This is, well, a version of Idol Janshi Suchie-Pai III, but it’s a bit… well, it’s a bit changed.

See, back in the mid-90s, the Sega Saturn was the go-to home console for slightly naughty videogames, and the first two games in the series had been released for the Saturn with slightly naughty bits intact.  Suchie-Pai Remix was, in fact, my first import Saturn game, and it got me hooked on mahjong for life.

By 1999, however, Sega had bowed to the mighty lobby that was the Japanese PTA and banned anything that could be seen as less-than-wholesome, so Suchie Pai III – which was originally a slightly naughty game when it was released in arcades – had to be turned into something considerably less naughty when ported to the Dreamcast.

Moreover, the name had to be changed to remove any association with the earlier entries in the series.

As an aside, there’s an amusing bit on the back of the game box where one of the characters is asking “why doesn’t the box say “Suchie-Pai” anywhere?” and another character responds “Shh, we promised not to ask about that”

So, the publisher did have a bit of a sense of humor about the whole thing, but there’s no disguising the sad truth that the game was pretty much hacked to ribbons for its home release.  You only have a choice of six characters, each path through the game is limited to four rounds of mahjong, and it only takes a few hours to burn through all of the “scenario modes”, which is the term they use for the brief stories that set up each set of mahjong contests.

Oh, and just to add that extra little bit of fail, it’s one of only two Dreamcast games I own that refuses to boot if you have a VGA box.  That probably more than anything else explains why it took me so long to get around to playing it.

After you’ve dug out an S-video cable and spent a few hours to play through the scenario modes, though, you can start the “Making Mode”. This is where you create your own character, dress her up, and go challenge people to mahjong.  Here’s where the game actually strives to get some longevity value, because you need to earn points to buy new clothes and hairstyles and such, and you can lose points just as easily as win them.  If you really want to outfit your Mahjong Idol in serious kit, it could take a very long time.  In addition, the mahjong you play during Making Mode is rather harder than the mahjong from Scenario Mode, because there’s (a) no “panel match” game to earn powerups from and (b) no powerups to use against your opponents.  You live or die by your straight-up skills with the tiles.

I played with that for a while, beat all of the available opponents once, discovered I could actually challenge my personally-created character to a contest, beat her after some consternation, unlocked a special outfit for doing that, and decided that I could probably put the game aside and still feel like I’d done it justice.

On the other hand, it plays a pretty good hand of mahjong and it’s very English-friendly.  It gives you arabic numerals and roman characters on kanji-only mahjong tiles and it has an English list of rules, spelling out scoring and winning conditions and giving picture examples.

And, small side bonus, it’s free.

Link is here.  Enjoy.

Anyway, it was cute.

I put off buying it for some while, even though I actually had money already in my Japanese PSN account and therefore it theoretically wasn’t going to cost me anything I hadn’t already spent, because I was playing through a bunch of Saturn mahjong games already.

Still, inevitably, I broke down.

I’m not going to get into much detail about the game because I’ve only played a little of it.

Basically, it’s got a story mode, there’s no stripping, it’s four-player mahjong, it’s got quite high production values, and so far it looks pretty fun.  It features voice acting by members of AKB48, which seems to be an all-girl musical group where the girls rotate out as they get older and new members are brought in.  Basically, a hyper-cute Japanese Menudo.  I may be dating myself by making that comparison.

The reason for this post is that I’m hoping to save other people the same problem I had.

When I started the game, I got a status message saying that it was checking the memory card for a save file and not to remove the memory card.

Then it gave me an error “No data found : 80110307″ (strictly, “データがありません。（８０１１０３０７）” ) with an OK button.  I OKed that and it asked me if I wanted to start the game as-is. (“このままでゲーム開始めしますか？”), this time with yes or no options.

I chose “Yes”, because I assumed that I just needed to get into the game and that it would then create the missing save file and all would be well.

I was a bit optimistic there.

After playing the game for a half hour or so, accumulating a fair score, and unlocking a few things, I decided to give it a rest.  Note that, during this process, I’d occasionally been getting a “now saving” sort of icon appearing in the lower right corner.  It seemed like my theory was a good one.

