Forum - View topicREVIEW: Saki Episodes 1-25 Streaming
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pparker
 Posts: 1185 Location: Florida |
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We'll see if I'm in before Blood-
 Actually, not much I can say that Carlo didn't. One of the best descriptions of a series I've read--granted that I agree with nearly every word. I automatically avoid any sports or shonen/tournament anime. Even... no matter how much I love CLAMP, I just can never finish Angelic Layer.
With Saki, I was tired and out of any other otaku fluff to watch at the moment. Then I stayed up half the night from not being able to turn the show off during those tournament episodes, because of the skill with which high level competition was portrayed. Not to mention Mahjong being itself a fascinating game as shown. Its complexity drew me into it, even knowing the liberties usually taken in storytelling, plus the excellent animation effects and musical cues. My one disagreement is about keeping up with characters. One of the stellar aspects to the show was how well they kept each of over 20 lead and heavily supporting characters distinctly recognizable and memorable. I pretty much marathoned it, and so would have had more trouble remembering individuals otherwise, but that's my own memory issue. Each characters' design, personality and VA made it easy to differentiate them. I never wondered who was who or from what team. Not to mention another 10 or 15 lesser supporting characters. And out of all those, only one male. The show did the best that could be asked in that aspect. Individual viewer abilities may vary  .
One of the biggest ever surprises for me in terms of enjoying a series that I flat out would have avoided normally. Yes, it ended in the middle, but I suspect it has a good chance at completion so it's worth watching. |
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Megiddo
 Posts: 8360 Location: IL |
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From what I have been told is that the manga hasn't even gotten to the individual tournament arc, and you say the the most non-manga stuff is fluff?
Given this is a Gonzo work, I was pleasantly surprised with Saki. Granted, it is nothing more than "Moejong" (as I like to call it), but it fulfills that role well. Anyway, I'd understand your complaints if there was more manga to be animated, but everything I've read points to that there isn't (yet). Saki is published monthly after all, so it's going to be quite awhile till we get the National Tournament, but I liked the teaser we got with the ending theme. So where did you get that info? |
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bayoab
Posts: 831 |
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It's probably a misunderstanding. The trailer-like ending theme is based on materials from Kobayashi, the mangaka, but the manga is nowhere near that. Thus the whole:
is wrong. The series actually passed the manga at episode 18. |
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Malajax
Posts: 7 |
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Saki can go die in a fire as far as I'm concerned. The parts where they're actually play mahjong are awesome, but also few and far between in comparison to yuri nonsense. Did every female have to be a lesbian? Really? I put my face into my palms more and more often toward the end of the series because it was so ridiculous.
I guess if you're jizzing in your pants at the concept of stupid hot 13 year olds playing mahjong, this may be the show for you. It just wasn't for me. |
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Megiddo
Posts: 8360 Location: IL |
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I don't recall much in the show to "jizz" about Malajax, other than the enormous mounds on Nodoka and a few onsen scenes that are pretty much standard for this anime.
Are you just anti-lesbian or something? And not all the girls were lesbian. Yuuki for instance was obviously trying to flirt with Kyotarou. There's not even anything more in this series other than blushes and handholding. I don't think I recall a single kiss. So what are you so upset about? The idea of girls being interested in eachother? And at least half the show was the girls playing Mahjong. Back-to-back-to-back. Hell, the entire prefectural team tournament from episodes 9 to 19 was practically nonstop hyperbolic mahjong. |
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pparker
Posts: 1185 Location: Florida |
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To be fair, both Carlo and I used the word "fluff", but neither used it the way you mention. He said it about the non-tournament music, and I said it about the entire genre of light-themed, mostly pandering moe anime that I watch when I don't want to think. Not to be too argumentative, but honestly, Saki is not above average and isn't very interesting or original in the non-tournament episodes or whenever they aren't playing Mahjong--in character designs, story, animation or any other aspect. I'm a fan of ecchi, and Nodoka's is one of the worst character designs I've seen for moe anime. The reason I originally dropped the show after two episodes was I didn't see anything new or exceptional about it, and the micro-skirts weren't enough to overcome the worn-out story elements and other weaknesses. I did more enjoy the later episodes after the tournament, because I knew and liked the characters by that time and enjoyed just watching them interract. Having seen it and knowing how exceptionally good the tournament episodes were, I clicked on the review expecting to hear the usual moe-bashing. Instead I found Carlo's review to be very fair and reasonable, acknowledging the strengths, and not going out of his way to bash the weaknesses in a personal assault on all things moe. As some other reviewer might have done.... I wasn't aware, and apparently neither was Carlo, that the anime had outrun the manga. That's faulty research, granted. But if someone has no knowledge of the manga, just reviewing the anime, then his structure comments are also valid. I fully expected to see spoiler[the National Tournament in this season based on the story of Saki's sister that was revealed early in the series and it's becoming a primary story element as the motivation for her trying to win the tournament. ] Along about episode 20, I realized we weren't going to see it, and that was disappointing. So the high point of the show was near the middle, climaxing at the end of the Prefectural tournament. The ending was thus anti-climactic and fell flat because we were already into an new arc that wouldn't be finished and had long since crossed the highest peak. I understand it now, knowing that the manga wasn't even to that point. But in terms of the series, I agree with him. Knowing that, I would have suggested pulling the team tournament back closer to the beginning, adding more filler episodes before the individuals competition (character side stories, backstory or whatever--after we've gotten to like the characters) and then punching that series of games up to a more climactic ending that compared in intensity with the previous team tournament. But then, if I were really smarter than the producers, I'd be creating entertainment, not posting about it on the Internet with hindsight from my comfy chair .
