If you know anything about Konami's Mah-jong Fight Club, it's probably just that it exists, and a few games were released for consoles and mobile platforms. The only information that most English wikis have about the spin-off Mahjong Fight Girl, released March 2023, is also that it exists.

Having played 51 credits over the span of about two weeks in October 2024, not a day goes by where I don't yearn to play it again. It has easily the highest production values of any mahjong video game I've played, with shiny presentation to match. Though I can't easily confirm it, I'm positive the soundtrack is by members of the Bemani Sound Team. For some reason, it's easy to find character themes on YouTube with some effort, but I haven't been able to find the rest of the game's soundtrack anywhere. I really like the in-game and menu music, so if anyone knows where I can listen to them, please contact me.

This post contains my assorted thoughts on Mahjong Fight Girl while it's fresh in memory. It left such a strong impression on me that I had to write a full post summarizing them. This isn't intended to sell you on the game or anything, since it's one of the least accessible games out there, but more to make sure I don't forget the appeal by the next time I get to play it again. These thoughts focus on the most visible aspects of the game: the mahjong gameplay and the playable characters. For more information on subsystems, the most comprehensive English-language resource for the game as of this writing is the Fandom wiki, though it is currently out of date. It covers the history between the game's launch in March 2023 to February 2024, with descriptions of game systems and character profiles up to February. Since then, two new characters have been introduced. The comments in this article apply to the state of the game as of early November 2024.

If you want a better look at the game itself, watch this video of a Mitsuba player from June 2023, a few months after the game's release, which includes them dying horrifically[a] to a triple ron in the hand starting at 13:29. Though it's a dated video, it should very quickly give an impression of what Mahjong Fight Girl plays like and provide context for everything that follows in this post. Somewhat conveniently, this is one of the most viewed videos of Mahjong Fight Girl currently on YouTube that isn't a promotional video.

Update November 24, 2024: The Other Thoughts section was expanded with more information on character names and event history, and a few more photos were added.

Rules

Mahjong rules of interest used by this game, from the official website:

General Rules

Rule	Ruling
Dealer Repeat	Win only (Agari renchan)
Agariyame	On
Double/Triple Ron	Allowed
Open Tanyao	Allowed
Atozuke	Allowed
Kan Dora Reveal Timing	Always before discard
Nagashi Mangan	Off
Nine Terminal Initial Draw	Off
Four Winds Discard Draw	Off
Four Kans By Multiple Players	Game continues; 5th kan not allowed
Four-way Riichi	Allowed
Pao/Sekinin Barai	Big Three Dragons, Big Four Winds, Four Kans
Renhou	Off
Losing Score	0 or lower
Target Score	None

Format Differences

Rule	4-Player	3-Player
Game Length	East	South
Starting Score	20,000	25,000
UMA	+5,000/0/0/-5,000	+3,000/0/-3,000
Honba Value	300	600
Red Doras	1 5-crak, 1 5-bam, 1 5-dot	2 5-bams, 2 5-dots
Tsumo Payments	1x from non-dealers; 2x from dealer	Always equal, even from dealer
North Wind Tile	n/a	Not nukidora; not yakuhai
Free Continue	40,000 points	50,000 points

There is also a 2-player format against the computer intended for new players, but I didn't try it myself.

The mahjong game I play most often is Sega Net MJ. The differences are stark, namely the lack of any draw conditions whatsoever aside from exhaustive, the starting scores, and, since I specialize in the 3-player game, the fact that the North tile is completely worthless on its own. The rules it has in common with Sega Net MJ are that kan doras are always revealed immediately after the call regardless of the type of kan, and dealer repeats only on win and not tenpai.

If you complete a game with twice the starting score, the game will award 1 credit and give you the opportunity to immediately play again for free. There is no limit to the amount of free games you can earn this way in a single session. If you have the option to use Paselis, the credit is discounted as low as 26 yen starting at 10,000 points below double the starting score, but if you use 100 yen coins, partial discounts aren't available. There's really no reason not to use Paselis if you can. However, continuing the game will force you to play the same format and rate bracket as your original credit, whether it's free or paid. You'll have to start anew by going to Game Over and inserting another credit to change the number of players or the ranking points at stake. Also, choosing not to continue will void the free credit, so use it immediately or lose it. I played 51 credits according to my e-Amusement page, and I estimate I paid for around 35 of them.

