This episode was pretty good. I liked the bit of character development and plot that it showed. They introduced more mahjong players, since a prefectural preliminary tournament is about to begin. We see Saki still pulling her punches just so someone can have fun winning, which makes Nodoka upset. Another thing about Nodoka that becomes very apparent in this anime, is that:

I swear, I think her boobs are bigger than my fiance’s, if by just a little bit. I also discovered that Yuuki isn’t human.

Apparently if she runs out of tacos, she goes back to her natural form. (Or so she believes.) I don’t understand her fixation with tacos myself. I mean, they’re good food and all, but that’as just taking it a bit too far.

Nodoka doesn’t like it when Saki pulls her punches. She has fun when Saki plays all out. During the last half of the episode, we hear a bit about Saki’s sister and mother, mostly her sister Teru, though. Teru is a total badass, I have to say. Saki wants to use Mahjong to talk to her sister, because when she visited her once a long time ago, regular talking didn’t get through to Teru, so she wants to make it to the Nationals to talk to Teru with mahjong.

Ganbaru, Saki!~

So this is the special effects I mentioned in my previous post about this series. Now that I have seen the second episode, I take back my Bamboo Blade comment about the series and replace it with Prince of Tennis. There’s a lot of symbolism in this series, and I think I like it. Although the OP is rather… interesting.

This is a bit of a small clip in the Opening Sequence of the series. There’s a lot of symbolism in the opening.

In this episode, Saki is convinced to play because she wants to borrow a book of a particular series. I wanted to know what the series was and it’s revealed at the end, and I was actually rather surprised that it was mentioned in the anime at all. Well.. not that surprised, but a little bit.

Yeah. It’s none other than LOTR, Lord of the Rings. That magazine on the left, however, holds some significance to Saki. I’m assuming a family member of hers is a pro mahjong player of sorts. Probably why she plays so well. I wouldn’t be surprised if this theory was right.

Anyway, in the current game, Saki has to win, in order to get the book. Seems the whole collection is owned by the president and she gave Saki a condition of winning to borrow the book. The game was really breath taking, considering the type of game it was, and what she had to do to win. But she managed to pull it off anyway.

And as always…

Turns out she gets upset when she loses to Saki, because at the current time, Saki doesn’t like Mahjong, and that’s what makes it painful. However, over the course of the last bit of the episode, Saki goes after her when she runs away and have a talk with her.

She has fun playing with Nodo, and wants to play with her a lot more. At the end of the episode, Saki joins the club and they play another game. Can’t wait for the next one.

Wow. A mahjong version of Bamboo Blade. I’m really liking the new mahjong layout also, and I really enjoy the fluid animation and the gameplay effects of the first mahjong match.

The animation looks rather cute for this series, and I see there’s another moe character with the fang attribute. She’s rather awesome in the anime. One of the club members. My favorite character is the president.

She’s the one on the right; the president of the club and school, that is. I like her because of her personality and because I can somewhat identify with her. It’s just the first episode, I know, but still.

Anyway, the main character Saki sees a very pretty girl with big breasts at the beginning of the show, only to find out she’s the top member of the Mahjong club. And Saki kind of owns her, in a way, by getting +-0 3 times in a row. Which is a very magnificent feat in the world of Mahjong. We find out that Saki refuses to play again with her, and I just felt kind of sad when she felt so rejected. I think she started to cry.

Makes it look like she got rejected in love, but when in fact, she got rejected in Mahjong. But no worries, the president finds a way to convince Saki to play once more. And as always, at the end, she gets another +-0. But again, I rather like the new Mahjong interface. Akagi’s was rather old school and fit with the atmosphere of the anime, since it was rather dark. But this is fun and happy.

Yeah. Saki seems to be really really lucky and got a very rare hand to pull off her +-0.

Follow me in the adventure of this Mahjong club and see if they make it to the Nationals~