It seems that every successive
series of the Saki anime is going to be not what I expect. I thought
this series would cover the Nationals tournament – as indicated by the title –
incorporating Saki finally facing off against her scary sister and what happens
to the cute alternate team from Nara we got to know in Episode of Side-A.
Perhaps they’d be sacrificial lambs.
Well, all of that remains for
some as-yet unmade series – there’s an OVA on the way next year, for starters.
What this series did was some of the preliminary rounds of the Nationals
competition. True, there were some fun new character introduced – I loved the
extremely tall girl and the ridiculous shrine maidens who could summon the
powers of gods – but ultimately there was little here that was particularly
consequential. The fact is that the fun of super-powered Mahjong games eat up
episodes, though, and this half-season flew by. What Saki really needs
is to be very long and ongoing – too little happens for this sort of length of
series to satisfy.
So while our heroic team
manage to prevail thanks to each member’s skill and Saki’s ridiculous luck with
her rinshan kaihou hands, all that has really happened is that the central
conflicts of the larger series have been delayed for another future adaptation
– if we even get there. It may be that to see the actually important parts of
this story following its exposition, I may have to go to a manga.
But for all that annoys me, I can’t deny how enjoyable the ride is. The ridiculous characters and exaggerated drama of the hands played, the way formidable players can sense one another’s auras, the fanservice – it’s all very funny and entertaining, and makes for compulsive, brainless viewing. And I need a few series like that here and there.
So yes, I will go on watching whatever Saki I can get. But until I have to, I won’t feel any real need to read the manga.
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