Kaiji Ultimate Survivor is an anime that is about games with repercussions , It succeeded in many aspects Yu-gi-oh : The Shadow Games (A.K.A Yu-gi-oh Season 0) did not , while also failing on other aspects in which Yu-gi-oh succeeded.
Story 7/10
The Story is mostly about corruption , corruption of the mind , corruption of businessmen , corruption of the human desires , the setting is where Businessmen control the world via money, in other words were money is power. the realistic theme of course of this series was great , the problem was that the story made little impact on how things go, and seemed to be forced just to create the games , The setting did not affect how the game flows and was just made to give a background story in which the games can progress , in short , the anime could easily be divided into 4 games , The first game was deeply thought of and was perfectly executed , the second game was just to show psychological nature of humans which was completely unnecessary *Nothing is added and the game didn't really have any thinking abilities*, The third game is completely unoriginal *An alternate state of the 1st game* but it was enjoyable till the writer took an unbelievable route. and the 4th game was too simple but it had a lot of intensity. All in all , it suffers from variety, But its main strength is in how psychological aspects in this series are easily explored with your own mind giving you a chance to get the idea before the main character does which is really enjoyable with the exception of the second game which has nothing of that.
Art 7/10
Now this is the first time where I can say its not Madhouse's fault as Madhouse did its best to make it look as good as possible, The animation is pretty good and the studio made it look as best as it can , the fault here lies on the mangaka for the bad art style which is perfectly uncomfortable and I don't even know why did he choose such a bad art style. Madhouse made it look as best as possible.
Sound 9/10
Not giving opinions on the (Chaba Chaba Chaba) fx thing , The Music is nice and blends with the scenes perfectly , The characters voices are nice and they fit their characters
Character 8/10
The Characters are admirable in most cases , One of the good parts that Kaiji emphasizes on is how it allows the exploration of each character's agenda which makes things interesting and makes the mind games played enjoyable , the bad parts in the characters is how anything outside the realm of the games makes any sense , for example *A kills B , C wants to avenge B , so C challenges A to a game* and there was one lunatic unbelievable point that was out of character completely. rather than that the mind games and the agendas make up for it.
Enjoyment 8/10
In the Enjoyment level I Enjoyed it pretty much , the use of Xanatos Gambit (Agenda exploring) in the games instead of Deus ex machina (Asspulls) makes the series much interesting , It maintains unpredictability in some times which was good and gave intensity as I watched it , One thing I didn't like in this series is when it came to using metaphors , a one and two could be enough , but you don't have to use up to 3 or 4 metaphors to explain one psychological state. It was used to kill time and to be honest it wasn't a good idea to excessively use them , Even though I stated a lot of flaws , The anime is really enjoyable and the good makes up a lot for the bad.
Overall (7 + 7 + 9 + 8 + 8)/5 = 7.8
Ceiling 7.8 is 8
So it is an 8/10 (Very Good)
