a harem of school girls. The only male character is a spineless shrimp who serves mostly for exposure - being amazed by the MC and explaining what's going on.

At some point, the story enters a series of tournaments. This is convenient for the writer, because a commentator can narrate the whole thing, and the setting provides enough confrontations between players. But that becomes extremely boring after a while.

This manga seems extremely similar to Yakitate!Japan in many respects. ... However, as much as both of these manga follow the exact same patterns, Yakitate Japan at least doesn't treat itself seriously, and allows for a bit of ridiculous humour in every arc.

Gamble Fish does nothing of the sort. Instead, it contains ecchi fanservice. That would be perhaps a good point if the art style was anything beyond average.

The art style is nothing to write home about.

I went into this manga really excited since it was a well rated gambling manga and finding good gambling manga can be hard sometimes. I however was severely disappointed after completing Gamble Fish. First off the characters are in middle school yet they are drawn in over sexualized ways which just feels creepy especially when you look at the fact that the story doesn't have to be set in middle school. On top of the characters being over sexualized for no reason, a majority of the female characters only exist to have some sex appeal, accomplish very little and then fall in love with the ... middle schooler main character. Additionally, all the villains seem very half baked and have very little incentive to do anything they are doing. Trying to look past the lack luster characters you still don't see much. Gambling manga often include some ridiculous luck but this manga took that to an extreme. In the manga if someone cheats they often talk about how they cheated at some point however at one point in a game of 2 deck blackjack there are at least 20 hands in a row that hit 21 which is just to lucky to even enjoy reading and they never mention cheating. Please pick up a different manga over this, it is poorly written and very overrated on this site. The only good part of the manga is when Obama shows up.

Story:
So this story starts off a bit strangely. As most people are use to the characters being of high school age, Tomu and his friends are actually all of middle school age. The story was well thought out with a lot of twists and turns. Of course it also made you feel smart as Tomu explained each one of the tricks to the games. The only downside to the story is when the games started to get a little TOO complex. It really took away from how Tomu really was outplaying his opponents and generally just lead to 'yay, he won, I guess?'

Art:
I personally am ... not a fan of the art style, but for what it was, it was well done. There were times were there was too much detail and it took away from the enjoyment, but other than those few times, nothing else was too distracting.

Characters:
Characters are some of the most important parts of the story, and every character was well thought out. Of course, almost every character had some flaw to them, along with some tragic background, except for Tomu's best friend. Even then, I never really lost sight as to why these characters were doing what they were doing. Every action was part of something meaningful to that character.

Enjoyment:
Like I previously stated, when the games started to get a little too complex and there were walls of text just trying to explain how the game was played, the enjoyment of the manga seemed to leak away. As much as I like details and knowing how things are working, when there is a whole chapter explaining how the game is played, I found myself skimming the chapters because it was rather boring to read. Then I found myself lost as Tomu is trying to explain how the game is beaten.

Overall:
This manga was something I had picked up a long time ago and came back to recently only to find it finished. It was rather enjoyable and the only thing that really ended up bothering me was just how I was no longer trying to find loopholes with Tomu, rather I was just waiting for him to explain to me how he had seen the 'trick' and he would win somehow.

Shirasagi Tomu... The Extreme Gambler, and the main character of Gamble Fish. Gamble Fish is a lovable, goofy, sexy and amazing series. Tomu and the rest of the cast are fantastically comical and creepy at times, only making them so much more lovable. The story starts off slowly but at a steady pace only getting faster after each gamble and all the more risky. the more characters join the party the more amazing the story becomes. This is not a story to be taken seriously, this is one of those wacky adventure stories similar to JoJo. I was kept satisfied throughout this story the entire ... time, especially with all the lewdness. The manga covers are also amazingly done and so vibrant. This is a great gambling story and I would recommend any manga lover to read it, can guarantee you wont be disappointed.

I give Gamble Fish an 8. I highly enjoyed it, and it was exactly what I was looking for.

