“Oh here we go“, you’re probably thinking. “Western writers always dismiss Mahjong games. Let’s see how he clowns on it. I bet he doesn’t even know what furiten means!“
Guess again, pessimistic reader I’ve invented in my head! I love Mahjong! Especially riichi! Many years ago I learned another variant from an auntie as is tradition, then got into riichi over lockdown and never looked back. I was legitimately excited to try this one as it’s been a minute since I’ve clacked some tiles. How was this implementation?
Ehhhhhhh.
Yakuman’s fine. The problem isn’t the quality of the interface, presentation, etc. Honestly it’s all laid out pretty well! Everything’s visible on a single screen and while not having color is a downer it’s manageable, and the inputs are intuitive. The bot opponent makes choices pretty quickly too, which is a rarity for early Game Boy board games! No, the issue is that this is exclusively 2 player Mahjong and that’s just not the best ruleset. I’m not even a diehard 4p or bust kind of guy in matters of Maj’ – I actually love playing with 3! 2p just doesn’t cut it for me most of the time, not without some wacky rule variants, different yaku, something to spice up the I-go-you-go. There are so many better 2p rummy-adjacent options out there!
Though y’know, I say that now with the benefit of hindsight, but how many competitive options existed in ’89 beyond just playing Gin with an actual real life deck of cards? 2p riichi via a link cable is legitimately a pretty cool use case for the DMG and it certainly beats Nintendo’s previous attempt at standalone virtual Mahjong. I would not be shocked if this killed it among the grandma set in Japan, though I bet the eye strain required to read the characters on the original screen may have scared off more than a few. I appreciate this thing for what it does, even if it’s not all it could have been.
2.5/5
Bonus zone because apparently I like to do those when I find extra material – there’s an English translation patch! I didn’t touch it so I can’t vouch for the quality, but there’s very little text in-game so I’d be surprised if it wasn’t sufficient. What it won’t do is teach you Mahjong, but the game already didn’t really do that. Hell, even its manual spends basically no time on the game itself as much as how to operate it. Tile-curious folks will still want to look elsewhere, this one’s for those who are A) already in the know and B) current year Game Boy enthusiasts. Pretty narrow venn diagram, but know that if you fall into it that we are kindred.
Wack Game Boy Zone 