I was personally quite interested in The Way of Pon when it was first announced. A cute-girls-doing-cute-things low-stakes slice-of-life anime about a bunch of insanely cute girls, who were designed by the mangaka behind The Quintessential Quintuplets, hanging out and playing Mahjong. Unfortunately, cute character designs are the beginning and the end of my interest in this show and my investment doesn’t span over four episodes.
Not that you’ll be able to watch this anime if you live in the UK. Because this is an Amazon Prime Original if you live in a certain region then fuck you. As of the time of writing you’re going to have to either make a voyage on the seven seas, make use of a VPN or wait and hope Amazon will be benevolent enough to dump the whole season on your lap once spring arrives.
Not that I can recommend that you go out of your way to watch Way of Pon. It is a thoroughly mediocre story about ganki girl Nasiko getting kicked out (literally) of her home by her parents for being too ganki, taking over her dad’s old parlour and turning it into a place for her and her friends to hang out and discovering a Mahjong table. Also, a magical Mahjong-Phoenix… thing appears from nowhere that only Nasiko can talk to… I guess?
The thing about Mahjong is that it’s not a very interesting game to obverse let alone try to make an entire season around. You can only have your cute girls sit around a table and make Kaiji and Yu-Gi-Oh references so many times until the joke becomes stale so the show mixes it up by having an episode dedicated to the girls making curry or mobile gaming which is just as thrilling as it sounds. I don’t dislike the girls. I like them a lot. They’re incredibly well-designed and they all have likeable personalities (Haneru with-standing as she’s only just been introduced by the end of episode four) but the script feels very safe and very mediocre.
Speaking of designs, despite the overall art and hand-drawn animation being pretty good, the digital backgrounds and the use of CGI are not. Some of the digital backgrounds have a strange fish-eye lens effect to make the interior of the parlour seem more spacious, but it doesn’t blend well with the characters and art. The CGI hands used when the girls push all of the mahjong pieces into the centre to be shuffled or when they’re making places are distractingly uncanny like they're disembodied from the characters. It’s not OLM’s best showing.
The Way of Pon isn’t good or bad. I hate to use the word, but “mid” is the best way I can describe this anime that you’ll have to pirate unless you live in a territory that Amazon has decided to permit you the honour of watching it weekly. I came for the Quintessential Quintuplets character designs and I left to watch something else. There are much better cute-girls-doing-cute-things anime out there, like Yuru Camp! I’ve been catching up on season 2 because season 3 is coming out in spring! It's a great show! Watch that instead.
5/10 Mediocre.
