Saki

Recently I have been into the game Mahjong because of this anime, Saki. The first time I played Mahjong it was pretty enjoyable but after watching Saki, the game just seemed to get more intense.

Saki as you might have already guessed revolves around the high school Mahjong club (Riichi club) and their dreams of entering and winning the nationals. The Mahjong only had two club members at first and one of them was in their last year, but luck seemed to be with them and that year brought them four new members. Unfortunately however Miyanaga Saki does not like the game for personal reasons and it took some convincing from the Middle School National Mahjong Champion Haramura Nodoka to get her in, which they soon discover was a brilliant asset.

Well I'm not going to ruin the whole storyline so here are my scores (I'll give out scores and my thoughts it seems much easier to express myself that way)

Music: 6/10
The music wasn't really what I expected for an anime like Saki but overall it did fit into the anime at certain points but could be better.

Character: 7.5/10
I feel they could have developed the characters some more, it seemed to me that 1/4 of the anime was based around Saki and Nodoka and the other 3/4 flicked on between the characters of different schools. That was one thing I found annoying though, how they have nearly 20 characters that play a significant role, I personally start to get lost at around 10 or so, so this could be a bit of a problem (my advice is focus on only two of the main people form each school, there's four schools, makes life easier) Apart from the ridiculous amount of characters I have to mention that there is a lot of yuri suggestive moments in Saki, I mean it shocked me, how do you even begin to think about mixing Mahjong with yuri suggestive scenes, I can't put that together.

Theme: 8/10
Basing an anime around a seemingly boring game isn't going to get much ratings BUT Saki managed to do it just fine, In a way Saki reminded me of Yu-gi-oh a simple card game turning to be an epic battle to the death, its just like Saki .... without the death. Saki manages to use the basic Japanese standard play of mahjong and turn it into a surreal way of playing the game, of course anything you see in this anime may not tend to work out for you if you played the game in real life. The use of effects such as aura's showing people that they're an enemy to be reckoned with and special moves that defines each character. What I found smart was their use of the two Japanese ways of playing Mahjong, Digital playing where everything is mathematical and Occult playing where players believe in the flow of the tiles and believe in people being blessed by the tiles. Saki tends to lean more to the Occult version of playing but none the less it makes it more interesting to have a table of phenomenons battling it out.

This is an anime I do recommend you all to watch, but you might want to get more opinions because if you are not a fan of Mahjong there is a lot of terminology you may not understand and it could bore you at times, but as I say try it out.