In reality, the diversity of all the characters makes it all more realistic. I used to play in chess tournaments, and ended up knowing and befriending most of the people playing against me in the tournaments. It's very hard to know nothing about them except their name and their face, so I believe the addition of the opponents' backgrounds is very realistic and necessary.
Second of all, most of those reviews come from people who have never played mahjong, but I have played many times and can assure you that some powers are possible given enough skill. You can calculate what tiles or how many tiles are let from the discards and chis, and my sister is a rinshan kaihou player herself (although she can't always win that way... She wins like that 1/5 of the time). There's lots of calculation of probability going on that is perfectly doable. There is only one power I find impossible and it is the "disappearing girl" which is more witchcraft than mahjong XD.
Ok for the actual review:
Saki mixes ecchi, yuri, story and action perfectly. I can feel comfortable watching it at school, which is a good sign about ecchi (compared to to love-ru...) and the yuri story is one of the best I have seen. The ratio is just right.
The story is well balanced with the main storyline taking most of the space, and some background story from time to time. People also complain about filler episodes; for real??? I think anime without fillers are way too dense... They become anime like Death Note (all action and development, unable to stop).
The characters are also well developped: Yuuki is funny, Saki has that amazing background story, Nodoka is calm, reserved, shy, Club Leader is energetic... No two character are the same, and all of them are fun to learn about.
Music? I didn't take note of the music. Not because it's bad; because it highlights well the moments, but not outstandingly well, it's just average on every aspect.
The art is also average, neither good nor bad.
Overall: it's very enjoyable. Although I didn't learn any new mahjong technique, (It could be too hard to explain anyway) I did learn a lot about friendship, boobs and yuri XD
TACOOO
