The third annual Crunchyroll awards are upon us for the 2018 season and that means it’s time for us to fulfill our civic duty as anime lovers and figure out which shows deserve the prestigious honor of being “we all really liked that one for this one very specific thing.” And although the 2016 Crunchies were ruined slightly by the fact that Yuri!!! on Ice got nominated for close to every category and, in an even more baffling turn of events, won the majority of them - infamously including edging out Mob Psycho 100 for Best OP - it was still a pretty fun event that actually got me to check out a few shows that flew under my radar that year.

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.

So…this is gonna be a slightly awkward review… I’m not gonna make excuses for myself, but because I’m a grad student with a limited amount of time to spend each day doing things I want to do, I have to schedule how and where it goes. In regards to my stories for this site, that typically means I watch a good chunk of the series I’m reviewing over the weekend, so that way I have plenty of time to sit down and think about what I thought of the show on the whole.

Fall’s here! Yes, glorious, excellent wonderful fall. And after having to endure the sheer shamelessness of the summer season, which proudly touted some of the worst shows to have come out this year, fall season is a breath of fresh, crisp, refreshing air. And please keep in mind that I’m talking almost exclusively about the anime season. As an actual physical season, I much prefer the warmer stuff. By a wide margin.

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.

…you people seem to like requesting romcoms for me to review, don’t you? Yep, I’m doing another request, this time from one of CSM Anime Club’s old officers. And if you have shows, past or present, that you want me to take a look at, make sure you point them out in the comments section below this review. So after blasting Netsuzou Trap (or excuse me, NTR, God what a stupid abbreviation) with my shotgun last time, I thought I was done with reviewing romcom anime for a while, but then it slowly dawned on me that almost all of the summer season’s showings were romcom shows, and I nearly had a panic attack.

Some of you may have noticed a bit of a motif in my past reviews, specifically related to a four-player game in which players pass around tiles to score points and humiliate their opponents over and over again. Yeah I finally finished up Akagi, and the only way I can fill the void left by both it and Kaiji right now is to play five hours of mahjong daily until I finally get bored and go back to WoW or something like that.

It’s okay! I’m alive! Yeah, sorry for not doing anything last week. Schoolwork got the better of me and I ended up having to dedicate most of my time then to actually getting things done, and that meant that I had almost no time whatsoever to get this show a right proper reviewing. Again, I apologize, and thanks for sticking around as I chugged through last week. And to make things special for this week, let me start off by saying that this show was actually requested for me to review by a fan of the site (who wishes to remain anonymous, although I will say he’s a chill guy and draws cute coyote girls on DeviantArt if that’s something you’re into).

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.

Before we get to work here, I want to slip in this disclaimer. If you’ve read any of my previous articles about this movie, you’d be well within your rights to think that I’m not the most objective person to review this. On the runup to this film’s release, I advocated for its conceptual merits extensively and have showed signs that I’m really hoping for this movie to be good. We call this confirmation bias, and that can be a dangerous thing in critique, as it can cause critics to judge something more or less harshly because we kinda get a kick out of being right about things.