#he spent CHAPTERS on this brain spiral. going thru all the other times he was betrayed. and getting mad at himself. poor thing

[good-wine-and-cheese]

Ohhhhhh okay so I knew that Miyoshi and Maeda betrayed him but I didn't realize it was right from the beginning. I really like that a lot actually. Once the reveal hits it completely flips the narrative. I do still feel it feeds into the "Muraoka doesnt really matter that much" angle for this arc, the bigger conflict for Kaiji is more the actual fallout from part 2, where he's ended up totally aimless and then his old friends get the wrong idea about where the winnings from the Bog actually went. If anything, Muraoka is what Miyoshi and Maeda think Kaiji has become.

Heartbreaking to see him spiral in his mind about not wanting to believe the guys would betray him though. That's rough. He really didn't want to believe it.

Shoutout to this part where Kaiji flips up the toilet seat and then sits down like so, fully in his jeans. like you deliberately did that, on purpose

One of the things I find kinda funny about part 3 Kaiji is like...it doesn't feel as though Muraoka is the primary antagonist. He feels more like a setup for Kazuya.

We barely get an introduction to him, and at almost no point do we see him behaving like a proper threat to Kaiji. From the start, Kaiji has an advantage: he knows about Maeda, and Miyoshi is helping him which Muraoka doesn't know. Now, yes, Kaiji does start losing: and it's the big matches that he's losing, but even so it never feels like it's because Muraoka is a formidable opponent, it's more that Kaiji made a mistake. Muraoka is just kind of a guy. The only threat he represents is "Kaiji loses a bunch of money he doesn't have" which is big for Kaiji, but doesn't really offer much for an 'arc villain'.

The only person who has a threatening energy is Kazuya: who, throughout the entire arc so far, Kaiji keeps trying to figure out who this person is and how he knows who Kaiji is, and whether or not he's going to blow his cover and screw him over. Kazuya's the actual opponent here.

It's not really the match itself that has weight, but rather the guy watching (and enabling) as things play out.