I played through Super Real Mahjong PIII in between Japanese grammar review sessions; it’s a pretty short game.

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.