This is sorta silly/embarrassing for me, because when I chose this anime, I had assumed Saki was about high school harem. You know, when a guy has 5 girls after him and the guy is indecisive and usually ends up hurting the other girl’s feelings cause he can’t choose between them and then finally (usually at the end of the anime), he makes a choice. Normally I don’t watch these kinds of anime, but I thought “why not… I’ll change what I watch every now and then”. Saki was an anime that I really didn’t put any thought into why I chose it, I just did… kinda situation.
So after watching episode 1, I was kinda confused how the main focus was on this Japanese game called “Mahjong”. I figured that the harem would pick up in the episodes to come, but yet it was still focused on this game. It wasn’t until episode 3 or 4 that I finally read the description for Saki and said to myself “crap”. However, in hindsight… I coulda dropped this anime series, but I have this annoying habit of finishing what I started and rarely do I drop an anime series… the only exception is if the anime is completely a waste of time.
Now if I would have known from the start that this anime was about games/sports, then I definitely would NOT have watched this. This is my opinion, but I think sports anime in general are boring and I’ve tried to watch a few in the past and have never been able to get into it and usually end up finishing the anime only to feel dissatisfied after the watch. Some might disagree, but there is always a genre that people don’t like to watch, it just happens to be sports for me.
Anyways… let’s talk about Saki, yes?
Well first off, I’ve heard of this game before, but never have I actually had someone explain the rules to me. I am what people call a “newbie” to this game.
Animation
This is the rare time that animation actually hurts this anime. Usually when this category gets low marks in my previous reviews for an anime, it’s because the animation is below expectation but doesn’t hurt the overall anime as a whole, however, that is not the case here.
When someone is playing Mahjong, there are these CG effects that show smoke, lightning, slow motion or anything over the top like this when a player is getting a domino or tile. At first, I thought nothing about these effects, but then I realized that these effects kept coming and coming, and continued to come even when they were not warranted. So in moments that when these effects could be used to intensify the situation… the effects had been used so much that you really didn’t care when they came, even at an important moment. Let me make sure you understand this… these effects happened a lot, probably 10-20 times an episode or more depending if a tournament was taking place.
Regular animation in terms of backgrounds and art style were average, however the mesh between CG effects and regular animation didn’t not mesh well.
Lastly, there was this one girl that happens to be one of the main characters that had huge breasts… I mean huge. Even though this is not an ecchi genre anime, there were countless breast shots of this girl and to the point where it got ridiculous. Haha, it sounds like I’m complaining about breasts, but here is my view on this. It felt like the animators or producer of Saki thought to themselves, “the viewers might be bored of an anime solely focused on Mahjong, so let’s please the majority of the viewers… the male audience with these senseless breast shots”. To me, it felt like more attention was on this girl’s breasts than the actual game and the reason I decided to not drop this series was to learn more about the game.
Sound
The OP/ED were somewhat decent. I probably listened to each of these 2-3 times, and then started skipping through it. The background music was below average in my opinion, because I didn’t really notice it. I think this category could have been stronger, for example, put dramatic music to show tension for an important moment in the game, but the music here was just elevator music… meaning it was just there.
For some reason, the anime that I used to watch that could be a prime example is Yugioh. I remember a few years back I used to enjoy this show, but the one thing I remember, was the music. What I’m trying to get at is that music can in a way keep a viewer watching a normally boring anime much longer than if it wasn’t there. I mean hey… the music kept me entertained for Yugioh and looking back, I can’t believe I actually watched Yugioh.
I guess all the attention for this anime was on the game play and not the music… that’s just too bad.
Story
This anime starts off with Miyanaga Saki just having graduated from middle school and is sitting by a tree and Haramura Nodoka (big breasted girl) walks by. Of course, the first thing Saki notices are the breasts. Suga Kyoutarou (the only male in this anime), invites Saki to the Mahjong club. When Saki comes into the club room… who do you think is there? Yep, Nodoka!
There are 3 outcomes for Mahjong. You win will positive numbers… lose with negative numbers… or get a 0, which means you didn’t win or lose, but this is extremely hard to attain. Yet Saki gets a 0 four times straight. Meaning in four different games, her outcome was a 0. Nodoka takes this as an insult because she thinks Saki isn’t taking the games seriously and Nodoka is a very good Mahjong player.
Saki gives her reason why she only goes for 0’s in Mahjong games. It’s because when she was younger, Saki played Mahjong a lot with her family, but when Saki won, she would get in trouble and when she lost, she would get no candy… so it was from this moment that she started to play for 0’s… she didn’t win or lose.
Saki and Nodoka start off as strangers, then enemies, and then become good friends. It’s when these two become friends that they make a promise to each other. The promise was to enter the prefectural qualifiers and win, then to go to the Nationals and win that too. The only way to go to the Nationals is to win the prefectural qualifiers and the prefectural qualifiers is a tournament, so about 80% of this anime is focused on the prefectural qualifiers. There are two different kinds of tournaments for this prefectural qualifier… which are team Mahjong and individual Mahjong. The majority of this anime is focused on the team Mahjong part.
And that right there ladies and gents, is Saki the anime. I think I was able to explain enough without giving away too much.
Characters
This is sorta a confusing category to describe, because Saki and Nodoka start out as the obvious main characters, but as the anime progresses and the tournament begins, so many characters are introduced with their side stories, that one could make the point that there really aren’t any main characters.
Throughout this anime and the tournament, as the characters play, there are flashbacks for why certain individuals joined the tournament and what they are playing for, but the thing is, you would assume these flashbacks are for the main characters, but almost everyone gets one.
I guess the only thing that could be said is that this tournament strengthens the friendships of all these girls that are participating in the tournament. All the characters are girls and there are no boys or love issues to make this anime complicated… its very linear… people (girls) playing Mahjong.
Value
There isn’t any value to this anime. It’s just people playing Mahjong. I mean, nothing really exciting about that and to make things worse, there really wasn’t any effort put into this anime, like love or twists that could have spiced up this anime. I also thought Gonzo (animated company) devalued this anime even more by putting all sorts of girl stereotypes to attract the male audience… like I mentioned about the breasts above, it felt like the company was saying, “well we might bore a lot of people with this game anime, so let us entertain males with eye candy”.
Enjoyment
Here is the confusing part of this review, because it seems like I hated this anime based on this review… but in reality, I thought this anime was addicting, as hard as that may be to believe. I knew absolutely nothing about Mahjong, so when I was watching this anime and all these moves were happening, I guess I watched more to try to learn how these moves were being performed and why. I guess you can say I was trying to learn and watch anime at the same time. That aside, I truly believe if it wasn’t for those over the top, cheesy and repetitive CG effects, Saki could have been made into something a lot better than it is.
Conclusion
My prediction is that if 10 people decided to watch this, probably half of them would drop this series after the first few episodes. I’ve never done this before, but this is a
. What I mean by this is, that if you do decide to pick this up and watch it and you are bored after a few episodes, well drop this series now because this is how the entire series is, however, if you are somewhat interested in the beginning of this anime, keep going and you might be surprised like I was and end up finishing Saki.
Furthermore, if you actually read my review to this point, then I would like to mention that there is going to be a 2nd season, because this anime is about a promise to get to the prefectural qualifiers and win that and then to go to the Nationals. Well, these 25 episodes only concentrate on the prefectural qualifiers… so what does that mean? Yep… a 2nd season to cover the Nationals, but if there isn’t a 2nd season, I would like to say that the ending is bad for Saki. The ending is in such a way that one would believe a 2nd season is coming soon.