Archive for the Mariko S Category


Gunbured x Sisters, Volume 2 (ガンバレッドxシスターズ), Guest Review by Mariko S.

April 13th, 2022
I’m extremely pleased to welcome back the Okazu Guest Reviewer who takes on series that I’m not going near…Mariko Shinobu! /extravagant flailing of arms/ For a refresher, check out her review of Volume 1, which is now available in English from Seven Seas. Please welcome back Mariko with your warmest Okazu welcome!
 
Time for round two of everyone’s favorite (and likely the only) Yuri nunsploitation manga! In honor of the official English release of volume 1, I’m here to whet your appetite for the further adventures of Dorothy and Maria, our dynamic duo of Church-adjacent violence and sex in Gunbured x Sisters, Volume 2 (ガンバレッドxシスターズ).
 
As the story continues, we think we know the lay of the land. Our heroines will investigate and confront the escalating vampire threats to keep the populace safe, while attempting to unravel the deeper mysteries surrounding both the undead and Maria herself. When the volume opens, we meet what is surely to be the next major threat for the Red Sisters – a dapper, regal-looking vampire who perches on an overstuffed armchair sipping premium blood from a goblet. And just as he’s gearing up for his big villain speech… exit, stage left, courtesy of Maria’s pistol and Shannon’s daggers. These women are not intending to play “business as usual,” and they’re not about to let a preening villain get in the way of the conversation (read: “fist fight”) they need to have about Dorothy.
 
However, convolutions are writhing beneath the surface of the story. We get the first hints that the Church is not a pristine force for good courtesy of wunderkind inventor Chloe and her massive robot sidekick Sanders, whose grandfather invented the Optare (the cross-like weapon Maria wields when she really means business.) Meanwhile, Dorothy tortures a vampire she captured – not for information, but “just because (she) wanted to.” She ends up with info on the new vampires anyway, but again we see the damage that hides beneath her “perfect leader of the Church” facade. A facade which, by the way, she doesn’t even attempt to keep up around her friends, and barely maintains around the Church elders.
 
And then, suddenly, things get real. The force behind the sudden uprising of new, more powerful vampires reveals herself – “Doctor J,” the pure-blood vampire mad scientist. She has been testing the Church with her hybrid genetic monstrosities, and is utterly and completely unafraid of anything our heroines can throw at her. She looks at every encounter as a chance to gather data, whether it’s Dorothy and Maria fighting one of her creations, or shooting herself in the head with Maria’s gun. And the data she gathers is foreboding – she is able to counteract and reverse Maria’s dhampir mode, regenerate any injury completely and instantaneously, and only decides to retreat from Shannon’s entire Knights of the Cross brigade because it might be “annoying” to kidnap Maria under those circumstances.
 
Despite the complete and total loss, though, Maria finally gets the bit of critical information she has been seeking all these years: Noelle is alive, and Doctor J knows something about her. As the book closes, we glimpse even more foreshadowing that things are not as they seem with the Church or the vampires. And we are left with so many concerns for both Dorothy and Maria, who are hiding so much pain from themselves and each other. Dorothy, in particular, has a scary way of being tender and kind with Maria directly, but dead-eyed and mercenary when discussing her with others. Does she have any genuine feelings for Maria, or is the dhampir nothing more than a monstrous tool to effect her revenge with?
 
If you’re back for another helping, you don’t really need the warning, but the buffet of service of all kinds continues unabated. There’s lingerie and blood. Shower scenes and severed body parts. Nighttime liaisons, flashers, and bloodlust-as-intimacy. There was even “Maria beats up some guys who were creeping on Dorothy and one of them ends up with a daikon in a very uncomfortable place,” which is not a type of service I knew I needed but nevertheless enjoyed. Caveat emptor. As far as Yuri, we’re mostly on the same wavelength as the first volume, just a little more intense: Shannon is desperate to be Dorothy’s princely protector, to win her favor and reserve “Dolores-sama’s” affections for herself. Dorothy and Maria continue to have a very physical relationship as the result of Maria’s vampire needs. Some of it Dorothy clearly plays up for her own amusement, but there are definitely signs during, for example, the night Maria spends in Dorothy’s bed, that there’s more developing. Maria catches herself a few times getting emotionally invested in Dorothy’s past and well-being, and though she tries to correct herself… she’s catching feelings. Dorothy is a thornier issue, though. While publicly she is flirty and forward, even at times kind and affectionate, when her mask slips it becomes very unclear if she is capable of love for anyone, or if all that will ever matter to her is her mission.
 
