Saki - The Nationals - Episode 9
Nodoka keeps on keeping on, even taking the round's biggest shot. The true mahjong monsters come in for the 5th round. |
I don't know if the producers wanted to rush to the 5th round so that we can see our eponymous heroine in action, but I was a little disappointed with the first half of the episode. Two of the girls decide to stop blocking the loli-miko and let Nodoka take the hits of her South-West Gate wins, but somehow she keeps being blocked and they're not quite sure how. We get a hint from Nodoka being proud that she picked up on the weird coincidence with the wind tiles that Hisa warned her about. It wasn't explained explicitly, but perhaps Nodoka has begun to take into account individual players' statistics with her digital style play. Nodoka is figuratively playing in a different dimension, one of pure computational analysis, than the others with their understanding of mystical or magical guidance of the tiles. They can't see her using her powers, while Nodoka also cannot notice the others' powers. Their planes of mahjong existence are orthogonal to each other. Even when Nodoka takes the biggest hit from the South-West monster, she calmly takes it as if it were expected. The loli-miko was crying earlier when she was being blocked, but with Nodoka in the zone, it's just the end of that hand, and she's on to the next one.
I wanted to see some Nodocchi power going on, but we're being moved on to the main event. The anchors, the true mahjong monsters on the teams, face off now. Most of them haven't even played in the tournament yet, so dominant are their teammates that they've taken all the points from one team before the last round. This is Saki's first time playing all tournament, as is the other shrine priestess. Saki immediately gives us what we want: the rinshan kaihou - getting a four-of-a-kind, and then the winning tile on the extra draw that comes with it.
The fans have all seen this before, so we need to see what the other girls do. The tall one with the hat has the ability to exploit a specific rule in mahjong. If someone openly declares her wait, a riichi, she can double, or more depending on how much she wants to wager, her score, but a chasing riichi means that if another player wins the hand before the waiting one, all the points she wins will come from her, instead of being spread around the other players. Toyone, the tall one, is like a mahjong hitman, and when she gets serious about killing someone, she takes off her hat. She is openly gunning for the school in the lead, taking all their points as her own, effectively doubling her points in respect to that school.
I expect this round is going to take a while. We're going to need to see the back story on the three other players besides Saki, and how their mahjong monster powers work. What I hope to see is what Saki learned to do when her play style is being blocked. The best players have one or two tricks reserved for those situations.
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