I started it up again later, and, of course, got the same errors again, got into the game, and found that none of my progress had been saved.

It turns out that the actual process of creating a Moeru Mahjong Moe-Jong save file is as follows:

1. Start the game.
2. OK the first couple of prompts.
3. Select yes to the next prompt.
4. Get into the game and get to the main menu.
5. Press “Start”
6. NOW select “yes” when it asks you if you want to create a save file.

…

This is not exactly intuitive.  I’m not going to call it exactly user-hostile, because I’ve seen WORSE, but it’s pretty daft.

Anyway, if you are getting any of the above errors and your google searching leads you here, try those steps and good luck.

So when it comes to something like Magical Mahjong Warrior Poe Poe Poemy, I have to give Imagineer just a little credit.

Not much, mind you.

The plot consists of the following:  It’s 2016 and the earth is a miserable place, full of death and destruction.  Three demons escape from hell to make things even worse, and Hell’s truant officer Poemy is sent out to bring them back.  She takes along her mascot, of course.

In order to work in the human world, demons need to possess humans, and Poemy is no exception.  She winds up in the body of a girl named Emi, whose mother died when she was only 5 years old and whose father, a ship captain, hasn’t been seen in three years.  She’s being raised by a hulking great bodyguard.

See?  That’s character development, it is.  This game has all kinds of plot, and it even comes with some really bad semi-animated cutscenes to tell it all.

Here’s Poemy and her mascot:

Here’s a couple of your opponents.  Note that the first has cleverly possessed the body of, uh, a fast food waitress to carry out her evil plan of eating all the food on earth.

Not making that last bit up, by the way.  I only wish I were.

After fighting Ms. Damn Big Appetite, you meet another demon whose motivation for coming to earth, best as I can tell, is that she likes beating people up.  I didn’t think to get a screenshot.

You then meet the last opponent, a bespectacled possessed computer genius who’s trying to, I think, hack into hell and somehow depose Enma, the king of the demons, or something; I didn’t really pay much attention.  Still, plot plot plot, this game has plenty of plot.

Also she’s kind of cute, but that might just be the glasses talking.

Anyway, you defeat her at mahjong, you’ve successfully beaten all three escaped demons, you bundle them back to hell and give Emi her body back.  Life’s good, except that it isn’t.  Earth is still messed up and Emi has to move to an underground bunker with her bodyguard.

Oh, and aliens are attacking.

Aliens make everything better, especially when they’re lead by (apparently human) girls.

Also, note that she went to the School of Posing For Evil Conquerors, and she either has really odd musculature or she is sporting some awesome shoulderpads under that cloak.  As we all well know, shoulderpads make the villian.

Anyway, Emi has a flash of insight and summons Poemy back out of hell to fight off the alien invasion, using mahjong which even aliens know how to play.

You beat her, you realize that you’ve driven off the aliens but the Earth is still a barren wasteland of pollution, and then Emi taps into Poemy’s magical demon powers to clean the atmosphere and make the world bloom with flowers.  As the credits scroll, you see the demon escapees being punished by doing endless mounds of laundry, you see Emi being taken to the zoo by her hulking great bodyguard, and then… just at the end… her father returns and they’re reunited.

Cue upswell of music, cue curtains, let’s call this a wrap.  We’ll make millions.

Now, you may look at all I’ve written so far and say something like “I dunno, it sounds kind of bad”

And you’d be right.  It’s an ugly game and isn’t really all that fun to play.  It’s made easy, at least, because Poemy – being a Magical Mahjong Warrior – can cast spells that do things like let you draw just the exact tile you need to win, or to protect your discards from being taken by your opponent.  Kind of like Suchie-Pai games, in that regard, only it’s bad.

But, at least I’ve played through it and can chalk it off my backlog.

