“Please, God! I cannot lose this money!” The pink-haired young woman gasps out a desperate plea as the line continues to plunge downward on her foreign exchange investment. “If you can hear me, please rewind time!” Cue the flashback. Kurumi-chan is in the final year of middle school when the world economy plunges into recession. This global crisis is overshadowed, however, by a not-unrelated crisis at home, as Kurumi’s mother sinks into depression and addiction…to foreign exchange (FX/forex) trading. She loses it all, 20 million yen. Talk about a wake-up call. And for a time, Kurumi’s mother rallies, going back to work, even working multiple jobs, all in the desperate attempt to hide her financial failure from her husband, who works away from the family. Kurumi watches with deep concern, vowing to get a job too, and when that is vetoed by her mother, the girl instead dedicates herself to studying the mathematics and mechanics of forex trading for herself, so that she’ll be ready to help out as soon as she’s of age. Her school friend questions this strategy, though, whispering with chilling prescience that people who get involved in forex tend to…not survive it very long. But Kurumi is determined; she will prove that it is possible to win at forex, if only you take a level-headed approach and keep your cool!
Well, that was unexpected! The frantic, frenetic, bubblegum bright OP and promo material for FX Fighter Kurumi-chan promise cute girls cutely trading in foreign currency (such a cute hobby!), but what we actually have here is a group of characters (three other girls get a brief intro in the final scene) who, as the narrator reminds us repeatedly, don’t know until it’s too late that they are on the brink of despair! I’ve never felt so tense watching a CGDCT slice-of-life series before. But that’s not a bad thing! In fact, it makes the series even more intriguing, since it’s clear from the outset that this is no copy-paste niche hobby series centered on educating viewers in said hobby (though of course it promises to do that too). Instead, it will also be confronting the darker side of forex trading: gambling addiction, high risk behavior, and the tragic backstories that drive the characters to wager it all, even when they know better—like Kurumi-chan herself. Both the animation (from studio Passione) and the score (from Takuro Iga of Oshi no Ko fame) do a great job conveying the unexpected range of emotion in this episode, particularly the heavy emotions, with yandere-worthy expressions and bursts of edgy strings in the soundtrack. Let’s just say, this is one slice-of-life that probably won’t be the most relaxing this season, but may just have some meaningful life lessons mixed in with all forex lingo and formulae. Then again, Passione doesn’t exactly have a track record for serious drama, and so we may see a tonal flip after this first episode that makes light of the series’s more harrowing beginning. But if it continues on in the direction it’s going so far, it could be something really quite unique: the first hobby series where the happy ending comes when all the girls quit!
FX Fighter Kurumi-chan is streaming on Crunchyroll.