What I Enjoyed

Assist Features

Mahjong Fight Girl has a battery of assistance features that guide players closer to tenpai, intended to aid novices. This extends even to the player's turn as dealer, where it will inform the player that wins as dealer entitles them to 1.5 times the score. I don't play a lot of mahjong video games, so I'm not sure how common these features actually are. Unlike those other games I've played, a lot of these don't seem to be optional.

• Arrow indicators show discards that will result in changes in shanten (distance in tiles before tenpai). Shanten in general is highly visible, with a large counter to tenpai on the corner that animates and plays a sound whenever it changes.
• It's common for modern mahjong games to list waits while in tenpai, but Mahjong Fight Girl is the first game I've seen that shows tile acceptance at any point before, in this case going from 2 shanten to 1. It doesn't show the number of each tile available though, unlike in tenpai.
• The top-right of the screen lists potential yaku once the hand is a few tiles away from being tenpai for them, and clicking on them shows a brief explanation of what they are. An animation is shown when this list changes.
• Tsumogiri tiles are always shaded.
• When other players declare riichi, safe tiles against the riichi player(s) are marked with a + symbol.
• Newly formed melds are highlighted in the hand after a discard. I don't think it's of much use to experienced players, but I do like the visual effect.

Comparison of Assist Features

This table compares gameplay features between modern mahjong games I have experience with. Rulings in italics are my preferences.

Feature	Mahjong Fight Girl	Sega Net MJ	Mahjong Soul	Riichi City
Discard Suggestions	Yes; also marks tiles that will increase shanten	Yes; optional	No	Only to enter tenpai; optional
Shanten Counter	Yes	Yes	No	No
Winning Tiles	Always shown while in tenpai	Can be toggled; defaults to hidden, as the display covers up player's discards	Hold a button to display	Hold a button to display
Tile Safety	Same discards highlighted; safe tiles in riichi marked with "+" until end of hand	Same discards highlighted; "SAFE" indicators in center of table including riichi discards	Same discards highlighted	Same discards highlighted
Dora Tiles	Constant shine effect on dora tiles	Dora tiles colored yellow	Shine effect on dora tiles	Shine effect on dora tiles
Tsumogiri	Shaded	Shaded; optional	Shaded; only in replays	Shaded; optional
Auto Win	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Auto Skip Calls	Yes	Yes; also allows only prompting calls for yakuhai tiles	Yes	Yes
Auto Discard	No	Yes	Yes; also allows auto nukidora at any time	Yes; also allows auto kan and auto nukidora while in riichi
New Dora Reveal Effects	None	Cutscene with animation and voice	Sound effect	Cutscene with animation
Highlight Most Recent Discard	No	No	No	Yes
Right-click To Skip Call	Unknown[b]	Yes	No	Yes

Cabinet

There are no less than three cabinet types (as shown in the official website's main page), though I personally saw two. The premium model is a conversion from a quiz game called QuizKnock Stadium, and seems to be called the Custom Model in Japanese sources. It features two monitors, similar to some of Konami's later music games like Nostalgia—the upper monitor mirrors the main gameplay screen upon a win, showing the winner's character graphics and hand for all to see. There is also a large illuminated, dome-shaped button that can be pressed to declare a win. Slamming it is as satisfying as you imagine it is. It's as satisfying as hitting the Enter key in Sega Net MJ to do the same, and I wish all PC mahjong games had this feature. For some reason, the win button has a letter Q embossed in it. I have no idea what the Q stands for. There are no mahjong terms that start with a Q, so presumably it comes from the quiz game it was converted from; I assume it's to buzz in to give an answer.