I’ve met Showko before.  The first of the Super Real series I played through was the Neo Geo Pocket Color “Super Real Mahjong Premium”, which included several characters from PV, PVI, and P7… but after you’d beaten all of them, you unlocked Showko as the game’s true final boss.  I didn’t, at the time, get the significance; it was a tip of the hat to the original game and probably a neat bit of nostalgia if you’d grown up playing, well, slightly naughty mahjong games.

There was, as an aside, a “Super Real Mahjong PI”, but it was only released in arcades and on the PC Engine.  Also, oddly enough, it featured three opponents – “PII” and “PIII” had the same three opponents, but they were split – PII got Showko and PIII got the other two. It seems like they were backsliding there, maybe they were adding animation or something.

PII seems like a much easier game than the later ones, by the way.  I’m not sure if they really improved the AI between PII and PIII, or if they decided to up the difficulty level through less savory means.  Mahjong is one of those games where, if the AI decides to give itself an edge (through, say, better tiles), you really can’t do anything about it.

Anyway, I’m done with this particular series for a while.  I have a few more games in the same genre to play through, though, and somehow I haven’t gotten tired of playing them.  Maybe that’s why the game has been around for two hundred years. 

Well, that is, it’s a pretty short game if you change the options.  It only has two opponents, but beating both of them can take a surprising amount of time on the default game settings.

See, the basic idea of any of these is that you’re facing off against an opponent and need to beat them, oh, five or six times to win.

In the arcade, these games are designed to leech as many Y100 coins as they possibly can, so any loss to an opponent also cancels out your last win.

So, say you’re playing an opponent and need six wins to beat them and move to the next opponent.  You win three rounds, but then lose one.  Now you need four rounds, because losing also cancels out your third win.

The home versions allow you to change this behavior – and, in fact, later home versions have this behavior changed as the default.  With it changed, if you win three rounds and then lose one (or two, or three) you still only need to win three more rounds to move on.

In a way, it’s cheap; you cannot lose the game as long as you’re willing to keep hitting the continue button.  On the other hand, these games cheat pretty mercilessly so I’m not going to lose too much sleep over it.

The ending credits seemed to be really short.  I’m not sure if that’s because they changed the ending for the home release or for the compilation disc or just because older mahjong games really were made with very few people.  I’m guessing it’s the last one, there.

Just to be sure, though, I went looking for a FAQ.  I couldn’t find one.  What I DID find was a blog post – not in itself particularly racy, but the site it’s on is probably NSFW depending on how strict your IT department is – detailing the short and sordid history of Japan’s “red label” games, those sold with a 18-and-up-only logo.

Here’s an example:

This was replaced with the slightly more restrictive yellow-label rating, like here:

Mind you, calling even the red label games “sordid” is overstating the issue a bit.  They may feature animated jubblies, but they’re only shocking in context; they’re naughty for console games at the time, but I think that “D2″, which was a general-release game from only five years later, actually had more nudity and a less imposing rating.

Put another way: the “Tenchi Muyo” game released for the Saturn actually managed to land itself a red label.  Yes, a licensed anime game based on a romantic comedy.

Anyway, back to the title of this post.

If I am to believe the blog posting I linked to, there were 24 games released with this rating, and I own only 9 of them.

I could be MUCH worse.

Update: Just in case Canned Dogs goes away, I figured I would mirror their list here so this whole post makes sense:

Anyway, I don’t like this particular Akira very much, for reasons which go back a few years.

See, each Super Real Mahjong title features 3 or 4 girls, who you play mahjong against, in escalating difficulty, and Akira is the last girl in PV and thus the most difficult.  That’s not, however, the real reason she annoys me so much.

See, the first Super Real Mahjong title I played to completion was the Neo Geo Pocket Color “Super Real Mahjong Premium Collection”, which was quite a long game.  It had 8 opponents, taken from PV, PVI, and P7, and playing each one involved going through a little adventure mode where you first had to defeat a couple of others, and the adventure mode was of course all in Japanese and I couldn’t read much Japanese so it was mostly a matter of trial and error to figure out how to actually reach each of the girls in order to challenge them to mahjong.

I spent an awful lot of time playing through this, which meant a lot of false starts as I tried to figure out what combination of dialogue choices would get me through to the actual mahjong bits.

