Gamble Fish

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tl;dr: A manga held up mainly by how absurdly it’s games play out but that gets less absurd and thus less interesting over time.

Gamble Fish is a manga about a boy named Tom who begins attending Shishidou Academy. His reasons for attending are completely different from a normal student in that his goal is to dominate the academy through gambling matches. There’s an overarching plot surrounding why he’s doing this that has to do with the conflict between the clan that Tom is a part of, the Shirasagi clan, and the Shishidou clan who runs the academy. The plot also involves him searching for his ... missing father and his rivalry with Abidani, a devilish gambler involved in his disappearance. These plot threads do have a significant presence throughout the manga, however the story flows pretty badly and feels really random. On top of that, the ending is half assed in that it does kind of resolve things, but in a way that leaves a lot still left open. Thus, overall, I would say that the overarching story in this manga is pretty weak.

In terms of characters, there’s also very little depth. The cast is really flat and no one has any sort of character arc. The protagonist is Tom and he’s always good. The overarching antagonist is Abidani and he’s always cartoonishly evil. Tom’s has a male best friend Mizuhara who’s mostly just a pervert that serves as comic relief. And then there’s a host of girls that fall in love with Tom, generally after he beats them in some sort of game. I guess watching them all fall in love with Tom and then act as his groupies is kind of amusing, but there’s no relationship development beyond the moment they fall in love, and there’s not really any romantic fluff either. Thus, regardless of what you’re looking for in terms of characters, I doubt you’ll find it here.

As such, the main thing holding up the manga is the games, and since the vast majority of the manga is just the series of games that Tom gets involved in, the games do manage to hold up the manga to a degree. The reason it’s only to a degree is because while the games start out reasonably good, I felt they declined over the course of the manga. The first half of the manga could be considered the Academy arc. Here the games involve a lot of cheating and tricks. It gets kind of absurd, in that cheating seems to be perfectly fine as seen in that even when things that are literally impossible to happen without cheating are happening, there’s no penalty to the cheater. Rather, the focus is on Tom trying to figure out how the cheating is happening and coming up with ways to get around that, often by also cheating. It can be quite nonsensical, but it’s pretty fun.

The second half of the manga could be considered the Macau arc. While there’s still a bit of the cheating focused part towards the beginning, when the games fully get into the swing of things the games are much more tightly controlled, so cheating isn’t possible and thus there’s a larger focus on actually playing the games properly. However, the commitment to being absurd doesn’t decrease so instead the focus is on crazy things that are technically allowed, such as throwing dice so hard that the corner gets stuck in the table and thus multiple sides are facing up. This absurdity is still kind of fun, but it’s not as fun as the stuff in the school arc, and the games themselves have never been written all that great in terms of actual logic and strategy, so it’s a decline.

Towards the final stretch it goes even further in focusing even more heavily on the games themselves, essentially mahjong and blackjack, with the only crazy stuff happening being stuff with ridiculous chances consistently being relied on and happening, such as getting blackjack a dozen times in a row. To be honest, this section lacked what made the games in most of the manga fun and was thus just straight up a slog. That combined with how the manga drops the ball on the overarching plot and characters results in the manga overall ending on a pretty low note and not being very satisfying.

I will also note that I really liked the art. It’s certainly really rough in terms of both style and quality so it definitely took some getting used to, but it has a lot of personality and great design work that was used really well so ultimately I enjoyed it quite a bit.

Conclusion: Gamble Fish is a fun romp that delights in taking every gamble our protagonist gets in not just to the extreme, but well beyond it, while slowly ramping up the flanderization of its characters and the sexualization of its female cast until it reaches its tipping point 10-12 volumes in. The flames hath burned strong and bright, until it unfortunately runeth out of fuel and sputtered out, crossing the finish line a mere shade of its former self.

Below follows the more in-depth analysis if you want it.

