Will Teru Miyanaga continue onward until nothing remains but a shattered wreck where the other players were? Or is there hope that her streak can be stopped?
What They Say:
“Promise”
Playing against a champion has forced the girls to evaluate their play styles and never give up fighting for points.
The Review:
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
Forget Saki. Forget Achiga. Welcome to Toki: The Player. The Story of the Senriyama Girls’ Mahjong Club. Before any opening animation, we get an extensive three-and-a-half minute look at Toki Onjouji and her relationship with Ryuuka and Sara. This is before she gained her power, back when she was just a first-year who could not play very well. We see how desperately she wanted to be on the team and play with Ryuuka and Sara.
After the opening, we go back to the Semifinal match, and Toki has taken the extreme gamble of trying to see three moves ahead. She succeeds, but it’s clearly taking a heavy toll on her health. She successfully sees Teru declaring that she’s one tile away from winning three moves ahead. It all comes to pass as expected, so Toki tries to look into the future again. She does, but we can all see that she’s on the edge of passing out. We do not get to look at what she saw, except that she tells us something, well, I’m sure someone has been waiting for it: Kuro Matsumi from Achiga is about ready to make her move. She will need to, since Teru, of course, has a strong hand that can bring in 18,000 points if she makes it.
But making any move might require throwing away a dora tile, which Kuro is always extremely reluctant to do. The Matsumi sisters and their weird relationship with the dora tiles has been both a source of strength and a glaring weakness for them. Now, Kuro must make a decision. After a long internal monologue, filled with all kinds of symbolic meaning (her relationship to dora seems to be connected to her relationship with her mother, who appears to be out of the picture in the present), she decides to throw away a dora tile. It has an immediate impact: Teru Miyanaga’s right arm whirlwind, her streak power, dissipates. Not only that, but one can assume Toki saw ahead that if Kuro followed through on throwing away the dora tile, it would be Teru who would make the discard that gave Kuro a completed hand. And what a hand it was, worth 16,000 points, plus a bonus. It also ended the current players’ match, since it was the fourth hand of the South Wind round.
Unfortunately, even though it’s over, it appears that the strain has been too much for Toki, who finally collapses. The Senriyama girls rush with Toki to the ambulance, though they’re going to have to get their minds back in the game. The Achiga girls also come to see what’s happening, and out in the lobby they finally achieve, sort of, their goal from the beginning of the show: they get to see Nodoka again. Shizuno tells Nodoka that they must meet in the Final. Nodoka makes no promises, but she wishes to be there as well.
Break time is over, and now the second player from each school is at the table. It will be the elder Matsumi’s turn to try to gain as many points as possible, in order to come out at least second from this round of the tournament.
While I’m happy that they finally found some time for Kuro to shine, as opposed to her constant refrain of “I can’t do anything” that we’ve been subjected to for the past several episodes, the players’ round just completed really belongs to Toki (who cares if Teru won most of the points; Teru’s an unimaginative robot). It was more Toki’s story than anyone else’s. Fortunately, this episode serves as something of a corrective to everything that has been wrong for the past few outings. We have some actual drama and excitement, and we have a real portrayal of how a competitor will act under pressure. Sure, Kuro is near-pathological in her aversion to throwing away dora tiles, but when it was the difference between giving in to superstition or getting to tenpai (being one tile away from a completed hand), she made the logical, rational, and sensible choice. And she was rewarded for it. Interestingly, we also see what Teru Miyanaga’s real weakness is: once she has done her first round reading of the other players’ abilities, she is herself locked into expecting them to play a certain way. That leaves open the ability for someone who is completely random (a novice) or a deep, deep strategist (such as Yumi Kajiki or Hisa Takei) to foil her ability by acting in a deliberately contradictory manner. Well, we’ll see if this is even acted upon in the future, should there be another Saki series.
In Summary:
As the tension builds to stop Teru, Toki throws everything she has against her. It finally works out, but at a heavy cost to her health. So, the current players’ round is over, and it is on to the second member from each team. We also see Nokoka bumping into her old friends from Achiga, and Saki oddly sitting by herself.
Grade: B-
Streamed by: Crunchyroll Review Equipment: Apple iMac with 4GB RAM, Mac OS 10.6 Snow Leopard
