Saki

I discovered this anime after looking around with a friend for something interesting to watch. We instantly watched it and it was super disappointing. It made so many things wrong, but we need to look at it in its aspects.

Story

The Story is about the Kiyosumi Highschool Mahjong Club, which has the goal to reach the Mahjong Nationals. The story delivers enough space to build up a solid story, but it is done so bad because everything is predictable and there are no real twists or any interesting moments.

Characters

The characters are just boring written as they don't have any interesting characteristics, which make them special. Our protagonist Saki Miyanaga is a character, who has nothing special. If the anime wasn't named Saki, you would think she is a side character. She doesn't take action in any situation. Then we have Nodoka Haramura, who is the most unsympathetic character I've ever seen. You just want her to lose because you don't care about her. Yuuki Kataoka is a childish character, who acts inappropriately in every situation and makes everything even worse. Then we have Kyoutarou Suga who is a student at Kiyosumi Highschool. He has no relevance and its a shame to call him a main character. Hisa Takei is the student council president and the president of the mahjong club. She is the only character, who has at least some small characteristics, which make her special. At last, we have Mako Someya, who is a friend of Hisa and a Member of the Mahjong Club. She has the same problem as almost the rest of the cast. She lacks identity and can't deliver some interesting actions. The characters have overall the same issue, as they can't really stand as a standalone character and are not really individual

Visuals

And here we have the thing Saki has done the worst. The visuals are so bad that you get the feeling you are playing an 8bit game because the art style is so bad that it is too pixelated. The animation is not bad but not very good either. It is at a level, where you can say that it could be worse. It has some low-class CGI, which is not nice to look at.

Sound

This saved the whole thing. Saki has some great tracks like the opening by Miyuki Hashimoto or the second ending by Kana Ueda and Ami Koshimizu, which is just nice to listen to. The rest of the OST is nice too. The songs support the feeling and make it at least a bit endurable.

Conclusion

That anime had some nice opportunities to make it more interesting, but they weren't used and it ended up being a mediocre anime. If you are interested in Mahjong you can give it a try, but other people should stay away from it. It has nothing that it can give you when you are not interested in Mahjong.

Have a nice day :D