The Winter 2023 Anime Preview Guide

High Card

After discovering that his orphanage was on the brink of closing due to financial stress, Finn, who was living freely on the streets, set out for a casino to make a fortune. However, nothing could have prepared Finn for the nightmare awaiting him. The world order can be controlled by a set of 52 X-Playing cards with the power to bestow different superhuman powers and abilities to those possessing them. With these cards, people can access the hidden power of the “buddy” that can be found within themselves. There is a secret group of players called High Card, who the king of Fourland has directly ordered to collect the cards that have been scattered throughout the kingdom while moonlighting as employees of the luxury car maker Pinochle.

High Card is part of a multimedia project by publisher Kadokawa, anime studio TMS Entertainment, and entertainment company Sammy Corporation. It streams on Crunchyroll on Mondays.

Richard Eisenbeis
Rating:

Ever wished Card Captor Sakura had more explosions and bloody violence (not to mention a cast mainly made up of attractive men)? Then have I got the anime for you!

As you may have gathered from the sentence above, High Card isn't the most original conceptually. 52 superpower-granting playing cards have escaped into the world and various groups are trying to collect them for their own purposes. Meanwhile, our hero is your typical “punk thief with a heart of gold”—a man stealing in order to keep the orphanage that raised him from going under. With the eviction deadline closing in, he goes to “not-Las Vegas” to use his pickpocketing skills to win big.

In the casino, he runs into two other superpower card holders. It's here that we get to the creative part of the anime. The first has luck powers—to the point it's impossible to harm him directly. The other has the ability to turn anything he touches into marbles. Read that last sentence again. Lock me in a room for 20 years and ask me to do nothing but make up random superpowers and I strongly doubt “turning things into marbles” would ever cross my mind. And while I'm not sure why he's able to throw said marbles at a speed that makes them on par with bullets, I won't pretend I didn't enjoy the visual spectacle.

And really, that's what this episode is: pure spectacle. It does the bare minimum setting up our hero and then spends the majority of its time wowing you with beautiful animation and crazy superpowers. This show knows very well it has only one chance to get you interested—and with what it shows us, it's hard not to be. Who knows if this one will be any good in the long run but this certainly isn't the last episode I will be watching.

Caitlin Moore
Rating:

According to its creators, High Card was inspired by the movie Kingsman and deliberately designed to be accessible to non-Japanese audiences. I haven't seen Kingsman personally, but even without that context, High Card was a good reminder of why I don't care for high-budget Hollywood action thrillers: they're far more interested in looking cool than telling a tight story with interesting characters.

If you're looking for neat action, High Card will most likely keep your blood pumping, but for me, it was a struggle to pay attention through the whole episode. It was all just so empty, pure flash with no substance inside. Finn is a thief with a heart of gold, an orphan living on the streets? How novel! The orphanage will be shut down, so he's desperate to make money to save it? Why, I never saw that coming! Y'all will have to try harder than that to get me invested in this poor boy's plight than you are here. I like action, don't get me wrong, but I need more context about why I should care about the flashy car chases.

Plus, the action wasn't as thrilling as one would hope. Maybe this is a me problem – the climax was a high-speed car chase through a fictionalized, less visually exciting version of the Las Vegas strip. Zoomy cars are the least interesting variety of action as far as I'm concerned. However, I can't get past how the episode's primary antagonist is a dude who can turn things into marbles (or maybe hard candy?) and how wasted that was. You can have some fun with that power, but he mostly shot them like bullets. Finn pulling out his power at the end might have been cool, but then his power was just “gun,” and his winning move was “shooting guy real good.” Why didn't he use it before they reached that point?

Three stars may seem high for a review like this, but that's more acknowledging that I'm just not the right kind of person to enjoy High Card. I could see it working very well for the person whose tastes it aligns with – its energy stays high throughout, and the action is slick for what it is. Also, while I wouldn't say I liked it, there wasn't much to dislike either. I found no major narrative flubs, no themes repulsive, or gratuitous sexualization. It's pretty good, but it needs to try harder to catch my attention.

At first blush, this episode's opening sequence does not have much in common with the rest of the show. What is important to get from it, however, is the girl in the episode's beginning can pull off an explosive feat because she uses what appears to be magic playing cards. (No, not Magic the Gathering cards.) When she loses all the cards during her escape, and they fly free like shooting stars, that's the actual setup for the episode: the cards have been unleashed upon an ignorant public to be used as they will without really understanding their power.

As you might guess, the cards naturally fall into the wrong hands. It's not clear whether these cards were a well-known weapon before their loss, and that's something that the episode needed to establish a little bit better. It also feels slightly too ambitious; if the face cards count, there are at least fifty-two potential people with these powers, assuming that efforts to collect more than one card per user have been less effective thus far. There is an effort to balance these questions with action, but I don't feel like it works well enough to maintain an air of intrigue and solid plot-based action. For example, I want to know how much Finn understood about his two of spades right from the start; It feels just a little too easy that he manages to turn it into a gun at a critical moment.

This episode did not pull off what it wanted to. Establishing Finn as a ne'er-do-well with a heart of gold who wants to save an orphanage, possibly one where he grew up, is not the same as making him a fully realized character. I enjoy the repeated feats of sleight of hand that he pulls off during his debut scene; that he managed to rescue the little boy's lost dog felt like a very lovely indication that his heart is in the right place. The casino scene felt like an attempt to shoehorn in gambling in a show based on magical playing cards, and the appearance of three card users at the scene is slightly too pat. This wants to be a slick action show with this supernatural edge, and I don't feel like it entirely pulled it off, though I can't quite articulate why. It's probably worth the three-episode test, but it very quickly could turn out to be a show whose ambitions far outstrip what it can do.

I was skeptical of this premiere for a lot of its run. Sure, it was high-energy and had a slick production, but it felt like something was missing. Then, as a lead-in to the episode's action climax, an evil hitman used his magic poker card glove to turn a man's entire arm into marbles, causing our hero to shout, “His arm turned to marbles!” with 100% seriousness. Right then, that was when I changed my mind and buckled in for whatever ride this dumb show wanted to take me on.

As for why I was skeptical, High Card throws a lot of anime bullshit at you in its opening minutes with little context and an overabundance of self-seriousness. Characters start talking about fighting for their place in the world before we've even seen them. A girl reveals her special poker-card-based power is to summon a seemingly infinite number of explosives, including missiles. A king of some sort has visions of a mysterious “Lala” while ethereal wind scatters the central cards. It's all just so much, and that's before we meet our street-smart protagonist with a secret heart of gold who's trying to save the local orphanage. Unlike modern classic Birdie Wing, it wasn't immediately clear if the show realized how ridiculous it is or could lean into its excesses properly.

But once the mandatory build-up to our hero's fateful encounter with the dangerous world of magic playing cards was over, things did pick up. The marble assassin's powers are almost ridiculous enough to be a Stand power, and seeing him opt to flick his marbles – which are also apparently candy, since he eats some – to hold up his side of a gunfight, was just the right kind of stone-faced stupid to hook me. By the time we had a high-speed chase through the Las Vegas strip, firing guns and marbles through windows, I knew I needed to watch more of this show, if just for the chance of seeing more stuff like this.

It helps that the production is up to speed with its premise. The action is smooth and full of energy, combined with the peppy soundtrack to keep up the momentum of this supernatural crime thriller. Although character designs are solid, I'm less enthused by everyone wearing suits in the OP since Finn's casual style is much more interesting. Altogether it makes for a show that probably won't be great but could be a lot of fun.