Gyakkyou Burai Kaiji: Ultimate Survivor, JoJo no Kimyou na Bouken Part 3: Stardust Crusaders Recommendations
Top-tier psychological fights.
A unique GAR art-style with:
- angular character designs,
- manly tears
- and a glorious campy narrator making lengthy explanations with exaggerated metaphors and emphasis on the situation.
A very good balance of smart/stupid.
For example, at the beginning of some arcs, you will feel like the drama is overdone, the characters state obvious things with emphasis, which is made worse by the narrator, with a situation going nowhere, but actually, it is a very good setup for the following events to unfold in the witty cerebral fights, down to the sillier moments, who also set the mood for the bizarre situations occurring.
I still get had very
often about this. "Geez, this episode is a bit cringey, did it get worse or was I a fool?". but then it picks up, and I feel all the greatness once again...
Kaiji in particular will spend chapters/episodes setting out a situation, where it's often obvious Kaiji will lose, and you wonder what they will be able to do with such games whose outcomes seem random, especially with all the time they used up already, but it's handled very well. Just go along with it at first, you'll be rewarded and you'll end up trusting the series.
These anime adaptations are very good (MadHouse, David Pro!), but they are a bit dragged out at times (the first cour for JoJo and the second for Kaiji). On one hand, they're faithful adaptations, and you can actually enjoy the sometime lengthy arcs if you consider it as suspense (since they've finished airing, you won't feel the frustration of waiting for the conclusion of an arc, and it'll always be less dragged out than most perpetually on-going fighting shounen).
Thanks to experience, this got fixed in the latest season of JoJo, and MadHouse would probably do so if they animated the following arcs of Kaiji!
Kaiji is a bit more serious and much more realistic. but both are well written, dead characters stay dead, there is very little plot convenience, the arcs are not repetitive and dragged out, ...
JoJo was the most influential. It probably influenced Kaiji too.
read more
