Gyakkyou Burai Kaiji: Ultimate Survivor

After one of his coworkers fails to repay a debt, apathetic bum Kaiji Itou is pressured by loan sharks to settle the large sum of cash. Since Kaiji has little money and no future prospects of his own, he is unable to return what his colleague borrowed. Faced with massive financial burdens, Kaiji is given an offer to board the illustrious Espoir—it is said that "one night aboard the ship, and all of your debts will be paid."

What seems like a simple night of gambling quickly turns into a game of strategy and betrayal. With the losers of the tournament being subjected to a backbreaking life of indebted servitude, Kaiji must choose his actions—and allies—carefully. However, this is only the beginning of a series of gambles that will wager Kaiji's life, testing the full extent of his wits and will to survive.

[Written by MAL Rewrite]

Itou, Kaiji Main

Hagiwara, Masato Japanese

Tonegawa, Yukio Supporting

Hakuryuu Japanese

Narrator Supporting

Tachiki, Fumihiko Japanese

Hyoudou, Kazutaka Supporting

Tsukayama, Masane Japanese

Ishida, Kouji Supporting

Yanaka, Hiroshi Japanese

Endou, Yuuji Supporting

Uchida, Naoya Japanese

Sahara, Makoto Supporting

Komoto, Masahiro Japanese

Andou, Mamoru Supporting

Sakurai, Toshiharu Japanese

Funai, Jouji Supporting

Ishikawa, Hideo Japanese

Furuhata, Takeshi Supporting

Matsumoto, Yasunori Japanese

Tamura, Manabu Producer

Nakatani, Toshio Producer

Takahashi, Ryouhei Producer

Kobayashi, Mikiko Assistant Producer

Reviews

Mar 5, 2025

wopak

Recommended

Kaiji: Ultimate Survivor falls into a category of storytelling I call "Stresscore." American films like After Hours, Good Time, and Sorcerer all capture this white-knuckle feeling of unrelenting anxiety, where every decision is maddeningly critical, and every inch you move could mean the end of everything. The kind of situations where if you even think for a second about how much soul-crushing pressure is laid squarely upon yourself and only yourself, you'll lose your mind and blow it all sky high.

So basically, Kaiji is the fucking shit.

A phenomenal adaptation of Nobuyuki Fukumoto's idiosyncratic approach to style and storytelling, one of the great strengths of Ultimate ... Survivor is that it buckles you into the passenger's seat with one of the most endearing, tragic, horrifying characters in Anime. Kaiji Itou is a compulsive gambler, with an easily corrupted heart of gold. His empathy and sincerity are the only lights shining in the bleak snake-pit of high-stakes gambling... but even Kaiji's compassion is only second to his addiction. He will save your life, and then use it to gain an advantage. He will double-down, win the pot, and lose everything again in an all-in.

Building on themes of class inequality and greed, Kaiji's art style, music, writing, and voice performances all flawlessly build this nasty, nihilistic, absurd underworld where the rich have everything to gain, and the poor have everything to lose.... or at least that's what the odds say.

Through hare-brained schemes and strategies, cataclysmic emotional disasters, betrayals, psychological manipulation, and secret revelations, Kaiji: Ultimate Survivor earns its way into my top 5 favorite Anime of all time. That's some real shit right there, man.

Reviewer’s Rating: 10

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Mar 23, 2022

WitchFromMercury

Mixed Feelings

It's a seinen but the morality of the main character is more like a shounen protagonist. He's way too naive and goes out of his way for strangers he has no reason to help, which is frustrating to see and seems like writing to create conflict for the sake of it. But maybe the writing's not so bad since the whole premise of the show is from Kaiji co-signing on a debt to help out a friend he had no reason to trust like that. That's just the way Kaiji has always been, even aside from the games.

I got the urge to watch it now ... since a lot of Kaiji fans called Squid Game a poor imitation of Kaiji. Squid Game is a lot like Kaiji, they even both had a bridge crossing game. But Squid Game's story is way more mature and impactful. The cheesy morality in Kaiji becomes irritating after a time.

And Kaiji has a lot of lame "visual metaphors." The kind of scenes that can only happen in an anime. They're very trite, like the image of death swirling around a character on the verge of falling off a bridge. This kind of presentation of how the characters are feeling is way too in your face. I took a class on graphic novels (comic books) once and the prof mentioned how in drawn works you can do things like depict the characters a lot smaller than they usually are to show something like how insignificant they feel they are compared to someone else. I find that kind of storytelling to be way too overt though and I don't enjoy scenes like that.

The first half is much better than the second, after the bridge scene the last two games played are very boring. There's also no longer any bystander characters participating so they feel too small scale and not as imaginative.

The animation is the cheap kind of look 2000s animes had, but it's stylized with characters having really thick outlines. There's also some awful CGI but it's only used a few times I gave it a 5 since it held my interest a lot at first before I felt it became boring. But even by the end it was still able to surprise me with plot revelations that did not seem too contrived.

Reviewer’s Rating: 5

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Feb 12, 2022

Gsarthotegga

Not Recommended

Kaiji is an insanely popular seinen, and it's one that might be a little hard to get into for those who are used to a more typical anime art style. Fukumoto, the author of the source material, has a fairly ugly, though quite geometrical--blocky and sharp--character design. It takes some getting used to, but it's manageable after a few episodes. It even has some degree of charm to the look, and the roughness of it MIGHT be perfect for a story about gamblers, shady characters, and swindlers. It's not a sakuga fest or anything even close, but all of the technical specs are fine and ... sufficient for the story at hand. The tunes add to the suspense or create a sinister atmosphere effectively. The writing is often pretty decent, and this is one of the most tense anime I've ever seen.

