Sentai Filmworks bets it all on a new blu-ray of the second season of Kakegurui. Did it payoff or did they sacrifice all their votes on a bluff? Let’s dig in and find out!
Hyakkaou Private Academy is a weird place where social status is determined by gambling skill and the school is populated by bizarre and obsessive personalities intent on rising to to the top with nary a faculty sponsor or really any kind of voice of reason in sight. I mean, do these “students” even have classes? Anyway, I digress. The first season introduced us to quirky and vaguely psychotic new student Yumeko Jabami who cares not for status or money but gambling solely for the sake of the thrill of it all. In tow is milquetoast attempted voice of reason Ryota who seems to be drawn to Yumeko despite her obvious mental illness and Saotome, a hard-nosed student Yumeko bested in the first season but somehow became friends with. The first season primarily focused on Yumeko shaking up things at the academy by defeated multiple student council members and robbing them of their wealth in the process. Season two begins with the student council president Kirari Momobami deciding to hold an election for new president by naturally holding a school-wide gambling competition to accumulate votes. In comes the Momobami clan, who aren’t students but somehow are allowed to compete in the student election anyway. Essentially it introduces a new crop of psychopaths for Yumeko to gamble against.
In the first season, the gambling games were mostly pretty straight-forward games of chance like poker, rock/paper/scissors, etc. save for a kind of Russian roulette competition hosted by an even more insane member of the council than most of them. The second season decides to up the ante (heh) by increasing the stakes and going for bigger, flashier games including a five story puzzle tower built exclusively for a random gambling competition where nothing tangible was even wagered and a big, gaudy auction with a Phoenix Wright-style reveal that kinda cracked me up. The show dedicates more time to character development by extending the games to take place over two episodes for most of them allowing the characters’ personalities to come out more. Of course, most of these characters are pretty one-dimensional, so it’s fairly predictable how they’ll behave for the most part with Yumeko especially always beating the odds and coming out on top by figuring out what’s going on and gaming the system.
On the visual front, the character designs are fairly generic and a little unpleasant at times with the anime throwing in random extremely bizarre character reactions that look exceedingly grotesque as if it were being animated like a horror anime. The anime in general is also EXTREMELY sexualized which only heightens the strange behavior.
On the technical side, as one would expect from a pretty recent anime, Sentai’s video and audio quality is pretty well done with the weird, clashing animation styles throughout the series coming through clearly. This release includes both the original Japanese track with English subtitles as well as an English dub (though no close caption subtitles for the dub). I checked out both as I did with the first season and the only thing of note is that it seems like the English voice actor for Yumeko changed between seasons and the 2nd season one felt worse than the first season’s actor.
Extras are as one would expect pretty skimpy as usual with the typical OP and ED animations and not really anything else.
So you could probably tell from reading this that I had some pretty mixed feelings about this one, especially in the story and character motivation areas. Despite all of that though, this show is such a freewheeling ridiculous trainwreck of a series that I ended up finding it pretty watchable and entertaining anyway. It is by no means a masterpiece of animation but if you enjoy wild, ridiculous shows built around game competitions full of insane characters (I’m looking at you No Game, No Life), then you may find this one up your alley.