I know that this has probably been said a plethora of times previously, but…she came.

Oooh, big dilemma, do I blog Saki, do I blog K-ON, both? Neither?! I kinda want to do both, but I’m not sure if I’ll be able to keep up that pace, since…well, I’m lazy. However, these two shows have the potential to drag the blogger out of me once again. They’re a ton of fun to watch and I can see them being a ton of fun to blog.

Anyway, I digress.

Saki 02

This week starts right where episode 1 left off, Saki pulls an insane hand out of a very select few to bring her score back to +/- 0. Another game is set up, but this time the president asks Saki if she might not try to play to win, suggesting she think of the initial scores being altered to her opponents favor so a perceived +/- 0 is really a guaranteed win. Nodo steps her game up and dominates for the majority of the round, but Saki wins the last hand with a, pardon me if I get this wrong, rinshan tsumo, suanko. (For some reason I want to say it’s a chankan tsumo, instead of a rinshan).

The rest of the episode is reserved for Nodoka BAAAAAW. Saki confronts her after the game but Nodo is all pissy because she got beaten by Saki, who doesn’t even like mahjong. Nodo runs home, broods in the shower, her wet hair clinging to her huge breasts, then she broods some more in bed, her huge breasts pushed against the bed. Breasts breasts breasts breasts breasts. I bet GONZO could redesign Nodoka to have no head and not a single person would notice.

Oh, there was also that bit that hinted that Saki’s mom is a mahjong celebrity of sorts.

I really hate Nodoka, not only because of her cow boobs, but because she keeps switching intermittently between creaming her panties over Saki and hating her because she’s a sore loser.

Speaking of panty creaming, dear god the lesbian undertones are strong in this one. All it’s missing is Nodo humping the corner of the mahjong table while moaning Saki’s name.

Just out of curiosity, I’d like to ask those of you who don’t know much about mahjong to comment on how the show is doing in terms of explaining it. Are you guys following along easily or do you find yourselves lost in the terms and scores being thrown around and only know something is epic when the speedlines and lightning kick in?

K-ON 01-02

This anime is a riot to watch. Yui is by far the driving force of the show, the lazy, easily distracted, airheaded lead who stumbles into the light music club in an attempt to bring some measure of excitement into her otherwise mundane life. She sorta reminds me of mai waifu with her general sillyness and some of the cute stuff she does…

Hup hup hup

And the effectiveness of sweets as a calming agent…

There’s more to the show than Yui though, the rest of the cast meshes very well together. You have the rich ojou-sama character, Tsumugi, the off the wall insane character, Ritsu, and her boke sidekick and voice of reason, Mio.

The show is a great mix of school comedy and slice of life, sorta like a Minami-ke/Manabi Straight fusion. The part time job scenes were pretty funny and everyone hanging out in the club room talking about music and fattening Yui up with cakes and pastries is equally hilarious.

A huge reason why I’m partial to this anime is because I’m also an aspiring guitarist, and when I saw Yui’s excitement to start playing, watched her pine over that Sunburst Les Paul Signature, I started to remember how I felt when I first started out, and it led me to pick up my guitar and start messing around again, the first time I had done so in many months. Damn Yui for getting her $2,500 LP in less than a week while I had to wait for close to half a year before I held my Ibanez RG, at less than half that cost retail. Spoiled brat D:

Now that everyone has an instrument, the real fun (ie. SCALES SCALES SCALES) should begin. Although for some reason I think Yui’s going to be some sort of guitar prodigy and have sweep arpeggios and string skipping under her belt before the week is out.

Quick note on technicals, animation is cutesy, but fitting. Music, judging from OP and ED, seems to fit the bill, and not half bad for an animu.

=O Ritsu you bitch!

~ Shirukii ~

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 ~