 

Ratings:

Art – 10     I still think it just “fits” this story, despite (or because of) its messiness. The fight scenes in particular do a great job of clearly orienting the participants in space and making the action legible.
Story – 6     Relatively little actually happens in this volume. But, I like the way subversive elements are casually woven into the story in pieces rather than having characters just exposition dump all the time.
Characters – 9     Chloe the disabled inventor, Sanders her robot bodyguard, and Father Marco, the deranged priest that wields a mace topped with a skull the size of a beach ball are worthy additions to our funhouse gallery of lovable weirdos.
Yuri – 6     Shannon is very clearly in love with Dorothy and wants to be her “prince.” Dorothy and Maria… it’s complicated.
Service – 10    All the service, all the time.

Overall – 8

 

The girls were sure in for a shocker
From the vampires’ perverted mad doctor
Much more violence and sex
And time for Dorothy to flex
All the assets her station has brought her

Gunbured Sisters, Volume 2 is available on Amazon JP, Bookwalker JP or CD Japan. in Japanese and in English in July, from Seven Seas!

Erica here: Thank you very much for the review, Mariko. I look forward to your reviews of this series more than to the series itself. ^_^ Tetragrammaton Labyrinth is the last Yuri nunsploitation series I can think of. It’s been a  while and we were due. ^_^





Gunbured X Sisters, Volume 1 (ガンバレッドxシスターズ), Guest Review by Mariko S.

October 13th, 2021
Welcome to Guest Review Wednesday on Okazu! This week we welcome back Mariko S whose reviews are always a delight to read. Ahead of the Seven Seas edition of this seies, Mariko is taking a look at Gunbured X Sisters, Volume 1, (ガンバレッドxシスターズ) and I for one can’t wait to see what she says about it. Welcome back, Mariko and take it away!
 
I am not an aficionado of vampire tales. I’m not a fan of nunsploitation movies. I don’t care for stories of spectacular violence or body horror. But when I ran across Mitogawa Wataru’s demented yuri-nun-vampire-girlswithguns-horror-erotica mashup manga… somehow, I knew it was for me. There is nothing subtle about this manga: It is proudly exploitative and violent. There is ugly lesbian sex and plenty of blood. But if just the idea of the sentence “sexy lesbian nuns hunt vampires with ridiculous weapons” makes you smile, you will love this book too.
 
Dorothy (Dolores to everyone but Maria, for reasons) is the daughter of the head of the Church, and a prominent nun in the monster extermination division of the abbey. She is slated to be the next leader of the Church and is treated with awe and deference by all that she meets. To public appearance, she is the picture of the Church’s ideal, trained in every aspect of running the Church and combating monsters. But privately she is a deeply, deeply damaged young woman. Her mother seems to have died when she was very young. In childhood, she witnessed the nursemaid that raised her be torn to pieces by vampires. She has become obsessed with the idea that vampire/human hybrids called “dhampirs” exist, and that finding one is the key to her quest to exterminate all vampires and effect her revenge.
 
Maria is the dhampir that Dorothy has been searching for all these years. Hated by humans and vampires alike, she and her sister Noelle were orphans. One fateful day a few years earlier, Maria helplessly watched as her sister was kidnapped by a vampire, and has spent all of her time since then hunting vampires from the shadows in hopes of finding her.
 
Of course, fate and circumstances conspire to bring the two together. Maria, chased by a horde of vampires she cannot defeat, crashes into Dorothy’s chapel, and is gravely injured. Once Dorothy realizes what she is, Maria gets a quick education in dhampirology. To this point, Maria has nourished her vampire side with blood bags, but a drink straight from the source triggers a powerful transformation into a bondage-geared beast. In that state she is capable of wielding the huge cross-shaped transforming gun that Dorothy totes around, which is specifically designed for dhampir use. Afterward they reach a detente – Maria will subjugate herself to Dorothy and work with her as a Red Sister, in order to further her mission to find and rescue Noelle. In return, Dorothy will be able to use Maria’s power in her quest to annihilate the vampire scourge.
 
