- Starring
- Miku Martineau, Eve Edwards, Aviva Mongillo
- Creators
- Simon Barry, Homura Kawamoto, Tôru Naomura
- Rating
- TV-MA
- Genre
- Crime, Drama, Mystery, Thriller
- Release date
- May 15, 2025
- Where to watch
- Netflix
“Bet,” a 2025 Netflix series adapted from Kakegurui, follows Yumeko, a skilled gambler who enters St. Dominic’s Prep, an elite school where gambling determines social rank. Seeking revenge for her parents’ deaths, Yumeko challenges the ruthless student council led by Kira, disrupting the school’s hierarchy with her daring bets and uncovering dark secrets in a high-stakes psychological game.
Login or
Join For Free to vote.
James Carrick
James Carrick is a passionate film enthusiast with a degree in theater and philosophy. James approaches dramatic criticism from a philosophic foundation grounded in aesthetics and ethics, offering insight and analysis that reveals layers of cinematic narrative with a touch of irreverence and a dash of snark.
As someone who has watched and enjoyed Kakegururi in English and Japanese, Bet misses the mark for me. This feels like a textbook case of what happens when studios adapt anime without understanding its’ DNA. This isn’t supposed to be a teen drama, rather, a rollercoaster of erotic tension, paychological mania, and moral ambiguity. One of the most jarring shifts is in the writing, being riddled with generic lines, clunky exposition, and surface-level story beats. The anime was full of visual style and subtance (dramatic camera sweeps, over-exaggerated expressions, each game’s atmosphere being like a deathmatch) that’s absent here. One thing that was really lost in translation is Japan’s culture of social hierarchy. Thematics of respect, shame, and control are more fleshed out in the anime than in Bet. On top of all of this, casting decisions seem like they were based on checking boxes primarily (All characters look like they are cosplaying Kakegururi instead of being in an official product).
If you’re going to engage with Kakegururi, watch the anime on Netflix (Sentai DVD/Blu-ray dub is different) instead of this.
You’re going to have a much better time.
No audience reviews yet. Be the first to leave one.