OK, well, no.  Today’s post is about Akira, but not That Akira.  Today’s Akira is Akira Hayasaka, star of Seta’s Super Real Mahjong PV, a series that – despite being probably one of the more influential Mahjong series out there – doesn’t seem to rate a page on the English wikipedia.  I’m not honestly sure if that last link will work, it’s a URL with Kanji in it and I didn’t know until just now that that was possible.

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.