But what? Why do you have mixed feelings if you enjoyed it so much. Well that's that thing, I was recommended this series because I enjoyed the first 50 chapters of Yu-Gi-Oh and really enjoyed the "Let's keep challenging Yugi with strange games and see how he gets his way out of there." That's before the card game became the entire focus of the manga, and before there was really one major game.

And in that way Gamble Fish scratches my itch. ... Mostly.

There's really four things to know about Gamble Fish.

The first is that the main character constantly gets challenged to interesting and unique games. Almost every game in the manga is different and almost every character is interesting. The manga starts with the main character saying he'll change a 100 yen bet into 10 billion yen in one month. He then continues to get challenged by players in multiple different games, everything from "figure out where we hid the yen piece" to a game of capture the flag involving seven player teams.

Each game feels different and usually the main character Tomu is put at a disadvantage, so he has to figure out a trick, or even how someone is cheating. Most of the manga is about him as an "Extreme gambler" and the bets made against him are heavily against him, and yet he will have to find a way to turn the bets around.

Conceptually it is similar but the author does a great job at leaving clues, and then illustrating Tomu's thought process, he tends to "defeat" not only the opponents but the challenges and games he is presented with.

WBut if you remember I said he states he'll change 100 yen into 10 billion? That doesn't really happen, in fact the story is the second thing we have to talk about. It's... relatively weak. I actually would love to hear from the mangaka about the thought process here, because the original manga seems like a great concept, but the manga over the 168 chapters changes tone quite a bit. It even drops entire plot points, hand waves challengers away, and tends to make Tomu unbeatable.

The games at the core of the manga are good, but the story tends to be mostly a convoluted path to get Tomu to the next game through what ever contrived reasons are possible. There's a relatively high energy to the writing, but by the end of the manga, so many pieces of the puzzle just seems to be forgotten, or just minor blips on the larger roadmap. So much of the series feels like the mangaka just made up the story as they went around and the large overarching narrative was only put in places moments before it was needed.

Also, most of the girls that Tomu faces... well they fall in love with him, and I don't mean he beats them into submission (or maybe he does), but basically every major female character ends up madly passionately in love with Tomu. This probably wouldn't be bad enough to make a point out of... but the artist kind of uses them in unwholesome ways. This manga slips into a bit of an ecchi feel early on and by the end of the manga, it just seems like that's all these characters are there for.

The thing is none of this is really done to help the plot necessarily, it's just "titillations" for no other reason than to drive the young male viewer to enjoy the manga. What's sad is I don't think Gamble Fish really needed the Ecchi arc. Maybe it's just "Fan service", and sure it could have been that way, but it's done FAR more than simple fan service. I imagine the mangaka drew many panels one handed, and problem quite a few readers read them that way as well. This isn't a huge negative and many successful mangas have ecchi scenes, but it's a little more than just a racy panel once in a while. And gets far worse as the series goes on.

Which brings us to my biggest problem with the series. The last 50 chapters. Around chapter 100 the manga takes a bit of a left turn, it had already started going off the rails because of the slapdash way the story arc had been going on, but the final third of the manga is different. It's not entirely bad, I enjoyed the majority of the games in this section but there's some VERY strange choices made, including one character who... Let's just say most people will be shocked at their inclusion.

But the last 50 chapters also has some of the weakest writing, and there are at least two games that have a singular problem. They're based on a certain game. The majority of the manga is "extreme versions" of specific games players might be able to recognize, but there's a long string of a specific game that just feels indulgent, and again, maybe it's due to the readers taste, or what Japanese readers love for gambling, but in general I found it pretty dry, outside of the energy of the story and the characters challenging each other.

To say more would be to venture into spoilers, which I don't want to do, because honestly, I would recommend most readers try this manga if you like the idea of an infallible gambler taking on the world in various games. The concept was executed well for the majority of the manga, it's just the final sections finally broke my enjoyment.

