Amazing. It's over.

Is anyone surprised by this outcome? Still, it was a hell of a struggle. More below the fold.

UPDATE: Actually, for me the big mystery is: when, oh when, will Saki and Nodoka start calling one another by their given names? They're still saying Miyanaga-san and Haramura-san.

UPDATE: I wanted to know what a "Rinshan Kaihou" was, and found this blog (NSFW). Explains it this way:

When you complete a kan (4 of a kind), you must draw an extra tile from the wall (that’s why saki got to draw two consecutive tiles).  If that tile causes you to win, it’s a rinshan kaihou.

UPDATE: Calawain also posted about this. And DiGiKerot talks about it.

UPDATE: Kurogane, too.

The room is totally black. Then Koromo raises her ki even further and she starts physically glowing. Then the power comes back up.

And Saki isn't intimidated. That quiet smile of hers can be frightening, since it indicates unshakeable confidence. Saki is certain she's going to win. But it's going to be an uphill climb. The scores currently are 38900 (Kana, Kazekoshi), 93400 (Yumi, Team Roadkill), 111800 (Saki, Kiyosumi), and 155900 (Koromo, Ryuumonbuchi). And there are only a couple more hands left.

We got a whole bunch of back story on Koromo which indicate why she's such a little monster. Her parents are both dead, and she's been living with Touka's family. Touka is her cousin. Touka promised her a lot of friends if she played mahjongg, but Koromo doesn't believe it's true. She thinks no one has fun when playing with her, and that no one really likes her. Koromo is revealed as being intensely lonely and emotionally isolated, even though Touka has been trying to reach out to her.

Kana, in last place, isn't beaten either. She's still confident, still making plans to try to win. She's in full-on catgirl mode (nyaa!).

But Koromo wins the next hand, extending her lead even further. She's now 63,500 points ahead of Saki, and the others are even further back. And there's only one more hand to play, unless Yumi (east) wins and keeps winning. Saki can only win one more time, no matter how things go because a win by anyone but Yumi ends it.

Back in their room, Hisa and Mako seem unreasonably calm and collected. They certainly don't seem dejected. Nodoka, too, still believes in Saki and thinks she can pull it out. Saki still has that quiet smile on her face, and her friends know what it means. She's enjoying herself and she's ready to kick butt.

Kana, in fourth place, gets the tiles to make a yakuman. It would be a big hand, but if she used it she'd still be in fourth place, and the game, and tournament, would be over. So she has to discard out of it.

Then Koromo gets a draw she doesn't know how to handle. Having Koromo be confused like that is really, really unusual. Her problem is that the obvious discard (the one-spot tile she just drew) would play into Saki's hand, but any other discard would ruin the hand she's building. She freezes.

Saki's hand is really awesome. But Koromo isn't supposed to know everything she has, though she's figured out a lot of it. She knows that the one-spot tile she just drew is something Saki wants. So she freezes.

After a while, Saki smiles at her and talks nicely about how much fun she's having and how much she likes mahjongg.

Koromo finally decides that even if the one-spot discard would make Saki's hand, it wouldn't be enough points to win overall, so the discard is a safe one. Of course, she's aware that Saki can do miracles, but she doesn't think that even a miracle would be enough in this case. So she discards the one spot.

Except that Saki doesn't play it the way Koromo expects. "Gonna win on that?" Saki responds, "No, even if I ron on that I lose. However..."

And then Saki pulls her master stroke. She does a kan with three one-spots and Koromo's one-spot, and plays it as an open meld.

Mahjongg, especially the version they're playing, has extraordinarily complex scoring, and Saki has pulled out an obscure scoring rule. Since she's created a melded kan using Koromo's tile, then if Saki manages to win with a Rinshan Kaiho, all the points she gains will come from Koromo.

Having two four-of-a-kind in her hand, Saki can kan twice more and thus draw three more tiles. Her power is up, and Koromo can feel it. And every tile Saki draws is golden.

What Saki ends up with is 4 one-spots (including Koromo's red one-spot), 4 two-spots, 4 3-spots, 3 4-spots, and 3 5-spots.

Describing it in game terms is a mouth full: "Tsumo. All circles. All pons/kans. Three concealed pons/kans. Three kans. 1 red dora. Rinshan Kaiho. 32,000 points." And since all the points come from Koromo, she makes 64,000 relatively, which is enough to overcome Koromo's lead of 63,500. That's it; game, set, match. Kiyosumi wins it with a miracle play. In the main auditorium the crowd goes wild.

Nodoka runs to the playing room for some quick yuri teasing.

And then there's some character wrapup.

The teaser says that next week is a swimming-pool episode, but the real mystery is this: it's a 26-ep series, and this was ep 19. What are they going to do with the remaining 7 episodes? It's not enough time for any kind of deep story, but without one it'll all seem like anticlimax after this ep.

If they'd ended this tournament sooner, there would have been time for another arc. But as it is, anything they do is going to seem rushed, especially by the standards of the languid pace they used for this arc.

All these people are going to see each other again in a week, for the individual tournment for this region, and maybe that's what they're going to use to finish up the series.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in General Anime at 10:55 AM | Comments (10) | Add Comment
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