This Week in Anime

Does Kakegurui twin Hold Up To Its Sibling Series?

Chris
This isn't too far off from the look of things when I covered Panty & Stocking with Garterbelt with Nick a few weeks back. And hey, the cutesy CalArts look might not be a bad fit for something that's effectively Kakegurui Babies.

Yes, every popular supporting character deserves their own entertaining origin story, so giving Mary here the Better Call Saul treatment makes plenty of sense. Especially since Yumeko transferred in the second year of classes in the original show, meaning there's plenty of time to see how a slightly-less-unhinged person might have handled the academy.

And while the whole show doesn't look like that cuddly cartoony intro we just sampled, don't worry! The girls of Kakegurui remain as... cute... as ever.

With Twin's particular taste in color filters going to extra mile to make clear for us just how "green" Mary is in this new environment.

But it is interesting to see this prequel open with Mary having a more socially optimistic take, before whatever occurred to drive her to simply buy as many friends as she wanted. We don't even get close to completing that character arc in this scant six episode run, but it creates a compelling unspoken implication even at this early stage of Mary's story.

Homoeroticism? In Kakegurui? Why I never!

Seriously though, not only does Twin ditch the presumptive-POV dude from the regular series, but I need to stress that the only instances of heterosexual courtship in this show are 1) a rigged dating game entirely designed around the participants winning money off of each other, and 2) an arranged marriage that one side is only interested in from the angle of cynical political power.

Everything else is, uh

Yeah, it's a very different feeling from Yumeko's near-immediate vibes of warping the school in her image. Mary is instead slowly seeing herself changed by her time at Hyakkao out of necessity to survive. So a lot of her plays in this mini-series are less about driving up the stakes to destroy her opponents with overly-intensified gambling antics, and more about her pulling out wins by the skin of her teeth. It's less four-dimensional chess and more improvisational chess-boxing.

With some heartwarming backup from her new friends.

I would genuinely thank them for their service and tip these girls after they finished fleecing me. They deserve it.

As with so many other elements of Twin, the dynamic between Mary, Tsuzura, and Yukimi feels like it's just getting started due to how short this is. The opening act skims some details, notably how Mary and Tsuzura became childhood friends. But nevertheless, they provide that humanizing anchor for this slightly kinder, more trusting version of Mary, even as she's still clearly being, you know, Mary.

Not knowing at the time when and how this all ended, it also added just a bit more credence to the big suspenseful twist halfway through the anime: that Tsuzura might actually have betrayed Mary.

Obviously, that ended up not being the case, and love triumphed after all in that situation, but it reinforces that this is a series with a built-in shoe ready to drop. I did look up later and discover that Twin has been going for 12 volumes and counting! But it's also notable that it's written by Homura Kawamoto, who is behind Kakegurui Prime, meaning this is all designed with some canon-compliant plan in mind.

Me, halfway through Episode One: "Hmmm, I wonder if this series will really carry forward the particular energy I expect from the Kakegurui franchise-"

"Oh, there it is!"

Given that I'm still not convinced Yumeko isn't the Actual Devil, it's completely plausible.

Compared to the surprisingly wholesome gambling support group throuple of Mary, Tsuzura, and Yukimi, Juraku represents that less rosy sapphic element.


She actually makes for an interesting overarching antagonist for Mary, since as we see in the future series, Mary won't be opposed to person-ownership herself following her gaslight-gatekeep-girlboss-ification.

I was genuinely shocked when it was made clear early on that she would be an actual character, with her own driving influence on the narrative. She may have signed away her personal agency for fetish purposes, but she's still got character agency!

She also provides the setup for one of my favorite absurd cuts in this series.

Please do note that, in-story, that liquid is just Mary spilling the tea, but.

I suppose that lets me get into one of the issues I do have with Twin: a lot of the gambling games themselves are on the boring side. Like 75% of them are some sort of dice game variation, which the show itself points out are a quick and simple choice.

I understand that part of this series is seeing the process of Mary working her way up the school's hierarchy to even be able to compete with the higher-level insanity we've seen Yumeko handle. But both the stakes and execution feel disappointingly low a lot of the time, with nothing approaching the characters risking losing fingers or engaging in convoluted Russian Roulette spins.

Part of me enjoys the gimmick of going into the theory and strategy behind a superficially luck-based game. But when that ends up being basically the only trick the show has in its brief run, it runs thin pretty quick.

Thankfully, I think the gaming action does come more alive when the show trots out a two-parter focusing on the most cutthroat, high-risk activity of all: dating.

Even more than the rest of the series, this arc is full of effective little character moments like that. Some are of the more dramatic variety, like that brief tease that Tsuzura might have betrayed Mary. But even the goofier idiosyncratic bits are all about setting up how in-synch the main trio have become, to the point that they can communicate with in-jokes.

This and that earlier maid-café mind game set up the arc for Mary where she starts to realize that taking rubes for rides feels kinda... good.

It's a distinctive choice that plays into Mary's particular methodology: on a meta level, we know that she doesn't wield the same kind of devilish gambling super talents that Yumeko does. So instead, Twin throws her in the middle of this conflict between the Council and the "Full-Bloom" counter-movement. In true Machiavellian fashion, Mary immediately tries to play both sides for the benefit of herself and her new girlfriends.


Part of me could read that as a cynical counter to any social movements supposedly against oppressive structures, arguing that people should only look out for themselves and their own. Especially since Mary is proven 100% right about Aoi's own self-interest by the end of this anime.

But then the other part of me knows this is all very early on in the actual story, and Mary still has a whole lot of ups and downs awaiting her on her journey.

Just girls, battling with their boxes.

This one also gets close to the Kakegurui absurdity I know and love, having the characters puzzle their way through the kind of Dante-Must-Die Mode escape room problems that seem totally unintelligible until they explain everything at the very end.

And more importantly, it brings Sado back for more fun.

Huge props to Netflix's adaptation team for going with "What the actual hell" on that line, that one absolutely killed me.

I think it was this arc where I finally noticed that, and once I had, I could not un-notice it.

The culmination of character interactions definitely elevates this storyline. From the teamwork of Mary's team to the way all the various antagonists like Juraku, Sado and Aoi come to regard Mary after the tumultuous layers of competition with her.

Which is just as well since the last gamble is yet another god-danged dice game!

Learning that the true treasure is the girlfriends they made along the way, where they head into the future where surely nothing bad will ever happen to them!

Indeed, for some of its shortcomings in creativity or intensity, it says a lot that my biggest complaint about Kakegurui Twin is that there just wasn't more of it. This might be the series that convinces me I just need to go and check out both manga series to find out where Mary, and later Yumeko, end up going.

It's not here for a long time, but

Same here!