For most, I think this could muster at least a 5 for general solidity, if not higher, as can be seen from the average rating, but maintaining constant tension--especially via simple luck-based competitions, doesn't really make for the most captivating art in the longterm. Yes, the ingredients tend to be average enough, if not good, but this doesn't offer much beyond the cinematic thrill of what an adrenaline junkie might get out of a roller coaster ride. Constant tension, then it's over. Sure, it's fun while it lasts, but it's ultimately rather shallow.

One aspect that should be singled out is the narration. This seems to be a narrative device that's not very common in anime. Given the nature of these games, a little bit probably is necessary, but they really overdo it in this show. The pacing is already an issue, and part of the way they pad the show out are still shots or closeups with copious amounts of narration. I think this show is a very good example of over-narrating or how easily such a device can cheapen the material.

SOME SPOILERS AHEAD:

We can divide the series into what amounts to four separate arcs: Rock-paper-scissors on the Espoir cruise ship; steel frame crossing; e-card; tissue box.

The first is the best. There's more downtime for the characters to chat and plan everything out. While it is thick with tension at various points, there is a relief to this tension, or at least our characters are momentarily distracted from it. Rock-paper-scissors is a simple game, but the methodology used at various points is elaborate and about as complex and well-written as you could hope to get for something like this. Many of the characters bend the rules and cheat, and there's a lot to take in and numerous ways the characters could approach the game, as opposed to the much more static and straightforward later scenarios. Kaiji makes for an underdog that is easy to root for, though the naivety of his philosophy and his stubbornness first appear in this arc, and this facet of his personality becomes much worse later on to the point that I'm left groaning at how idiotic Kaiji is. There are plenty of temporary alliances and betrayals here, and this is the only segment with nuanced drama and some much needed breathing room. The characters here are a bit more well-rounded than later segments, aside from subsequent villains, like Tonegawa or Hyoudou.

The remaining three arcs are high-stakes, and now Kaiji becomes something of a non-stop tension death (or serious injury) game. It gets kind of ridiculous in the steel frame crossing arc. There's (warranted, though the boomers need some hate, too) commentary about how useless millennials are and how they might improve their plight, along with a bit of class commentary that extends into the next arc; it presents the perspective of both the prey and the predators, and acts as decent incentive for the men to try their best. The emotions are meant to be pretty high here, and I think I've seen more manly looking men crying here than in any other anime ever. lol. Unfortunately, none of these characters, other than Kaiji have much of a presence. Ishida and Sahara aren't bad, but we aren't given much time to get to know them, and they remain very archetypal and relatively flat.

This is where the series' pacing goes down the tubes and it becomes SLOW. It manages to be pretty tense, but when I reflected on these episodes afterwards, they probably spent like 3-4 episodes for all of the characters to get halfway across the steel beams. That's more audacious padding than even DBZ! There are lots of closeups, crying, more crying + snot, visual metaphors, drawn-out narration, and whatever else the staff could use to extend the episodes. Don't get me wrong, these are some nail biters, but there's not much substance, and if you think about it at all, it's quite disenchanting how dull this actually is. A few moments are surprisingly quite impactful despite the undeveloped characters.

The e-card segment is just as drawn out, but it's a little less simple, and Tonegawa is a good nemesis to challenge Kaiji, who even manages to be a bit sympathetic by the end. There are several risks on Kaiji's part that seem game-breaking, and I'm surprised the yakuza (or whatever they are) would let that slide. The remaining participants in the steel frame crossing become fast buddies with Kaiji and are rooting for him at this point. It makes sense that they would share common ground because they feel they've been wronged by their usurious exploiters, but they're way too buddy-buddy. You keep expecting them to steal Kaiji's money at this point, but they've become softies, despite seeming like complete wolves who would do anything for a dollar in previous segments. The writing here is silly, and these characters all look generic, are flat, and I don't think any of them even have names!

The last arc is easily the worst. Like, Hyoudou says, the tissue box game, which involves drawing lottery tickets, is BORING. It's also dragged out for as long as possible, though this is the shortest arc. Seriously, couldn't the creator have come up with a more interesting game? The point was for Kaiji to come up with a spontaneous game that he could rig and that the opponent couldn't rig, but his strategy is pretty obvious, and it's amazing he'd even go through with this, given the risks, and the many issues with his plan.

This is where Kaiji becomes another irritating character. Instead of knowing when to quit, he turns this into a battle of good versus evil, he's unbelievably stubborn, ridiculously moralistic, and, honestly, quite stupid. They telegraph what the results will be, so the outcome is what you'd expect, and the whole thing is a waste of time. It leaves me grimacing with pain that part of his motivation for this last game is that he won't have enough money leftover after "keeping his promise" with Ishida, which should already be null and void because that part of the game is over. I've enjoyed many portrayals of characters who are very unlikable, immoral, flawed, etc., but it's hard not to be annoyed at a character who is written to be this stupid.

I'd honestly recommend the first arc, as that's the sole part I enjoyed when reflecting on the series. The 2nd and 3rd arc have good moments, but they're a lot more basic overall, and way too padded. The last arc is terrible.

Reviewer’s Rating: 4

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