It’s back to the mahjong parlors for another series of cute girls playing an old game. But this is not a sequel to the 2009 series. It is instead a parallel story.
What They Say:
“Chance Meeting”
Ako, Shizuno, and Nodoka were best friends in middle school, often going to Achiga Girls’ School to play mahjong. But as time passed, they saw each other less and less. That was until Shizuno saw Nodoka win the middle school mahjong singles tournament. She is determined to meet her friend again, at the inter-high mahjong tournament.
The Review:
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
Three years ago, Ritz Kobayashi’s manga Saki, about a young high school mahjong player named Saki Miyanaga who had, well, unusual skills, was adapted into an anime. After finishing my reviews for the first few episodes of that series, I had somewhat mixed feelings about it all. On the one hand, it was filled with a pile of tired cliches and character types which were no different from just about every other show in the anime universe: there was the lolita for those with such tastes; there was the girl with an enormous chest; there was the smart one and the glasses-wearing one. And there was a lot of debate over whether the girls were wearing undergarments. Yes, the typical kind of otaku bait fodder. Added to this were the standard tropes of the sports show, with power auras, secret powers, and sudden plot twists, turns of momentum.
But there was another side to it. There was also some weird kind of dynamic energy that was coming from this marriage of otaku bait and sports show. Many flocked to it because of the apparently canon single-sex relationships between the female characters, but that is not where the energy was coming from for me. I think what attracted me to this show as it progressed was the sheer fun the characters were having in their universe. While there were hard matches and stinging defeats to go with the well-deserved victories, throughout it all Saki Miyanaga, Nodoka Haramura, Yuuki Kataoka, Mako Someya and Hisa Takei (and the token male Kyoutarou Suga) all had fun with their run at the national championships. The infectious spirit of the characters (perhaps helped a bit by the energetic voicing of Kana Ueda, the voice of Saki, who is in real life a mahjong fan) came through and helped to propel it above the usual run of drivel that comes out every season.
So, now we are three years later. Instead of getting a sequel to the original series, instead, we are presented with a parallel story. Most people are referring to this as a side story, and there’s nothing wrong with that term, but I think I prefer to think of this as a parallel story, since it seems clear that the main timeline of this show is going to run parallel to the events of the original series, and it’s not really a branching off of the main or minor characters of Saki. It does connect to the main story, doing so by providing some backstory to one of the main characters, Nodoka Haramura. Yes, episode 1, if we think in terms of the “main” story, is a flashback. But seen from another vantage point, it is an alternate origin story for Nodoka Haramura, as well as for the new girls to whom we are about to be introduced.
We already knew that Nodoka had only recently moved to where Kiyosumi High School was. What we did not know is that back in middle school, she lived for a while in Nara Prefecture. There, she went to middle school with Shizuno Takamako, a very spirited girl who seems to prefer long tops which make it hard to know whether she is wearing pants or not, and Ako Atarashi, who wears her hair in twintails, a common fan fetish. Yes, the fan pandering is already present. Nodoka was at this time, the first year of middle school, a somewhat lonely girl as she was a recent transfer to the area, having moved there because of her mother’s work. She is befriended by Shizuno and Ako, who soon sweep her up in their own favorite past time: they love to play mahjong. They do so at the local combined middle and high school for girls, Achiga Girls’ School. There, a former legend from the school’s no-longer-existing mahjong club, Harue Akado, runs a small free mahjong club for the local area children. Nodoka was already playing mahjong before this, but now she found friends to play with, including as well the one-year older Kuro Matsumi.
We know nothing of Shizuno and Ako’s playing capabilities, though we do see that we’re clearly in the Saki universe when we learn that Kuro has a strange power: she attracts all of the red dora tiles (special tiles colored entirely red that have extra point values). Nodoka, of course, utterly disbelieves that such a thing is possible.
If we, the viewers, had never heard of Saki Miyanaga and Kiyosumi High School, you could not blame us for thinking that we were already seeing the trajectory of this story: a crack team of Shizuno, Ako, Nodoka, Kuro and one more (as you need 5 for team play) would, under the coaching of Ms. Akado, rise up and form a new Mahjong Club for Achiga Girls’ School, which has lacked one ever since the team led by Akado fell apart after her run at glory six years before the time Nodoka transferred to the area, and go head to head with the most powerful school in the Nara region, Bansei High. After that, would be nationals.
But, it was not to be. First, Ako decided to go to a different middle school, and then Nodoka and Shizuno were placed in different classes at Achiga Girls’ School. Akado was scouted for a professional team and closed down the club. The final blow came when Nodoka announced that she, too, was transferring. Time passed and the girls went their separate ways.
So, what changed? One day near the end of her third year of middle school, Shizuno was watching TV and happened to flip on the National Middle School Mahjong Tournament. We already know what happened here: Nodoka Haramura won the singles tournament. Shizuno is stunned by seeing her old friend rise to national prominence, and it relights the fire that had died within her, her love of mahjong. She calls her old friend Ako, even though now they are slightly distant, having gone to different middle schools. She too is somewhat stunned by Nodoka’s sudden reemergence in their consciousness. Not being able to think of anything else, Shizuno runs to the former mahjong club room at Achiga Girls’, expecting to find dust and decay. But there isn’t. None other than Kuro Matsumi turns up. It appears that the older girl, now a first year in the high school division of Achiga, has carefully maintained the room for the two years since Akado left. And suddenly Ako appears. Kuro was waiting for them to return, and now they have, with a new goal: to form a team and play with Nodoka again, though one wonders if they would have been so eager if they knew about the demons and demigods lurking out there in the Saki universe.
In Summary:
This first episode of the new Saki series (note, this is a new series, not a new season continuing the first series) establishes us firmly in the universe, but presents us with a parallel story. While Nodoka Haramura, the talented player who was first rival and then friend to the preternaturally gifted Saki Miyanaga, moved on to glory and fame, it appears that she left behind middle school friends who are inspired by her success at the National Middle School Championship to want to reach for the heights of inter-school competition themselves. It’s too late for middle school, but high school will provide enough time to try. Will Shizuno and Ako, her childhood friends, be able to form a team that can catch up to Nodoka? We will find out in this series.
Grade: B+
Streamed by: Crunchyroll
Review Equipment:
Apple iMac with 4GB RAM, Mac OS 10.6 Snow Leopard
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�G.B. Smith�actully the netionals will come faster then you think in this new series