I would have given this manga a 9. Excellent games, too much ecchi, but heavily recommended, after those final sections I think it dips the score down a bit more, but I still overall enjoyed the series, and so we end on an 8, and ultimately a mixed recommendation.

Hopefully after reading this you'll have a better idea of if this manga is right for you.

If you want a lot of interesting and high stakes games, you'll do fine here. If you want a slightly pervy manga, you'll enjoy yourself as the manga goes on. If you want a well told manga, then you'll probably want to go somewhere else. Ultimately though, I got exactly what I wanted. A manga similar to the first couple volumes of Yu-Gi-Oh.

tl;dr: A manga held up mainly by how absurdly it’s games play out but that gets less absurd and thus less interesting over time.

Gamble Fish is a manga about a boy named Tom who begins attending Shishidou Academy. His reasons for attending are completely different from a normal student in that his goal is to dominate the academy through gambling matches. There’s an overarching plot surrounding why he’s doing this that has to do with the conflict between the clan that Tom is a part of, the Shirasagi clan, and the Shishidou clan who runs the academy. The plot also involves him searching for his ... missing father and his rivalry with Abidani, a devilish gambler involved in his disappearance. These plot threads do have a significant presence throughout the manga, however the story flows pretty badly and feels really random. On top of that, the ending is half assed in that it does kind of resolve things, but in a way that leaves a lot still left open. Thus, overall, I would say that the overarching story in this manga is pretty weak.

In terms of characters, there’s also very little depth. The cast is really flat and no one has any sort of character arc. The protagonist is Tom and he’s always good. The overarching antagonist is Abidani and he’s always cartoonishly evil. Tom’s has a male best friend Mizuhara who’s mostly just a pervert that serves as comic relief. And then there’s a host of girls that fall in love with Tom, generally after he beats them in some sort of game. I guess watching them all fall in love with Tom and then act as his groupies is kind of amusing, but there’s no relationship development beyond the moment they fall in love, and there’s not really any romantic fluff either. Thus, regardless of what you’re looking for in terms of characters, I doubt you’ll find it here.

As such, the main thing holding up the manga is the games, and since the vast majority of the manga is just the series of games that Tom gets involved in, the games do manage to hold up the manga to a degree. The reason it’s only to a degree is because while the games start out reasonably good, I felt they declined over the course of the manga. The first half of the manga could be considered the Academy arc. Here the games involve a lot of cheating and tricks. It gets kind of absurd, in that cheating seems to be perfectly fine as seen in that even when things that are literally impossible to happen without cheating are happening, there’s no penalty to the cheater. Rather, the focus is on Tom trying to figure out how the cheating is happening and coming up with ways to get around that, often by also cheating. It can be quite nonsensical, but it’s pretty fun.

The second half of the manga could be considered the Macau arc. While there’s still a bit of the cheating focused part towards the beginning, when the games fully get into the swing of things the games are much more tightly controlled, so cheating isn’t possible and thus there’s a larger focus on actually playing the games properly. However, the commitment to being absurd doesn’t decrease so instead the focus is on crazy things that are technically allowed, such as throwing dice so hard that the corner gets stuck in the table and thus multiple sides are facing up. This absurdity is still kind of fun, but it’s not as fun as the stuff in the school arc, and the games themselves have never been written all that great in terms of actual logic and strategy, so it’s a decline.

Towards the final stretch it goes even further in focusing even more heavily on the games themselves, essentially mahjong and blackjack, with the only crazy stuff happening being stuff with ridiculous chances consistently being relied on and happening, such as getting blackjack a dozen times in a row. To be honest, this section lacked what made the games in most of the manga fun and was thus just straight up a slog. That combined with how the manga drops the ball on the overarching plot and characters results in the manga overall ending on a pretty low note and not being very satisfying.

I will also note that I really liked the art. It’s certainly really rough in terms of both style and quality so it definitely took some getting used to, but it has a lot of personality and great design work that was used really well so ultimately I enjoyed it quite a bit.