Saki

When I first seen this anime coming out I was very excited because it appeared to be much like Hikaru no Go which is one of my favorite anime. However, after watching several episodes I realized they are nothing alike. The only thing they have in common is the fact that they both revolve around games. The game in Saki is Mahjong. I've tried to play Mahjong in the past but could never completely understand it and hoped this anime could help. Unfortunately, it can't.

Unlike Hikaru no Go, Saki focuses more on the characters than the game itself. The episodes ... will spend a single episode on character development rather than them playing Mahjong. Plus, there seems to be a redundant trend of every girl liking some other girl. In some cases this is alright, but in excess it hurts the show. Basically, every episode has included a moment with two girls showing their affection for one another.....too much

The writers are also trying to make it seem like personality has more to with winning than skill. They even made a character that can disappear because she doesn't stand out in a crowd. I know anime isn't about realism, but come on. Also, the characters moods change frequently and I agree moods affect play, but not to the extent they show. Characters can simply go from losing a match to winning because they remembered people want them to win.....at least think of something better!

I wasn't gonna write a review, but after seeing a 10 and an 8 I couldn't help myself. All I can say is I hope this gets better because I plan on finishing it.....I got my fingers crossed

Such a disappointment.

Over 38 episodes, story never concludes.

Yuri for no reason.

Magic for no reason.

Artificial intensity for no reason.

... Mahjong is obviously a fun game, or no one would bother playing it. The creators of this anime went through a lot of trouble building a method to accurately animate all the tiles with high fidelity.

Then they invalidated those efforts by making this a show about magical girls who interact in public virtually naked from the waist up (and sometimes the waist down) and hold hands and blush between matches instead of making a show about Mahjong that WOULD HAVE BEEN INTERESTING just by virtue of showing how the game is played.

And tacos. Don't forget the tacos.

I still have no idea how Mahjong is played, and I WANTED to know.

I will tell you straight that this anime is dreadful to watch. This anime mostly consists of fan-services and nodoka's gigantic breasts. The story is very pathetic and juvenile. However, the art and sound alone are superbly done. The character designs are unique, but I just can't bare to watch episodes looking at the characters themselves for more than 2 seconds without glancing myself on nodoka's breasts. This basically sums up what this anime is all about. This review is not to offend anyone and it is only my opinion of this anime. Thank you :)
If you are truely looking for a thrilling Majong anime, ... try watching akagi.

I really like gambling anime and among those were some really great mahjong anime like Legendary Gambler Tetsuya and Akagi, which I watched and thoroughly enjoyed without knowing the rules to Mahjong. I decided to learn richi mahjong as a result and now that I have become reasonably cocmpetant I wanted a new anime to watch and see if I appreciate it more now that I know the game.

I really didn’t know anything about Saki other than it being a Mahjong anime I knew nothing about it. Its actually not really a gambling anime, whilst mahjong is a gambling game, its not played for money ... just friendly points, and it comes off more as a sports manga with highschool girls trying to get to nationals with their respective clubs.

The plot synopsis isn’t really much more than that, its about a girl named Saki, who doesn’t like mahjong much, she gets pulled into by her friend Kyou into joining the Mahjong club, after discovering she enjoys playing Mahjong to win her and her club aim to compete in the nationals, which unlike regular mahjong is played a team where you take in turns swapping between members after one has played both an east and a south.

Saki isn’t as enjoyable to me as a regular gambling anime what I like is the high stakes thrill the psychological warfare and tension, Saki has this a bit, but it doesn’t have this much. A few characters namely like the president focus on reading people and gauging their weaknesses in order to out play them which I really love, but mainly this anime is about absurd powers, rather than outplaying each other for the most part.

Think Kuroko’s no basket, and how you like have emperors eye, invisibility, copycat, but I would say this anime seems even less grounded than that one. Abilities to see the future, being possessed by Gods, and just straight up drawing the tile you want are all abilities you can see in this anime.
And that’s my problem its fun in how absurd it is and it can be pretty cool, but to me it’s a bit too ridiculous, that and I dislike the main character’s ability.

Saki the main characters, isn't bad per se, but she is quite bland and passivein terms of personality. What's more she comes across as the superman of mahjong despite not playing since she was a kid. She has absurd luck and game sense and the ability to draw any tile she needs when she gets kan. Whenever she is loosing its because of her own mentality, whether she doesn’t want to win, lacks confidence, or is scared by the other characters, its more her own mental blocks which stops her. Her ability is so op when she is in the right frame of mind nobody can really stop her.

The other main character is probably Nodoka who gets sexualised a lot through this anime as the big breasted champion of middle school, she plays a more logical style of mahjong based on probability, which is nice, however she mostly zones out when playing so I don’t get see her thought process as much as I liked.
The coolest club member to me would probably be the club president, she is the cool schemer always watching over her group, and her style of mahjong is about exploiting her opponent’s weaknesses, she was always the most fun to watch whenever it was her turn to play
The rest of the club members are there but I don’t think there is much to say they’re kind of flat to me, I think the worst culprit of this is probably Kyou, he is like the one male character in this show who sucks at Mahjong to the extent they state he isn’t even worth training. Alls he does is run errands and think of sexual fantasies of the other characters, It would be better if they did something with him, as it stands he seem kind of pointless.

