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.
