tobaku datenroku kaiji: kazuya hen midpoint thoughts!!

I'm new to this blogging feature, but I thought a fun way to use it might be to write little reviews and thoughts on the stuff I'm reading and watching, so here we go with my thoughts as of right now halfway through the Salvation Game arc of Kaiji!!

For clarity, I watched both seasons of the Kaiji anime and read about 30 chapters of the previous arc, but my friend who got me into Kaiji said I should probably just skip it and come back later, since I really know nothing about mahjong and it was confusing me a lot (￣▽￣*)ゞ

So far, I have really enjoyed the Salvation Game arc!! The manga art style is very charming to me, and I feel like it especially shines in the expressions of characters. The paneling is pretty simple, but this is also a plus for me. I never really get confused about what's happening which is nice.

I really enjoy the new characters introduced a lot. I saw a little bit of Kazuya in the last arc from what I read, but I've been enjoying him a lot this time around. He is delightfully insane, but also with some pretty sympathetic motivations, which makes him very charming to me. I also quite like Chang and Mario, and how they are appearing to demonstrate how good humanity can really be. Their backstories are really depressing, but I think it makes an interesting commentary on the state of Japan vs. other places in Asia. 

The pacing is pretty similar to the rest of Kaiji, which is a bit slow, but not unbearably so. I think the moments of drama easily make up for some of the less interesting chapters.  (*￣▽￣)b

That's all I really have to say so far!! I'll come back soon once I finish the manga proper and have my full thoughts on it. In the meantime, thanks for reading!