VS.
Round 1: Character Design
Kaiji: Ugly
Kaiba: Hideous
Advantage: Kaiji
Round 2: Cast of Characters
Kaiji: Devoid of women and children.
Kaiba: More annoying than Raki, the Bleach arrancars, and SpongeBob combined. After watching the fourth episode, I spent a whole week suffering from erectile dysfunction. The episode was about an ugly old man who fell off a lighthouse. Nobody pushed him off. No sudden gust of wind. He just leaned over the side because he saw a flower. SPLAT! Total dumbass. Oh well, survival of the fittest.
The original Pedobear
Advantage: Kaiji
Round 3: Plot
Kaiji: Loaded with clever twists.
Kaiba: Too much filler (and not the good kind with lesbians).
Advantage: Kaiji
Round 4: Addictiveness
Kaiji: Watched the whole series in two days.
Kaiba: Dropped after six episodes. Well, technically I dropped it after 5.9 episodes. I paused episode six with about two minutes remaining, went out for some fried chicken, and never looked back.
Advantage: Kaiji
Round 5: Graphic Violence
Kaiji: Savage beatings, electrocution, ear-drilling, and appendage-dismembering
Kaiba: Guns, stupid old man falling off a lighthouse, and a memory-eating plant
Advantage: Kaiji
Round 6: Coin Flip
Kaiji: Heads
Kaiba: Tails
Advantage: Kaiji
Round 7: Depth
Kaiji: Profound implications about class warfare, contractual sanctity (both written and verbal), rational choice theory, and fluid dynamics
Kaiba: No depth whatsoever. Everything is dumbed down. Each episode begins with the narrator asking:
What are souls? Memories? Spirits?
Here’s a better question: who cares? You could preface any anime with open-ended filler questions to make it seem deep.
Why do we dream?
What makes us human?
What are souls? Memories? Spirits?
Don’t spoon-feed me these questions; MAKE ME ASK THEM. Blatancy ruins depth. Serving potentially deep concepts to the audience on a silver platter effectively renders them shallow.
Everything in Kaiba is a blatant attempt to effectuate depth. Everyone on the show is a complete imbecile, not because it makes an entertaining story, but because it helps make a statement. That’s not intellectually stimulating; it’s intellectually lazy. You could convey the same ideas through rational, well-developed, endearing characters, but then the audience might be distracted by an entertaining story and have to work to discover secondary meaning (a.k.a. “depth”).
Kaiba treats you like a child by spelling out all its “deep” themes. Therefore, if you think Kaiba is deep, you’re a pedophile.