Rarely does a work incense me in quite the way Gamble Fish did. Reading this was ... ultimately an enjoyable experience, but your mileage will vary based on a staggering number of caveats. On the flip side, it's pretty easy to forgive Gamble Fish for most of its various misses when the core of its appeal comes from taking nearly every concept it works with well beyond its logical extremes and directly into downright parody territory, while never winking a single time to acknowledge this to the reader. It's a truly emotional experience in that it makes you feel emotions. For me, it started with a bit of dumbfoundedness as to not being entirely sure of what i was feeling, which slowly transitioned into unadulterated joy. Despite this, frustration would slowly but surely creep in the further down the line i got.

Foremost, the series is built on constantly scaling up its encounters to new, even higher extremes. More risk, more ridiculousness, more moving elements, more stakes. It teaches you to expect it to top itself with every single new challenge our protagonist Tom has to face. The problem is it ends up playing all of its best hands by the middle of the story. The last arc that is supposed to be the climax features some of the least interesting gambles and set pieces.

At the same time, the further the story progresses the more the characters in it become mere shadows of their admittedly still pretty 2D prior representation. Tom's advantage in this is that he never really was characterized beyond "just a chill cinnamon bishie who like gamble, like win, and whom women love" and fortunately (this is arguable) all these traits remain in play throughout the entire series. The only other major character to benefit from the same treatment is Tom's polar opposite, Gokijima. Everybody else devolves into representations of simple character tropes, which is most disappointing in the case of Avidan. Avidan is the main villain throughout the manga, but despite this, his initial portrayal has him carry an aloof demeanor, seemingly acting based off of a more complex set of motivations. This can be seen during the numerous times where he tacitly sides with our protagonist in various minor ways throughout Tom's early encounters with other gamblers. He does this while being a cartoonishly evil gremlin vampire creature. By the end of the story he remains just a cartoonishly evil gremlin vampire creature. Mizuhara similarly gets reduced to an ambling character gag by the finale.

But it's probably time to talk about the elephant I've been keeping in this room, here. The lasses, the ladies, the eye candy. Not a single one of them has any agency upon the story whatsoever, despite being both the majority of the contestants Tom faces, and the majority of his entourage. What's worse, barely any have a motivation that does not revolve around a male. Here, let me list out the various driving forces behind the female cast: really likes Tom, (former) loving brother, abusive father, really likes Tom nr. 2. And when one of them manages to sidestep that and have some intrinsic motivation like Asahina does, who really just likes playing with cues and balls, the portrayal of her friendship with Mika ends up being very fetishized. Very fetishized is eventually what will become of every single female character in the manga, and the writing simply does not have any interest in pretending there's even a gag behind this. Women will be getting stripped strictly for the titillation that provides. Yes, this series features multiple instances of strip poker with dubious consent, how did you know?

While there is more to dig your fangs in and tear apart in this manga, the above points are the main complaints, and going any further just feels like nitpicking at this point. It might sound like I am being excessively negative, but I'd like to reiterate that the core experience when reading this is joy. The series delights in small bite sized gags that are sure to get a giggle to somebody even (or sometimes especially) if you send it to them out of context. This happens more often in the beginning but it's a constant throughout the series. I would give this a much stronger recommendation were it not for the female representation that just icks me out. As it stands, I'm pretty mixed on it, but if you can stomach that, definitely go for it.

I went into this manga really excited since it was a well rated gambling manga and finding good gambling manga can be hard sometimes. I however was severely disappointed after completing Gamble Fish. First off the characters are in middle school yet they are drawn in over sexualized ways which just feels creepy especially when you look at the fact that the story doesn't have to be set in middle school. On top of the characters being over sexualized for no reason, a majority of the female characters only exist to have some sex appeal, accomplish very little and then fall in love with the ... middle schooler main character. Additionally, all the villains seem very half baked and have very little incentive to do anything they are doing. Trying to look past the lack luster characters you still don't see much. Gambling manga often include some ridiculous luck but this manga took that to an extreme. In the manga if someone cheats they often talk about how they cheated at some point however at one point in a game of 2 deck blackjack there are at least 20 hands in a row that hit 21 which is just to lucky to even enjoy reading and they never mention cheating. Please pick up a different manga over this, it is poorly written and very overrated on this site. The only good part of the manga is when Obama shows up.