Going outside the main club members I have to say there opponents get a decent amount of back story and development, that there were some cool characters who I ended up liking. But equally this show could bore me with the flashbacks within in the match with the characters I wasn’t interested in so its equal sums here.
So what do I think of Saki? I think it is an enjoyably absurd show, which the knowledge of Mahjong doesn’t help too much as the absurd powers makes it feel pretty detached to me. Its fun but it isn’t great, known of the characters are well developed and the games do feel like they’re a competition of crazy powers rather than skill. But despite that there is a tension and enjoyment to the games in this anime, its just nothing compared to the other mahjong I have seen namely Akagi or Tetsuya.

Overall I would give Saki and its sequel a 6.5/10 it could be fun, but was lacking in many ways.

A warning if you do want to watch this that it doesn’t finish its final arc, and if you want to swap to the manga to finish it, it is going painfully slow and looks like it will take years to finish.

If you want a better mahjong anime which is more tense and focused on skill I would recommend Akagi. Or if you want another absurd sports show there is always the aforementioned Kuroko which has its own crazy powers and is about a highschool team going to nationals as well.

I love the mahjong games. I love the animation, music, and sound effects that go with every winning play. I love how the game jumps from one character to another, all trying to take control of the game with their unique strengths and weaknesses. It's often ridiculous, but also intense, chaotic, and exciting. And speaking as a novice player, it feels true to the spirit of mahjong.

I am indifferent to or outright hate everything else about this show.

Beyond establishing the characters' basic personalities and skills for the mahjong tournament, this anime does very little with them. There's maybe one scene for the MC's family situation ... and one scene for her yuri-bait partner's family, and we're supposed to be led to believe that these are important parts of their characters. But then for the rest of the 25 episodes, we get to see almost nothing new about them. And then they are vaguely in love with each other, but all I can see are cardboard cutouts with boobs making blush faces--hence, "yuri-bait."

The rest of the main cast is similarly criminally underdeveloped. One of the other club member's characterization ends up just being a pedophilic running gag that gets run into the Earth's core by the end and wasn't even funny to begin with. The club president has so many ways to be interesting with her connections and power in the school, but almost all of that is ignored in favor of repeating her one backstory in the mahjong club over and over. Effectively, the MC's school is just the mahjong club.

It's clear that the anime just wants to focus on the mahjong games and only wants to establish what is necessary to make them work in the end, and if the anime really WAS just mahjong games, then I'd be more or less willing to accept that. But there is SO MUCH time wasted on yuri-bait pandering and fanservice episodes that are completely devoid of any personality or substance.

It doesn't help that, in the actual tournament, the anime sometimes struggles to keep every character at the table relevant without bogging down the pacing with constant flashbacks, sometimes to scenes that were IN THE SAME EPISODE. And while I do appreciate characterizing the different opponents the MC and her club have to face, it also means that there's even less time to focus on the actual main cast, which makes the yuri-bait sequences feel even more empty and unearned.

Not to mention that it's just kind of creepy that at some point every loli girl wears very loose or scanty clothing, sometimes both. It happens too often to ignore.

This can only be a 6 for me because the mahjong battles are just that good. As someone that enjoys sports and game fiction, mahjong games being 4-player free-for-all make them refreshing to watch. All of the major battles have multiple competing narratives, and it's not always clear which one will dominate in the end. A player may be preoccupied with beating one character only to be surprised by a completely different character that was enacting their plan the entire time. It never feels overwhelming either; having 4 players has just the right balance of complexity versus emotional resonance.

The game being partially luck-based also works in the show's favor, because it gives the sense that anything is possible and any player can still come back from seemingly insurmountable odds. It's like the best parts of Yu-Gi-Oh or No Game No Life, but with the added complexity from having 4 players/teams.

There are episodes in this anime that I would absolutely watch a second time. Every character has some special strength that gives them the edge, but any other character can disrupt them with their own special strength and take over the narrative. When someone finally breaks through a character's dominance of the game, the show's excellent presentation does everything in its power to make you feel that high, even if you don't play mahjong.

Not every mahjong game is a huge hit; there are times when I think the characters' powers get too ridiculous to the point where, even when another character starts to beat them, it's not really clear HOW the other character is winning or what they did differently. The pacing being sometimes interrupted by too many flashbacks is also a bummer. But even the worst mahjong battles in this anime aren't a slog to get through, and the highs are still just as high.

In the end, I'm torn, but overall I'm glad I got to have watched this anime. It helped in my introduction to the game of mahjong and how it can be fun and interesting, but anything beyond that is just a mediocre shoujo ai fanservice schlock. I'd recommend this to anyone who can at least somewhat tolerate/enjoy those distasteful parts, because getting to those mahjong fights was well worth it.