Introductions aside, the rest of volume one is devoted to peeling the onion on the workings of the world and its societies, both vampire and human, as well as deepening our understanding of our heroines. Maria is crass and boorish, and absolutely uninterested in conforming to the expectations of a sister or of obeying Dorothy. But Dorothy in turn has a sadistic streak, and delights in manipulating Maria into doing her bidding. That completely unsubtle sub/dom dynamic is a major part of their relationship, especially at first. They undergo some missions that provide both spectacular stages for violent action, as well as further the mystery of just what the vampire legions are up to. We are also eventually introduced to Shanon, the princely woman who leads the Knights of the Cross, the male equivalent of the Red Sisters in the Church. She has been in love with Dorothy since childhood, and is her self-appointed protector.
 
Let’s talk about service. In case everything I’ve already written hasn’t made it abundantly clear, this series is a confection of pure uncut service from every direction. There are shower scenes and bedtime seductions and bondage and clothing destruction. There is every manner of salacious angle chosen to show off legs and breasts and butts. Maria wears a “combat habit” that is basically a miniskirt and corset, and after her magical girl transformation to dhampir mode wears even less. There are buckets of blood and violent deaths and huge explosions. What I appreciate most is that Dorothy and Maria are never cringing victims who are abused by the story for the reader’s pleasure (only to win in the end to make all the torture “ok”). No, they have power and agency at all times. They are not cute. At all. They are foul-mouthed crazy assholes, and I love them both for it. Also worth noting is Dorothy’s character design – if you like full-figured women but are tired of the anime aesthetic of a twiggy girl with two beach balls strapped to her chest, then Dorothy’s zäftig frame may be right up your alley. She has big hips and big breasts and they look and move like they should – A+, Mitogawa-sensei.
 
Yuri is a slow burn in this series. Dorothy is clearly obsessed with the idea of “owning” Maria the dhampir. There is a lot of playing around with vampire lore and tropes to suggest a conflation of Maria’s bloodlust with sexual desire for Dorothy. But they are both so screwed up and self-absorbed at this point, that most of the Yuri is veiled through their power dynamics. The late introduction of Shanon introduces another Yuri trope to the story, and there will be more, much more, in subsequent volumes.
 

Ratings:

Art – 10     Totally subjective, but the detailed-yet-sketchy renderings of gothic churches and dark alleys and horrible monsters and sexy nuns is, to my mind, perfect for this story.
Story – 7     Points for innovation, points off for cohesion (there’s a lot of hand-waving for anything that doesn’t get us to the next scene of mayhem). Also, having grown up Catholic, the concept of the Church operating in this way is absolutely hilarious.
Characters – 9     Did I mention “shit-talking lesbian nuns-with-guns?”
Yuri – 5    Not so much yet, outside of some variably tasteless exploitation scenes between Dorothy and Maria.
Service – Yes.

Overall – 8

 
Note: the title is a bit of a Japanese play on words, combining the words “Ganbare!” (Do your best!) and “Red Sisters” (the name of the combat division of the Church’s nunnery). The author’s romanization (which differs from the katakana), “Gunbured”, also suggests a reference to a “gunblade,” presumably the cross-weapon that Maria wields as a dhampir.
 
Attempt at obligatory limerick:
 
In a modernist medieval town
Hot nuns fill bloodsuckers with rounds
With a Church ineffective
And each her own objective
Dorothy and Maria get down
 

Erica here: Outstanding! Extra credit for an obligatory limerick. ^_^

As a quick reminder, Seven Seas English-language edition of this series is slated for March 2022 release. It sounds like utter trash…I look forward to it. ^_^ Thank you again, Mariko for this review and we look forward to hearing about future volumes from you.





Kaijuu-iro no Shima, Volume 1 (かいじゅう色の島), Guest Review by Mariko S.

July 28th, 2021

It is Wednesday and you know what that means! It is indeed a Guest Review Wednesday here on Okazu. Today we welcome back Mariko S. (whose compelling review I have sincerely missed!), with a look at Kaijuu-iro no Shima (かいじゅう色の島), Volume 1. Please give her a warm Okazu welcome back. The floor is yours, Mariko!

