Thursday, October 1, 2009

[Ended] Saki: Very Interesting

This is a story about Mahjong. However, you cannot take anything about Mahjong play in this anime at its face value, just as you can't take anything about tennis you see in the Prince of Tennis seriously. Everything in this anime is way too far-fetched to be real, yet they are still way too interesting to resist.

This is one of those animes that regardless whether you know the game of Mahjong or not, you would enjoy it greatly. However, people do know Mahjong (like me) sometimes tend to get a bit irritated by it. However, it doesn't really hurt the overall enjoyment of this anime.

Although the ending is somewhat open, I wouldn't hold it against it because one, this segment of the story is mostly complete, two they're just leaving things so they can make a sequel.

Final scoreboard:

Drama: 91 (Mahjong Drama)
Comedy: 90 (Funny)
Action: N/A
Art/Animation: 80 (Typical)
Sound/Music: 87 (Good music)
Character: 87 (Unique and plentiful)
Plot: 87 (Little far-fetched, but well written)
Ending: 88 (Good enough)

Re-watch value: 75 (Still somewhat interesting)

Overall: 90 - Far-fetched but interesting

Recommendation: If you're into a good mahjong drama, or just general drama about games, this is it for you. But if you're not into stuff like this, they you probably won't be interested in it at all.

2 comments:

the_other_brand said...

We are currently watching this in Aggime and we watched episode 4 this week. Honestly, the only thing that keeps me interested in the show right now is the fan service.

Watching the Mahjong games reminds me very much of watching the first season of Yu-gi-oh!, when they didn't follow the rules of the game. Except random lightning makes sense in Yu-gi-oh!. I find it somewhat annoying that the anime makes no attempt at explaining what's going on when they are playing the game as well; but this might be because I got used to reading Eyeshield 21.

Then there's the Yuri subplot between "Ordinary Girl" and "Fan Service Girl" which is played a bit too much for my tastes. It just comes to be more awkward than touching. (Do they have to blush ALL the time?)

The one thing I do like is the artwork, but once again that's probably due to "Fan Service Girl" more than anything. The story when outside of Mahjong isn't too bad, but when the game is going it reminds me too much of Yu-gi-oh! for me to take it seriously.

The Evil Cat said...

I used to play Mahjong a lot, but I've never played under the Japanese rule. So it too was a bit learning experience for me, except I was a bit more familiar with the the core game itself. I too learned very little from the anime, most of the learning are done outside the anime. If you're interested, this is a very good reference: http://ofb.net/~whuang/ugcs/gp/mahjong/mahjong.html

They might have gone a bit overboard on the fan service or the yuri theme. But to be honest, I hardly noticed them because I was so focus on the actual drama in the mahjong play. It may not appear to be interesting for people who doesn't know the game, but if you just take little time to learn the game, you too will find this anime very interesting.