Anyway, the first character you face off against, regardless of your other choices, is Akira, so you have to play mahjong with her a LOT.  I got very very tired of seeing her, especially since I really didn’t know much about mahjong at that point and I tended to lose an awful lot of the time.

So I’m going to be upfront and admit that I abused the heck out of the “Save State” and “Load State” functions in SSF in order to play through PV as quickly as possible.

It had a cute little story running through the end credits, so I took a slideshow, reproduced below for your benefit.  Akira’s the one with the little white hair dumplings.

Side note: This brings me down to only having eleven mahjong games left in the backlog.  I say “only” with, as some would say, massive sarcasm quotes around it.  I’m resisting buying the Y1200 PSP game, “Moeru Mahjong Moe-Jang” that got put up on the PSN the day before Christmas until I get through these.

Also, they include panel matching games that let you beat your opponents even if you’re not very good at mahjong.

Oh, and they have pretty girls with character designs by Kenichi Sonoda, which doesn’t hurt either.  Mind you, that’s a heavily generational thing; he designed the characters for some of my favorite OVAs, like Gall Force, Bubblegum Crisis, Otaku no Video… which are all at least 20 years old, now that I’m thinking about it.  Wow.

I feel old.

Anyway, back to mahjong.

One of the things that’s annoyed me greatly over the years is that, while I’ve understood the basics of how to win a hand of mahjong, there have been plenty of times when I would be holding a hand that I thought SHOULD be a winning hand, only to have the computer tell me that I couldn’t use it.

Eventually I hit upon a strategy – never use an opponent’s discard for ANYTHING except going out – that cut those down to a minimum, but I was still hitting the occasional why-can’t-I-win-here moment.

Then I found this site, completely by accident: Osamuko’s Japanese Mahjong Blog.

And now… now I understand a lot more.  I mean, that’s not to say I can actually understand 80% of the posts on the blog, they’re full of a hell of a lot of jargon that I just can’t follow, but I now have an understanding of why I wasn’t able to win with certain hands in the past and what I can do now to avoid that.

To test this theory, I booted up my Saturn version of Super Real Mahjong PVI, a game in a series that’s a completely different level of play than the Suchie-Pai games.  I mean, it’s still pretty low difficulty level mahjong compared to facing off with a human opponent, but it’s a step up.

Four hours later…

I feel pretty good about things now.

Also, I get to cross another title off my backlog.  Only 220 games to go!

Apart from that, I’ve beaten the game with every character and gotten their “good” ending, so I think I can consider this game finished.

As far as mahjong games go, the Suchie Pai series have always been very forgiving of people who aren’t very good at mahjong.  It’s actually very easy to win matches without running your opponent out of points, because they usually have a little concentration game that you can play after you win a hand.  You make matches to get power ups.  If you clear the board in the concentration game, you win the match no matter how many points your opponent has, so you’re usually going into the next opponent with a handful of power ups collected.

Suchie Pai III remix makes the concentration game a little more essential.  See, you play six matches, and in the concentration game for each match are hidden two pieces of a medallion.

If you complete five medallions throughout the first six matches, you get to fight the secret boss, and then you get the character’s best ending, whoever you’re playing as.

If you manage to run your opponent out of points before you find the medallions, or if you get lucky and hit a “panel clear” (instant win) power up, you wind up not getting the medallions for the match.  So if you win TOO quickly, you wind up not getting the best endings.

This leads to some situations where you need to take a deliberate loss in order to let your opponent build up their points a little bit more so you have more time at the concentration game.  It’s an interesting bit of strategy.

The over-the-top power up-based story mode is nicely supplanted by a free battle mode where you can pick various characters from earlier Suchie Pai games and play one-on-one mahjong with them.  No power ups, no concentration game, just a straight-up mahjong game where both sides start with 30000 points and you go back and forth until one of you wins.

Oh, and being a DS game, there’s no nudity, so you don’t have to feel too ashamed playing this one.  You’re still a bit of a perv, but at least you can justify it as “It’s just mahjong!  Look!  No jubblies!”