I can remember clearly a certain type of person from my tween years, as we all navigated that transition between child and not-child. Smaller than other kids, shy, awkward, left out. Maybe because of those things, still interested in (or, at least, still holding onto) “childish” things. A little scared or uncertain about the adulthood their peers were rushing toward (seemingly) eagerly. Chigawa Kon is a girl like this. Slight and tomboyish, she scuttles barefoot around her tiny island town in a one-piece swimsuit and ill-fitting shorts, passing another lazy summer alone.
 
I remember another type of person from those formative years, too. A little too hurried to put on the markers of adulthood, forced by a body that seemingly overnight changed unrecognizably into something else to pretend they’re ready for it. Even more than that, putting on a front of maturity to try to mask the deep insecurities and immaturity that roiled in them as well. Hitoto Furuka is this girl. Taller, more developed, with painted nails and stylish clothes, her sudden appearance on the island presents a curious interruption for Kon, who doesn’t exactly understand the crushes her peers are so excited about, but who now finds Furuka compelling for reasons she can’t quite articulate.

What I find most remarkable about this manga is how grounded it is. That sounds like an absurd thing to say about a manga in which a (maybe real) mystical sea monster features heavily, along with supernatural phenomena of various kinds. But this is a manga about school girls in Japan that features NONE of the tropes or fetishes of school girl Yuri. There are no uniforms, no zettai ryouiki, no absurd clubs or sharing of cakes. This story could take place for any kids anywhere whiling away a summer vacation. Men exist and aren’t toxic creepos – Furuka’s uncle is an easygoing laborer who is confused as to why he has to suddenly put up with a freeloading relative. Kon’s little brother is a fun-loving kid who is really into kaijuu. More than anything, the vibe this story gives off to me is like Blue Drop, another slow-burn sci-fi Yuri tale set in a sleepy seaside town with a richly developed cast.

The first volume isn’t very long, and moves at a languid pace, and yet somehow many momentous things have happened by the end, and many more mysteries have been set up for the future. Does the monster exist? If so, is it embodied in Furuka? What is the relationship between Kon and the women sacrificed to the monster generations ago? Does Furuka have a mysterious power, or was the intervention with the bullies related to the monster somehow? Kon and Furuka have already kissed by the middle of the book, and maybe more, so with that out of the way we can focus on the real development of their relationship, on whether they can overcome both the mundane and fantastic challenges set before them, and of course on delving deeper into the lore of the island.

This story comes closer to transcending the definition of Yuri as “lesbian content without lesbian identity” for a school setting than any other I have read recently. Despite Furuka’s efforts to look mature, she quickly reveals that she has basically run away to this island with little to no plan for her future. Chief among her reasons is her despair and loneliness at not fitting in because she is gay. She never uses the word “lesbian,” but she describes knowing since the fourth grade that she wasn’t like the other girls, and only had eyes for one of her female friends. Unfortunately, she describes herself as “sick.” Kon isn’t thrown by this at all, and decides she must have this same “sickness” since she feels this way about Furuka. I’m not going to say everything that happens between them feels realistic, but it certainly fits in just fine with plenty of other coming-of-age teen romances. Kon is believably depicted as a girl just starting to awaken to the idea that she might love another girl, and Furuka is a sympathetic example of a girl who already knows this about herself and unfortunately feels outcast because of it. Yes, we all love Yuri stories where the protagonists face no obstacles to their love, but it’s also nice to have a story that acknowledges and deals with still very real prejudices.

Ratings:

Art – 8 Extra points for the variety of character designs and the imaginative sea monster renderings
Story – 8 I’m enjoying it very much, it’s different from anything else out there.
Characters – 7 Kon and Furuka feel like real people. There isn’t much of a supporting cast at this point, though.
Yuri – 7 Kon and Furuka’s relationship is at the center of the story.
Service – 7 I wouldn’t say it is prurient, but there is a fair amount of (not explicit) nudity, and a scene of Furuka brooding that is set unnecessarily in the shower.

Overall – 8 Intangibles and personal taste make this a solid 8 for me, I’m eager to see where the story goes! Alas, as I understand it, new installments are released only quarterly, so we may be waiting awhile for the next volume.