All cabinet types have a 3.5mm headphone jack, and some have a USB charging port. The port must be manually activated in-game before it supplies power. The Custom Model cabinet also has a 3.5mm microphone port for some reason. If it has voice chat, I don't recall seeing any in-game options related to it. I can only assume QuizKnock Stadium had voice chat, which is also why the cabinet doesn't have a USB port. If that's the case, and there's no voice chat functions in the game, I have to ask why the microphone port is labeled on the cabinet instead of just removed and covered up in the conversion kit.

Characters

As of November 2024, Mahjong Fight Girl has 14 playable characters. This is a stark difference between just about every other gacha-funded mahjong game today, which have dozens of characters in the form of static images and voice lines. To be sure, this has consistently proven to be an effective business model for all kinds of games, though in all but the highest-budgeted games, it comes at the cost of all of those characters having little to their assets aside from a few still frames and some voice lines, and only a select few have alternate versions. Here, the characters are fully animated 3D models, all with a number of alternate costumes and a very large number of voice lines, and story mode segments. (I skipped all of the story due to the limited time I had to play the game.) Konami developed the cast with quality over quantity, and I find that alone to be very respectable even if I don't care for a good number of them.

But I chose to write this article almost solely because of the 14 characters, one of them, Chaos Isshiki, is a 100% certified Theo Character. It is very rare that a game of this nature has someone I can confidently call "my guy"[c]. Place in front of me an emotionless deadpan anime girl dual-wielding the Justifier light guns from Lethal Enforcers and I will pay any price to have her. Luckily, the price is a reasonble 20 credits. And thanks to the free continue system for winning with double the starting score, I didn't even have to pay for all of them.

Lethal Enforcers is the first light gun game I ever played, specifically the SNES version. We rented it from Blockbuster, with the Justifier gun and everything. Since then, I've had a lifelong love of digitized graphics and light gun games, and games with non-standard control methods in general. That said, Lethal Enforcers isn't that great as a light gun game, but I'm nostalgic for it all the same. Anyway, Chaos' guns are named Justy and Fire. If Lethal Enforcers got a weirdly dark anime cyberpunk spin-off game like Silent Scope: Bone Eater, Chaos would be from that game. In truth, the Justifiers were only the first thing I saw that compelled me to play the 20 games needed to unlock her, and once I selected her and she started speaking and reminded me of Vanilla H, that was all I needed to put in 30 more.

Once the inevitable plushes come out, I will do whatever it takes. Especially since she has my favorite good face in the game (above; clearer image here), so good that I was motivated enough to play the gacha for real money to unlock it. I can count on one hand the number of times my conscience wasn't able to prevent me from spending money on gacha. Just look at the chibi forms of the characters in the Fandom wiki galleries, it's very clear they're blueprints for plushes.

With that said, while Chaos possesses my favorite good faces, they aren't the best ones in the game. Those belong to Mitsuba Ankoku, the local chuunibyou patient and designated comedy character, the sort who talks with overconfident bluster until the second things don't go her way (all the time, because she's unlucky). Particularly, this win screen stands out. I should have started with her but didn't find her among the stock characters in time. Since she's convinced she's a lord of darkness (暗黒 ankoku), she integrates it into her calls, like "Ankoku riichi!" and "Ankoku renchan!" (See the video linked at the top of this post for a reference.) She also has my favorite riichi theme in the game, which mildly sounds like something out of Deathsmiles. Each character has to be grinded individually to unlock character-specific items and accessories, and this includes riichi themes (most of which can be found on this YouTube channel). Grind enough and you'll gain her unique riichi theme to replace the generic music. Grind harder and the music will gain lyrics, until it eventually becomes the full song.

