Achiga defeats Bansei in the very first match of the tournament stopping a 10th consecutive win for Bansei and make it to the Mahjong National tournament.

Nodaka’s school also made the nationals.

We get to see some familiar faces as team Achiga arrive at Ryuumonbuchi high school for practice. Their team members are, if you’ve forgotten, Ryuumonbuchi Youka, Inoue Jun, Kunihiro Hajime, Sawamura Tomoki and of course Amae Koromo.

After that they go through a 10 day training camp.

They finally get to the nationals and Saki makes herself known.

Thoughts:

So… that went a bit fast… you hear all this talk about how amazing Bansei is and then the episode only gives a minute for them to be beaten. However you look at it, that’s not right. I think we all expected a good fight between Achiga and Bansei after all this hype and how confident Bansei was, only to make them seem like ants that got stepped on. The only reason that I can possibly think of why they would do this is to showcase how strong the Achiga team is. But even still, I would prefer a fight to the finish and for Achiga to develop a bit on the way instead of waltzing through.

After that I thought it was facing all the second place teams that was going to be shown properly, such as finding a way past Koromo. But nope… they skipped that too and accepted that they had no chance against Koromo. Which when you think about it means they won’t stand a chance against Saki.

Then came the training ‘camp’ and I thought okay it must be this part where they get some special training to develop and improve. But again nope, skipped it with a few scenes.

This leads me to assume that the rest of the series will be the nationals. But is there really enough to show? I don’t think there is, but I can’t think of what they can show afterwards. I find it hard to believe they can beat the team of Saki and Nodoka, especially having had no real big developments to improve. They can’t be good enough from the start, I refuse to believe it if they are.

It was nice to see characters from the original series so soon, I didn’t expect to see them this early. But it was fun, and even though Achiga team have the main characters, I still kinda want Saki to win. I think many of you will feel the same way, just haven’t given us enough time to like the new characters enough yet and rinshan kaihou is how you play.

So yet again there was no epic lightning Mahjong. After watching some AMVs from Saki, I remembered how Mahjong was supposed to be played, and I hope this anime will give me some of that epicness that attracted me to Saki soon. I have my hopes up, so better not disappoint.