Erica here: Thank you so much for another fantastic review! I want to run out and get this manga, right away, now.

Kaijuu-iro no Shima,Volume 1 is available in print from Amazon JP, or CD Japan and available in digital format on Amazon JP Kindle or Bookwalker JP. And, if you haven’t already seen it, take a moment to watch the animated trailer for this volume of manga!





Yuri Manga: Ichido Dake Demo, Koukaishiteimasu., Volume 1(一度だけでも、後悔してます。) Guest Review by Mariko S.

March 4th, 2020

Welcome to Guest Review Wednesday here on Okazu! Today we welcome back reviewer Mariko S. as she takes a look at  a book that was mentioned in last week’s YNN report, Ichido Dake Demo, Koukaishiteimasu., Volume 1 (一度だけでも、後悔してます。). Please give her your attention and your warmest welcome once again!

24-year-old Kozuka Chiyo is a typical manga protagonist. She loves anime and games, and used to work at a game company until a few months ago, when she lost her job due to vaguely hinted at circumstances. She’s spent the time since holed up in her apartment burning through her savings on living expenses and obviously necessary figurine and video game purchases, but, alas, not on rent. One day her landlady, a petite girl of 19, comes to collect and, finding Kozuka unable to settle up, suddenly bluntly proposes that if they have sex, she’ll work out a way to get her caught up. Despite not being sexually interested in girls, with no better alternative Kozuka apparently agrees and, after a few beers, wakes up naked next to the landlady the next morning with regrets, but at least a path forward.

The landlady’s plan – she’ll move in with Kozuka, and Kozuka will pay off her debt in blocks of 10,000 yen, each one to be checked off when Kozuka is deemed to have rendered “good service.” The landlady is clear that she wants this to be/include sex, but Kozuka is eager to find alternatives. The problem being, as you might expect, that Kozuka has no life skills to offer – she can’t cook, clean, or do laundry – while the landlady is extremely put together and competent. Kozuka finds her own life improving more by the landlady helping her, instead of anything she’s able to do in return benefiting the landlady, at least at first.

“Ichido dakedemo…” isn’t quite as dire as its skeevy and salacious (skeevalacious?) setup portends. The initial sex trade happens off page and, though the service quotient is high, it’s not especially gross. Once/if you can look past that “no woman would ever do this” setup, the subsequent “services in lieu of rent” are more of a slow burn toward relationship development/general intimacy and friendship, including things like playing games together, talking about their pasts, going on a shopping date, and a “redeem any time” hug offer. Hara, the landlady (we don’t learn her first name and only learn her last name late in the book) is very clear about wanting more, and her internal monologue suggests she’s in love with Kozuka and has been for awhile, for reasons we can only guess at (other than her stating that she likes older women).

The surprising turn comes when Hara is shown to have been struggling with same-sex attraction and the way people have treated her for it for a long time. When she and Kozuka are out on the shopping date, they run into one of the landlady’s old high school acquaintances and her boyfriend. The acquaintance outs the landlady to her boyfriend, and even though neither reacts badly, they are pretty callous with how they talk about her. Kozuka comes to Hara’s rescue, and they have a sort of coded talk about how it’s been for her and Kozuka’s attitude about gay relationships. We see that what Kozuka really can offer Hara is a chance to connect with someone else, more than just physically, who actually cares about her and needs her.

The biggest problem with this manga so far, really, is that since it’s obviously intended to be a romance, Kozuka is undoubtedly going to come around to falling in love with the landlady, even though she’s been nothing but clear about not having any same-sex desire. That said, the landlady does bring a lot to the table for her, at the very least as a roommate and companion, so if they do end up together they should be relatively happy.

I don’t think any of this excuses the problematic sexual coercion/power abuse setup. I do think the author tried to offset that by making the landlady so much younger and smaller, so that it feels more like Kozuka consents to the terms for her own gain rather than because she feels threatened or forced. It’s not going to be a title for everyone, but I was pleasantly surprised at it… not being as bad as it could have been? No, more being way better than I would have expected? How’s that for an endorsement. ><;

 

Ratings:

Art – 7   There’s a certain sloppiness to it that is kind of refreshing, and the proportions and poses are generally good, but it rarely has much reason to push the details and creativity beyond “nice enough.”