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nechronius
 Posts: 275 Location: So Cal, USA |
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I was surprisingly entertained by the series in general despite a lot of its obvious shortcomings. Like most of the scenes not involving mahjong.
The nature of the fan service in Saki amused me somewhat. Really short skirts but not a single panty shot anywhere (not counting swimsuits later), which I thought was sort of a defining point about ecchi fan service. Like the animators said "We're going to get as close to the line as possible, without going over it."
Perhaps your perception might be a bit skewed, as on several occasions I found myself wondering why they couldn't just get on with the plot and show more matches instead of having a single match span across multiple episodes. Then again I didn't realize at the Time that the anime was going to go well past the manga so stretching things out was in some ways a necessity. I will grant you that there was a lot of female love to go around and I too found myself rolling my eyes at the sheer volume of it. Really? Every team in the finals has at least one girl with a romantic interest for another? Perhaps some of it can be chalked up to simple adoration/admiration for a senior (seems a pretty foreign concept in the US) but yes, it did seem excessive. Then again, the target demographic was apparently otaku males 35-39 (I think I read that in an article on the site somewhere) so that makes some sense.
To be fair the show is about high school in Japan, which is the equivalent to grades 10-12 in the US, so your point to emphasize is either out of ignorance or malice and neither is warranted. |
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Kyaa the Catlord
Posts: 300 |
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I have to agree that despite this show being really silly fun, Nodoka's character design was really disturbingly bad. Especially when she was hugging her penguin.
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malvarez1
Posts: 2116 |
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I may have to check out the manga, it sounds like Hikaru no Go. I really liked Hikaru no Go.
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Kit-Tsukasa
Posts: 930 |
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Gonzo caught up to the manga by episode 19. Everything after that was filler. So had the series ended there, it would have been a good way to end it, but the series didn't end all too bad either. Hopefully Gonzo will make a second season for this (and not fail like with Druaga)
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darkchibi07
 Posts: 5515 |
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Of course for a couple number of peeps, this is not all about mahjong but about how many girls we can yuri ship indefinitely! I, for one, am starting to get interested in shipping the Yumi x Momoka couple.
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Blood-
 Bargain Hunter Posts: 24171 |
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Damn, you pparker, you beat me to the pole position. Yeah, I don't agree with the difficulty in keeping characters straight, either. I thought they did a great job of differentiating a large cast. And this:
Is simply a braindead comment. There were a lot of episodes that were virtually wall-to-wall mahjong game. The yuri content, in my opinion, was pretty mild and usually restricted to blushing. Only somebody so homophobic that even the barest tinge of it gets their Underoos in a twist would think otherwise. |
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Ktimene's Lover
 Posts: 2242 Location: Glendale, AZ (Proudly living in the desert) |
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The most heterosexual female character I think was that annoying Yuki. No offense to her seiyuu, but her voice was irratating with that high pitched little girl voice, and her obsession with tacos. Kyoutarou Suga was the only major male protagonist but was a loser. I find it interesting that Jun Fukuyama was in this with Ami Koshimizu. Koshimizu played the big-boobed Nodoka who was the crush of Suga. Along with Code Geass and Spice & Wolf, this is a series where Fukuyama and Koshimizu play characters that are love interests that include one-sided love.
And that thing about the shoujo-ai? That really turned me off. I much prefer anime where the lead 2 characters are a boy and girl that share a chemistry. I spit at CrunchyRoll and Japan for giving us the censored version because it is unfair the Japanese get the uncensored DVDs and we don't (unless we obviously buy them). |
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Houlgrave
 Posts: 21 |
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My main problem with Saki is the fact that, barring moron-extraordinaire Kyotarou, it's like this anime takes place is a universe where males don't exist, and as a result this series doesn't have much in the dynamics sense.
I mean, I'm all for lesbian love, but if Aoi Hana can keep a realistic gender balance within its cast, why can't a series like this? |
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ikky
Posts: 76 |
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Once this show got going, I enjoyed it immensely. The fanservice could do without, but the mahjong was deliciously unrealistically entertaining. I love how both Saki and Koromo's "special moves" spoiler[haitei and rinshan kaihou] are some of the few yaku based entirely on luck.
I found the main flaw of the show to be how dull both Saki and Nodoka were as leads. I ended up rooting for half the secondary characters. |
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