So…yeah, hi. Been a while. I…deeply apologize for dropping off the radar last year. Seriously. It turns out being a first-year PhD student with a TA position and research responsibilites, shockingly enough, eats up a metric ton of your free time. There was not a week when I didn’t have anything on my plate, and I had just been run ragged over the past semester. Like, to the point where it’s not even funny.

Okay, maybe calling Saki a sports anime was a bit of a stretch. Look, I love mahjong as much as the next guy who probably has no clue what’s going on with it. That isn’t in question. This is more along the lines of me having a sudden realization that, over the eight months I’ve been writing for Kotatsu Club, I have never formally reviewed a sports show for the site.

Kakegurui is one of the nicer surprises to come out of the summer season. The art direction is great, the dialogue is brilliant, and watching our protagonists deal with the slew of cheats and tricks their opponents throw at them never ceases to entertain. It is an engaging, thrilling show that I wholeheartedly recommend to anyone who’s interested in the premise of after-school high-stakes gambling clubs and the associated chicanery that happens within.

It’s gotten to the point for me where if you see the words “directed by Mamoru Hosoda” in one of my reviews, you should immediately interpret that as a confession of bias on my end. I’m not sure what the deal is with him and the rest of Studio Chizu, but I’m yet to find myself not blown away by any of their productions, and frankly I’m not sure if that trend is ever going to change.

Before you read any further, consider this your one and only warning that the following review is going to contain spoilers. Quite a few of them. However, aware as I am that flag can turn people off from this review, I’m willing to compromise. The problem is I can’t give this film the thorough dissection it deserves without having to give away the Act 2 plot twist, because that’s the point where the entire tone, theme and story in general switches gears and almost turns into an entirely different film altogehter, so what I’m going to do is chop this review into two sections.

In completely unrelated news, I just finished rewatching ERASED from last winter, and it is just as amazing as I remembered it to be. I’ve always been a big fan of mystery shows both inside and outside of anime, and ERASED satisfied me in a way I haven’t felt in ages. It was a well-told, well-paced and engaging whodunit that admittedly I guessed six episodes in advance of the actual reveal.

Alright, first review. Let’s get cracking. Straight to the heart of it. Nothing for me to digress about at all. Actually, no, let’s talk about Digimon for a minute. Full disclosure: I honestly don’t know a ton about it. My shounen of choice growing up was DBZ, and if I wanted to see kids use their pets to play Mortal Kombat, I’d throw on Pokémon. But every now and again I’d catch an episode of the original Digimon series and just see if I could keep up with what was happening.