Story – 6   The hook is ludicrous, and many of the vignettes pretty standard adult slice-of-life variants, but there’s some good potential for the future if they delve into the hinted-at discrimination that cost Kozuka her job, or more explicitly into Hara’s struggles with being gay.

Characters – 7  Maybe a little high, but I’m just glad that they’re cute without being (too) moe and have adult bodies. Oh, bar, why must you be so low?

Yuri – 5  Since only half of the characters fit the description thus far.

Service – 7  There’s the usual assortment of “walking in on each other naked,” “conversation about bras,” and “occasional cleavage shots.” Also, I guess, the premise is literally about “service.” Service thing that bugs me little: somehow Kozuka, an otaku couch potato who lives off of cup ramen and doesn’t exercise, has an incredible body under her dumpy clothes. Don’t get me wrong, the artist excels at drawing Kozuka’s curves, but you just don’t get that body without a lot more effort than she puts in. ^^;

 

Overall – 6

Erica here: Thank you Mariko for another great review of a manga that I would never know anything about otherwise. That’s the best part of guest reviews!





Kakegurui Season 2 Anime (English) Guest Review by Mariko S.

July 3rd, 2019

It’s Guest Review Wednesday here on Okazu and today I a very pleased to once again welcome back Mariko S with another terrific review. I hope you’ll all setting for a treat and let Mariko wisk us away to a world of unhealthy obsession. Take it away Mariko!

You may recall that I previously gave a qualified enthusiastic review of this little “high stakes high school gambling addict” sports anime’s first season. Well, it seems its bombastic debut was popular enough to bankroll a second season, so what do Yumeko and the gang have in store for us this year?

To recap, in an elite private school where the children of Japan’s upper crust seemingly don’t study at all, but do spend all day gambling the GDP of small countries on increasingly elaborate contests, wildcard transfer student Jabami Yumeko arrived to shake up the status quo. She took down (and subsequently befriended) an escalating series of insurmountable opponents from the all-powerful Student Council in search of the pure essence of gambling and the chance to compete against the Yin to her Yang, President Momobami Kirari. Having miraculously won the right to stay in her gambling paradise, the season closed with a tease showing a hospitalized woman who looked like Yumeko folding paper cranes…

Kakegurui, Season 2 opens in media res on Yumeko gambling for some painful stakes with old frenemy Midari and a new goth loli girl. The next episode rewinds to tell us why: for some reason, Kirari has decided to step down from her position at the head of the school and offer it up to a school-wide election to be determined by – what else? Gambling. Since the position of Hyakkaou Gakuen student council president is apparently something akin to both Don of a mafia family and maybe head of a shadow government, the election has drawn the interest of a motley crew of teens from the other branches of the Momobami group, determined to take power for themselves. Every student in school is granted 1 chip, and whoever has the most chips at the end of the election period is the new president. May the games begin.

Let’s just get this out of the way – this season was a massive disappointment to me. We can start with its fatal case of “sequelitis.” Basically, the creators decided to repeat everything from the first season, but MORE. The absurd gambling games are even more far-fetched and less-related to anything resembling actual gambling. The grotesque faces that accented the escalating stakes last season, that were so unique and added such strong emotional visualization, are now omnipresent and ratcheted up to 10. Instead of the contests being a battle of wits and wills between Yumeko and a clearly defined opponent, the games this time are gimmicky and involve bloated groups of 3 or more gamblers. In fact, Yumeko regresses completely as a character this time out – you can barely call her the protagonist, as she functions almost entirely as a pure gambling id to catalyze the people around her. We learn nothing new about her, she does nothing to deepen her personality, and in fact in some of the episodes she is literally sidelined as the other characters work out their issues. She does and says things that directly counteract her previously demonstrated core values, and even the things she directly said moments ago. The first season supported Yumeko as both a force of nature and a complex person, and one who would show her gradually escalating excitement at the art and science of each gambling moment in lunatic ways. This time, she’s basically a service delivery device where the slightest hint of any opportunity to gamble making her come is her entire character.

