In addition to playing and finishing some new games, I also got the chance to finish a couple of anime series. One of these was Saki, an interesting take upon the game of Mahjong and the World Poker Tour. And it was all done in the traditional anime style. There was much to Saki that I enjoyed, but there were only a couple of things that took away from the great story, in my opinion. Overall, though, I think you should pick this up and enjoy watching some clever Mahjong action.

What was Win

In case you don’t already know, “win” is the internet term for awesome, great, or some other relative synonym. Anyways, there was a lot to like in this anime. First, the story was pretty good. This anime stars a first-year high school girl, Saki, who just recently got into high school and has found a mysterious building (and mysterious girl) on campus. It just so happens that this building is home to the school’s Mahjong club, and the mysterious girl is the reigning middle school champion of Japan. Saki, our main heroine, goes to this building after school, and decides to play Mahjong with the other club members (almost all girls, and 1 dude). Saki, although not winning, consecutively shows her skills by scoring +-0 every time (really, really hard to do in Mahjong). After the other members see her skill, they want her to join their club, and Saki eventually does. The group then decides to train hard to get to the prefectural qualifiers, the gateway to national-level Mahjong competition for both the team and individual versions. Along the way, the group ends up becoming close and pulls for each other.

What I really liked the best was the character development: there were around 20+ characters, all of which were multi-dimensional and quite relatable. For me, I related to Saki, as she originally didn’t play her best, as it took away the fun for others who were playing (and they would also get really, really angry). She ended up learning how to play well by keeping her score at +-0 to make sure everyone else could win and have fun. This was very reminiscent of how I try to play many games: to make sure others have fun. For the most part, there was a character in there almost anyone could relate to, which I feel helps to strengthen the anime.

The animation and humor also kept me watching the anime. The anime was vivid, and contained tons of color. They also transitioned from traditional drawing to the humorous type of drawing multiple times, which helped to reinforce the humorous aspects of the anime (like the tacos one of the main characters liked to eat, or how they always made the one dude in the club grab all the food). Not only was the animation done well, but they also included special effects like lightning and angel wings, which related to the type of player each character was (e.g. stealthy, attacking, defensive, demonic, etc.). This was pretty darn cool. Oh, and they also did some cool 3D animation of all of the Mahjong tiles when critical times in the game and the story took place.

In addition to the great animation and drawing style, the designers of this anime also implemented a World Poker Tour (WPT) type of style for looking at all of the Mahjong tiles. The camera would zoom in and reveal the tiles for each player as the camera would pan and track to each of the different characters. The characters would also think aloud their strategies so that the viewers could have a better idea as to why they were playing the way they were (and I don’t have a clue about Mahjong, but after this anime, I would like to learn how to play!). Also, they had two commentators that would try to hype up the action of every tile, which was quite funny and distracting (though none of them commented like Vince Van Patten or Mike Sexton, the WPT commentators) at times. It felt like I was actually watching the tournament on the TVs at the tournament, and that also was a critical piece to why I really enjoyed the anime. I also really enjoyed the bright and up-tempo music, too.

I could have used less of…

Fanservice. Apparently I’m not the targeted type of viewer for this anime. There was a lot of jiggling. And there were many, many shots of legs and short skirts. Whenever a person was scared, a camera would instantly cut to legs, short skirts, and sweat. Or, when some of the girls would start running, the camera would cut to their short skirts or their anatomy jiggling. Some of the girls would also try to heckle the most endowed character by making her feel bad about her “fat”-ness. Yeah – not needed, in my opinion. There was all of the above to make the anime really fun to watch. But then again, like my friends at work say, I’m not 13, or watching anime for this type of pleasure.

So if you like that type of action as well, then this anime will have everything you’ll ever want. Even still – I’d say go grab this one and enjoy the epic Mahjong action. I’m waiting for season 2 to come out as see what happens next.