Finally, Shiori Fujisaki of Tokimeki Memorial is in this game as a character that can be bought for 3,850 yen from the e-Amusement website. Paying this fixed amount is the only way to obtain her, no gacha luck required. I imagine most people willing to pay this cost are lifelong Tokimeki Memorial fans. Shiori makes a cameo appearance here and in Bombergirl, because this is just what she does now. Her backstory is exactly what you expect, just a slightly modified version of her backstory from her home game: She's your (the player's) childhood friend who you meet in the same high school after many years apart, and also she's good at mahjong now. True to her origin, she's presented as pure and incorruptible, with all of the silliness and provocative outfits being beneath her. Even in 2024, Konami is committed to keeping this image unchanged, and I find that deeply respectable, even if it does mean that she's also above shooting lasers from her eyes (see Other Thoughts at the end of this page). The only reason I bring her up is the expression she has on a tsumo loss. Every other character makes some exaggerated shocked or angry face, but Shiori instead makes a really dumb face like a relative just died, which is extremely funny because of everyone surrounding her (and in this particular case, the winning hand isn't even worth very much). Since she's good at everything ever, she can't stand losing like anyone else in this game, but arguably takes it harder than they do.

Gameplay Flow

As for the mahjong gameplay itself, two views of the table are available: the default "Wai Wai" mode, and the simple view. The latter is a traditional view of the table with rectangular windows of each player, but the main attraction of the game is the Wai Wai mode, which is the full experience of the characters in 3D in front of a concert stage. The stage has a screen in the background that shows the characters' thoughts and emotions when they undertake any kind of action, like thinking for more than a few seconds, discarding a dora, discarding the same tile multiple times consecutively, when a tile of theirs gets called, or even just playing it safe during riichi. The game acknowledges that the table is harder to see in Wai Wai mode, but easy readability of the other players' discards isn't the reason you play this game. The characters all do stupid dances when they call riichi and they make stupid faces when they die. At least one character (G-14 Iyo) does a stupid dance for the entire game. For wins valued mangan or higher, the loser(s) are blown away, screaming as they're launched into the sky. I think it's great.

Any players who find this off-putting are welcome to instead play the many Mah-jong Fight Club Extreme cabinets that are invariably next to them, or even the older Sega Net MJ Arcade machines that are sometimes also in the vicinity[d]. Mah-jong Fight Club Extreme, released 2022, is also fantastically polished but created for serious players, with an interface that reminds me of Tenhou.net but with an aesthetic that reminds me of those "dad games" you would see at Walmart. But it's still a Konami game, so it has a much more impressive number of soundtracks (mostly from previous Mah-jong Fight Club games), all of them the hottest jams you could hope to hear from an arcade mahjong game, that can be changed at any time. It's hard to believe these two games are directly related.

What I Didn't Like

The focus on characters means large cut-in graphics accompany tile calls, and they will often cover up the tiles that get called. This especially becomes an annoyance for kan calls, because the game will not surface the new dora. The player is expected to look at the dead wall themselves, which in the default view is rather small. There is a highlight in the player's hand when a tile becomes a dora, but it's easy to miss. While there are a number of assist features in this game that I've never seen elsewhere, I miss the many features that I've grown accustomed to in Sega Net MJ, like the very clear markings of dora tiles and even the ability to auto draw and discard. The more I played Mahjong Fight Girl, the more I was missing those features. What it does have in common with Sega Net MJ is the lack of protection in matchmaking. Nothing prevents new players from being matched with veterans with a double-digit level above 10th dan.

The dead wall is placed in the center of the table, but unlike every other game I've played, the count of remaining tiles in the wall is in the top-right corner of the screen and not the center of the table. This information should be immediately visible, and the top-right corner of the screen, away from the action, is easy to miss.

It's very lucky there's a character tailor-made for me in this game, because while there are a handful of starting characters I also like (Mitsuba, Yao), there are a few too many sex demon-type characters and comically-large busts for my liking. Then again, it's a mahjong game. There's going to be sex demon characters and I just have to deal with it. At least they, like everyone else, have good faces upon defeat.

This is the only game I've played that starts below 25,000/35,000 points, with a score of 0 ending the game immediately. The rules are optimized for fast player turnover, which is why there are no draw conditions whatsoever outside of exhaustive. While I like that you start closer to death, I'm not a fan of 0 points counting as a loss. Fighting from a distant, seemingly hopeless last place as you mount the Hype Comeback when your turn as dealer comes up is one of the thrills of mahjong to me, and reducing the window for that isn't much fun.