Speaking of the visuals, they take a step back across the board. Gone is the surreal artistic masterpiece opening that Yamamoto Sayo put together for the first season, replaced by a workmanlike sequence that just displays the characters as cards, with lots of shots of Yumeko’s bouncing chest. The ending is basically the animators deciding to “yes, and” Yumeko’s rain walk from last season, as this time she turns into some kind of naked busty blue fairy surrounded by rainbows doing the same walk, just more cheaply animated. I lost count of the number of times someone’s chest was groped or faceplanted into. I already mentioned the overuse of the funhouse faces, but, at the same time, overall things felt more static and less inventive. The Momobami clan gives us a ton of unnecessary new characters, each with a distinctive visual design but little run-time to allow them anything but the shortest backstory and motivation. In fact, you could basically say this season was about healing the defeated opponents from last season more than anything else, as one-by-one the contest they take part in allows Yumeko to play Manic Pixie Dream Gambler and show them the heart, the courage, or the brain they always had inside them. And finally, the season ends on a complete “Huh?” Setting aside the resolution to the final gamble, I don’t think it’s a spoiler to tell you that the election isn’t even decided. Things just… end.

Can I say anything positive about this season? I guess one of the things that was interesting was how clear the show tried to make it that Kirari and Yumeko are two sides of the same coin. Kirari is a crazy sadist who sees the school as her personal aquarium and the students as the fish to be used, observed, experimented on, or discarded at whim. Yumeko also kind of sees people as a commodity, in her case, gambling fodder. She is kinder, yes, and almost accidentally more helpful, but is more of a masochist who likes the helpless feeling of chance. Her philosophy seems to boil down to, “if we have a good gamble, whatever happens was meant to be, so everyone should enjoy the outcome,” even if it’s utter devastation. Similarly, Kirari, though powerful, isn’t power-hungry – she just wants to be entertained as well. In her case that doesn’t always mean gambling, as long as she gets to watch someone squirm under her microscope.

On the Yuri front, this season is a step up, at least in quantity. Student Council secretary Sayaka, who is infatuated with Kirari, is given her own episode replete with lily imagery and, I suppose, as happy an ending as could be possible for someone in love with a misanthropic sadist. Midari is around for several episodes, displaying her usual over-the-top lust for stimulation by an alpha dog like Yumeko or Kirari. And one of the new characters, Batsubami Rei, though a kind of butler to the rest of the -bami tribe, is given a tall, handsome, princely aesthetic that charms the many girls around the school that she interacts with. However, the resolution to her story is, in my opinion, problematic. (Can’t say more without spoilers.)

Bottom line, if you liked the first season mainly for the kooky gambling antics, you’ll find more of that here to enjoy. If you were hoping to learn more about Yumeko’s past and see a character drama of ratcheting intensity, or even a magnetic attraction between two the-same-yet-opposite supernovas, you’ll be disappointed. Here’s hoping that if they gamble on season 3, Kakegurui can roll a 7 next time.

Ratings:

Art – 5 A dramatic decrease in quality from last season.
Story – 4 The election framing device was decent enough, but there was not much beyond it except at a superficial individual level.
Characters – 4 The gutting of Yumeko, the glut of little-more-than-sketches new characters, and the near omnipresence of the animal-hoodied loli and her minions as the “election monitors” send this one plummeting.
Yuri – 5 As described above.
Service – 10 Still a 10, but a different sort of 10 this time around. I didn’t care for it.

Overall – 4

Technical Note: Netflix continues to struggle with translations, but one of its mistakes is pretty funny on a meta level. Irrelevant-self-insert-male-narrator Suzui Ryouta’s name is sometimes miswritten as “Suzuki,” which is perfect for his interchangeable blandness.

Erica here: “as happy an ending as could be possible for someone in love with a misanthropic sadist.” is such a great line, I wanted to cut and paste it just to enjoy it all over again. I watched all of Season 1 and wished I had liked it more than I did. I’m sorry for you this wasn’t as solid but am regardless very happy you stopped by to let us know! Since I watched that first season, Netflix suggests this to me constantly – and you know how their ads autostart.. Watching a popular baking show?  Try Kakegurui.

Oh, you like My Little Pony? HAVE YOU LOOKED AT KAKEGURUI

Hey, we see you watched these murder mystery shows…. MAYBE SOME KAKEGURUI NOW?

Look, you watched Into the Spiderverse

 

It’s actually pretty funny, unless I have guests over. ^_^;