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The sibling franchise to _Akagi_. _Kaiji_ follows a fairly standardized beat: Kaiji lazes around until catastrophe befalls him; to get out of it, he participates in a gambling game, is naive & trusting, plunges further into disaster, wakes up and (often with the trust & assistance of some even bigger losers than him) comes up with an ingenious trick or stratagem to win back all his losses and then some; and then he falls right back asleep and since he's a gambling addict/loser, he'll eventually lose most or all of it again, to repeat the cycle... Structurally, it's the opposite of _Akagi_ (even though there are some _Akagi_ references in it), because Akagi is the inscrutable gambler par excellance, who coldly weighs every odd and plans every move on multiple levels - like the 'security mindset' of a good hacker, this is not something one turns off, and we cannot imagine Akagi ever co-signing a loan nor lazing around nor cheating nor can we imagine him ever falling for, say, a 'friendly' game of cee-lo without taking gambler's ruin (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gambler's_ruin) into account nor could he be said to be addicted, because he's always in control; but also Akagi only ever plays one game, mahjong, while Kaiji plays a different game every time. Not being a mahjong player, _Akagi_ was almost entirely lost on me, while the games in _Kaiji_ are clearly explained and often simple. Some of the invented games are quite interesting: Restricted Rock-Paper-Scissors layers a mini-economy onto rock-paper-scissors to produce complexities I'd love to see investigated more deeply, while E-Card is simple yet exemplifies what game designer Sirlin calls "yomi" (http://www.sirlin.net/ptw-book/7-spies-of-the-mind). The art is about the same as far as I can recall: no women anywhere (which makes one wonder if that's misogynistic or not: does he think that women don't matter, are too sensible to fall into these traps, or that men will always sacrifice themselves?), and characters with heavily stylized faces and noses so sharp that a losing character could commit seppuku with them; I can't decide if I love or hate it. The narrator, once you get used to the purple prose, is hilarious (at one point I noted that the narration could be used in a pornographic film with little or no editing.) The music takes a punk rock approach, echoing one of the major themes: that society is structurally unfair, filled with traps and deceptions and false promises of rewards to encourage people to trample on each other and throw away their time/lives to win position & wealth from the meritocracy, becoming 'slaves to those above, and tyrants to those below' only to eventually be fed into the maw of the system by their successor and discarded when their usefulness is over; those who win are not those who are lucky but those who have seen through the lies fed to the ordinary people and realized that you must cheat, deceive, and steal your way to the top - when the Chairman talks about a "king's luck", it is merely an euphemism for cheating (so in other words, 'kings' *make* their own 'luck'), and those who refuse to cheat but entrust their hopes to chance or God will eventually lose and will deserve to have lost, and indeed, failure to understand this is Kaiji's ultimate undoing at the end of season 1. (The critique is generically Marxist, complete with obese capitalist plutocrats savoring the suffering of the lumpen-proletariat.)
So that's the stew of ingredients which is _Kaiji_: a loser with a heart of gold and occasional flashes of genius who is too weak-willed and soft-hearted to escape his permanent cycle of debt-hell and is plunged into exotic games for the amusement of the wealthy where he must scheme & cheat for his salvation. Is it successful? I would say no. The character himself is too implausible to take seriously (again, we may not like Akagi or see any depth to his character, but he is like a shark: his eyes are flat and reveal no consciousness inside but he is perfectly adapted to his environment). The art remains a problem since we're going to be staring at Kaiji's face for a very long time. Solutions to the gambles are not always satisfactory, as Fukamoto is better at inventing games than solving them, so the resolutions often involve some overly convenient devices like some valuable jewels just feet away Kaiji can grab to save himself or cheating. (Season 2 in particular is a huge letdown in this respect.) Some of the twists make no sense: how is a man blown to his death from a window opening on the 22nd story? That is... not actually all that high up! And at the end of season 1, how can we possibly believe that it could end that way when one of the 3 special rules was very visibly broken and so Kaiji didn't actually lose? (Since the folding of the ballot was clearly depicted in the animation, and folding was explicitly forbidden by the Chairman as a rule, I was convinced that Kaiji would point this out and snatch victory from the jaws of defeat, leading to my single greatest surprise in watching _Kaiji_.) The cheating in E-card made no sense: if a billionaire wants to cheat at his own card game at a time & place of his own choosing with his own custom cards in his own custom game room, there are approximately an infinite number of ways to cheat which don't involve elaborate electronic gadgets attached to someone, and heck, the cheating wasn't even necessary, since the entire arc would have worked just fine if Toneagawa had good tell-reading skills and Kaiji had to use desperate measures to defeat the reading! (Tonegawa was probably my favorite character, and I was disappointed to see him made to resort to such clumsy cheating.) The pacing of both seasons is atrocious, as episodes are grossly stretched out: season 1's Restricted Rock-Paper-Scissors was too long, the Human Derby & death bridge were much too long, and the E-card / lottery games were somewhat too long; while season 2, with only 2 games in it (cee-lo and the pachinko machine) should have been done as maybe 9 episodes at the most (with zero loss) and I strongly advise watching at 300% speed if you watch season 2. (I wonder if the manga suffers from the pacing problem? I suspect probably not.) The pachinko machine arc is - let's not mince words here - pretty stupid, especially when you start season 2 with the understandable expectation that Kaiji has learned his lesson and will meet the Chairman again in an even more epic duel. (He hasn't, and won't.)
Ultimately, some fun games & hilariously over the top narration and an initially very promising first arc can't rescue a series with a flawed protagonist, ugly art, repetitive plot, simplistic social commentary, and direly slow pacing.