Other Thoughts

If it's not clear by now, the real appeal of this game to me isn't necessarily how friendly the mahjong interface is, but the supremely polished presentation and the litany of good faces. There's a good number of small details I think readers of this site would like, such as when you draw a tile, it's delivered to your hand by a chibi version of your character, and when you select a tile to discard, that chibi character appears under the tile to push it up and out onto the table.

The characters' names are always rendered in English (Asian name order, last name then given name) and in katakana in-game (with the exception of Shiori Fujisaki). If you look at the original characters and notice that their names look strange, it's because their names come from contrived alternate readings of yaku names in kanji or, in the case of the Isshiki twins, very creative translations of the same. The Fandom wiki lists yaku motifs for the characters that have them, with kanji in the profile translations. For example: Sen Tatenaori's name is rendered in kanji as 立直・千. 立直 is the kanji for riichi, and 立 can be read as tate and 直 as nao, the base of the verb 直り naori. Her given name 千 Sen[e] is the kanji for the number 1,000, the cost of declaring riichi. Another example is the yaku hon'itsu and chin'itsu, or their alternate names used in this game, hon'isou and chin'isou. These yaku in kanji are 混一色 and 清一色, and are the namesakes of Chaos Isshiki and Clear Isshiki. The common kanji 一色 means "one color", and can be read as isshiki. 混 can be translated as "mixed", and 清 as "pure", hence the very loose translations of Chaos and Clear for character names.

Before this game, I have never heard of the "Chun Beam" yaku. The first time a Red Dragon is discarded, the player calls "Chun Beam" and the background display shows them shooting laser beams out of their eyes. If any successive players' next discards are also a Red Dragon, they fire a follow-up Chun Beam, and this can continue until a round passes where the players who haven't yet discarded Red Dragon fail to do so. There doesn't appear to be any effect if a player discards two Red Dragon tiles consecutively. I don't know what influence this has on the hand in this game, nor am I aware of any other games that use this mechanic. Chun Beam appears to be a recently invented local yaku, where if a single player discards four Red Dragons and reaches exhaustive draw, they're entitled to a mangan payment from the player across, unless that player discarded a White Dragon as a shield against the beam. I should have taken more photos of this game, because many of the Chun Beam declarations are also good faces. As I mentioned above, Shiori does not do this, which is both lame and understandable given how important her image is.

Each hand has different background music. Since the 3-player game has six hands, it has more unique tracks than the 4-player game, but the East 4 song is never heard in the 3-player game's South hands. I like the South songs more, but as mentioned before, I can't find rips of the regular match music online. The only game I've played on PC that allows for individual tracks for each hand is Sega Net MJ, and you have the freedom to set each hand's music to any songs you have unlocked, but the good ones have to be won in gacha.

When given the prompt to continue, there's an option to suspend the countdown for five minutes. During this time, the cabinet is locked and the only thing that can unlock it is the e-Amusement Pass that was used to start the game. This allows for plenty of time to leave the cabinet to do any preparations needed to continue, like preparing more money, using the bathroom, or getting refreshments, with the assurance that no one is able to steal the credit. Obviously, this depends on the honor system holding players to not unfairly prevent others from getting their turn, but I never saw anyone abuse it.

As a final thought, from November 14, a survey was offered to anyone who had played the game. I filled it out, and one of the questions is what caused you to try the game out. One of the responses was "It had a Touhou Project collab." And yes, it does have popular Touhou remixes as riichi music. There was a series of Touhou collab events throughout August 2024, which included event matches where players can unlock a Bemani-endorsed Touhou arrangement that best matched their character. Naturally, there were also a couple of Touhou costumes, but only for Hiyori and Tenshi. Check the official website's news history for information on past events, but don't rely on permalinks or translators because all of the text is in images. As for me, what got me to try the game out was in fact the big red button on the cabinet, because it's much larger than the button on Sega Net MJ Arcade. I just wanted to press it.