The new season is here and so far I’ve only watched two of the new releases, FMA Brotherhood and Saki. I’m not a huge FMA fan, and while it’ll be fun to watch the series take the darker, more serious route that the manga did vs the first anime, I don’t have much to say about it. Saki, on the other hand, is basically Akagi with lolis, and there are few things better than Akagi.

Saki focuses on the titular character, who is a mahjong prodigy unbeknown to herself, or perhaps more accurately, in denial. Her style of mahjong is an odd and almost surely impossible one, to finish every round with a score of exactly +/- 0. Her compulsion to do so is rooted in her childhood, playing mahjong with her family. If she scored too low she wouldn’t get her sweet candy reward, but if she won too much, she’d be scolded, so consciously or not, she aimed for the middle ground. The EXACT middle ground.

So Saki avoids playing mahjong, even going so far as to say she dislikes it, presumably to avoid similar ridicule/anger that she was subject to as a child. However, her friend drags her to the mahjong club, some easy prey for its members. As the game progresses, one of the club’s star players, Nodoka, begins to suspect Saki’s odd style of play, but its only when their president wakes up that the (rather obvious) conclusion that Saki was playing for +/- 0 becomes apparent.

Bribing her with books, the president gets Saki to return the next day, having shook up Nodoka, who, despite her best efforts, can’t match Saki’s unique skill. And once again, despite her best efforts, cornering Saki into a position where only a couple choice hands (70 fu 2 han hands) would net her the coveted +/- 0 score, she manages to pull a rinshan tsumo (winning on the bonus draw after a kan) out of sheer godly luck.

Thoughts

It’s okay Saki ;_; someday you’ll find someone who loves your DFC

FUCK YEAH AKAGI WITH LOLIS!

Well…actually, not quite. So far, Saki, both the show and title character, lack the chronic insanity that Akagi did. Saki has a sort of calm confidence about her, which kicked up a notch in the final scene where she drew her “winning” hand, but she’s not about to play chicken with a bunch of thugs and run herself off a cliff in a speeding car. Also, the mindfuck element is missing in Saki, so far. No lengthy explanations as to how Saki set up her hand, defying all logic, reason and odds, it was seemingly random, or purely luck, which is fine, but not nearly as awesome as seeing Akagi’s perfect manipulation of not only the game itself, but the people playing it. And the cheating, of course.

However, the sheer impossibility of consistently scoring +/- 0 in every game Saki plays edges it into the same domain as Akagi mindfuckery.

But damn if these high schoolers don’t take their mahjong seriously, let alone the club owning a fully automatic mahjong table, Nodoka has her own personal one (albeit with little else in her room). These things can run you thousands to tens of thousands of dollars! Also…

Mahjong graphs!

Akagi comparisons aside, on the technical aspect of things, animation is…sufficient. No frills animation is at work here, with some questionable choices here and there, like the CG umbrella in the rain scene. But at least GONZO knows where to allocate their resources, putting the most animation weight into Saki’s epic final draw.

Music is, once again, inconsequential, if not bordering on pretty bad.

Finally, seiyuu cast is decent, with Kugimiya Rie, Ueda Kana and Koshimizu Ami being the recognizable voices thus far.

Speaking of GONZO, with two seasons of Druaga and now Saki, whose manga has a respectable following, they’re actually not sucking too hard as of late. Kudos guys.

lol at the pseudo fanservice though, a stupid move if you ask me because it’s going to piss off both extremes, those that clamor for fanservice any chance they get and those that abhor it. Personally, I don’t mind it, I think it’s funny and not at a level that’s distracting…yet.

I’m going to blog Saki, or at least TRY to, when school doesn’t have it’s boot firmly planted in my ass. It’s a quirky and fun show whose base concept I have an underlying knowledge of. I’m by no means a mahjong expert, but I know enough about it that I’ll be able to explain to the clueless out there exactly how epic Saki’s latest hand was.

Then again…perhaps I’m just choosing Saki because I long for the excitement that Akagi brought to the table, even if it’s in its most watered down form D:

I’m definitely not doing it for the lolis, not at all. What kind of absurd accusation is that!?

And a pinch of yuri undertones for good measure

~ Shirukii ~