Oh my god… the building-up is finally starting to pay off now, and yet this series still continues to build up with just four episodes left. I also must say that this is going to be one very interesting climax. I can’t imagine ANY cliché or stereotype that would fit as an ending for this series. There’s no clichéd antagonist, there’s no real goal where this series centres around. Instead, there are just characters, all with their own issues. The final episodes will probably focus the most around Tarou and Miyako, but how it’ll end… I still have no idea.

Still, I do wonder: who was it that knocked Miyako’s father off the stairs? The only possible candidate would be his former friend, the guy running for mayor. Something happened in the past between him and Makoto’s father, so perhaps this involved Miyako’s father as well.

And dear god… I never imagined that Makoto’s mother would be so depressed to actually set her own house on fire! Did she survive the thing, or was it a suicide? According to Makoto’s reaction, I’m edging to think that that indeed is the case, even though this goes against one of the big laws of anime (a character is only dead if he or she is confirmed dead).

It’s also interesting how Masayuki and Tarou finally realize that something’s wrong with Makoto, but what was that thing that Masayuki mentioned, that it might be related to Tarou’s kidnappers? In any case, it’s also interesting how the first car they ran into was the one of the female scientist. I think that she knows fully well that it was Masayuki who spied on her last episode, so now the two or them too get a chance to settle their differences.

Also, I wonder… why haven’t we seen Masayuki’s sister for the past few episodes?

One thing that I do want to praise this series about is the balls that it has to go really extreme. After the Boat-arc, for a minute I feared that Kaiji would try to stop the punishment of Tonegawa. Instead, Tonegawa has proven that he’s a real man this time, even though he lost. He was just unable to escape the clutches of the employer he worked for for decades. His final moments were truly terrific, and I’m glad to say that this series now has two well-developed characters. And with a bit of luck, the chairman will make this count three, but that depends entirely on what’s going to happen for the final four episodes.

At the moment, I still don’t regard Kaiji as a flawless series. The boat-arc and especially the beam-arc dragged on, were a tad predictable and lacked engaging characters to keep me interested. And yet, the past few episodes, ever since Kaiji cut off his ear, have been absolutely amazing. I guess that that’s the time since the characters clicked with me.

The chairman has been an interesting character so far, with an interesting philosophy, but he still lacks development a bit. This episode told a bit of his background, but the final episodes still do have a bit of work to do. It would be a bit of a shame for Kaiji to just defeat the guy and make an end to his twisted ideas.

This episode was about the smiling guy that we saw in the OP. He turned out to be a vampire who can hypnotize his victims by playing the guitar. He has put a local politician on his possible-victims-list, and he recruits Nezumi Otoko for this, while the politician hires Kitarou to get rid of said vampire. Yet again it’s an episode where Kitarou hardly does anything, as quite quickly the Vampire injects him with a strange drug that liquefies the guy’s flesh and separates it from his bones.

It was another very solid episode for this show, with lots of twists, as Kitarou’s father tried to get his son back together. It’s especially interesting when we say him hiding in Kitarou’s skull, being an eye on legs and all. For the first time, Nezumi Otoko also plays the role of good guy, as he too gets scared of the things that the vampire can do. The best thing about this episode, though, was the same refreshing scriptwriting of this series. It’s hard to explain what’s different, but I think it’s how the creators manage to keep a semi-serious tone throughout the entire episode.

It’s a shame that there are only two episodes left, and I’m quite curious as to how the creators were planning to end this series. Kitarou is still in liquid-form at the end of this episode, so his father will probably spend the next episode to try and get him back on his bones. According to the OP, we still miss the scenes with the three-eyed priest, the scene with the armed generals that shows up very briefly in the OP, the scene with the strange guy in the middle of a field of rocks, and the strange flashlight creature. It’s not really the things you’d expect for a big climax, but then again this series has never really listened to the general guidelines of anime. :P