Ultimate Mahjong: Idol Graphic

For years I’ve dreamed of the day I’d come home with a PC Engine (TurboGrafx-16 in the US). Just short of the Neo Geo AES, the PC Engine and PC Engine CD always seemed like the pinnacle of retro gaming; the purest form which mere mortals can only dream of. As a mere mortal myself, it meant that, despite not owning a PC Engine myself, I still ended up with a small collection of games in the hope that I would eventually be able to play them. As of Saturday, March 23rd, 2019, I ascended to the realm of PC Engine Owner. The first game I played? Ultimate Mahjong. What could go wrong?

So then. 究極麻雀　アイドルグラフィック, or Kyuukyoku Mahjong: Idol Graphic. I haven’t done any research to verify this, but it appears to be a console port of an arcade game. You drop in your 100円 coins and start the game. How many coins you insert matters, but we’ll get to that at the end. You’re given 1,000 credits to start, which you can use in the store to buy “cards” that give you special abilities. With your starting points, you can only purchase the first card, which allows you to select any number of tiles from your starting hand and re-draw them. Unlike other games that allow you to purchase special abilities, this game uses all the purchased abilities right away, so you can’t wait to use them strategically. After you win a match you’ll be rewarded with credits equal to the number of points you ended with in the last game. Points you don’t spend are saved, but if you lose a match you lose everything, so there’s not much reason to save.

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The menu options in the store are, in order: New haipai¹starting hand tiles, guaranteed haitei²winning with the last tile, I don’t remember, guaranteed riichi ippatsu³winning on the first available discard or draw, I don’t remember, and exit.

On to gameplay. Ultimate Mahjong is a 2-player game where you start with 1,000 points and your opponent starts with 10, 20, 30, and finally 40-thousand points as you progress through the game. This puts you in a tight spot because even the cheapest hands are lethal at the start of the match. The AI often gets an early riichi and seems to tsumo a majority of the time, so dodging and playing safe is pointless unless you have already won enough points to absorb a direct hit. If and when you lose, you’re brought back to the screen where you insert your coins and continue on. You don’t lose your progress through the game, which is good, you just lose your credits. Once you beat all 5 of the opponents (four girls and one guy, who thankfully does not get naked) you get to see a slideshow of all the photos from the game, which I’ll talk about in a second, followed by a scoreboard. The idea is to beat the game using as few credits as possible, while also having the most credits earned, which will get you to the top of the scoreboard.

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But what about that 18+ warning at the top of the page? Yeah, there’s nudity, and in surprising detail. At the beginning of each match, you’re greeted by, who I assume to be, an idol. They wink at you, give you some lip service, then the game starts. Assuming you win, you get to see them in their lacy underwear, then in just panties, then again, topless, giving you a gift (one of the special ability cards). Each of the images, except for the gift one, pans across to reveal a much larger image than what’s shown in the screen grabs below. The only thing I can really say is that it’s kind of surprising to see realistic women, both in style and body shape.

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That’s really it. Completing the game might take something like 30-60 minutes. I can’t imagine that I’ll be playing it again, now that my name is on the leaderboard (which is erased once the power is shut off). Overall I don’t really recommend going out of your way to play this game, especially given the cost and difficulty of finding a PC Engine to play it on. If you happen to already have one, and you see it for 100-200円… ╮(╯_╰)╭

And if you’re wondering about the lines all over the drawings, I’m pretty sure that’s an artifact of the deinterlacing. Plugged directly into another display it looks much more natural, so maybe I’ll tinker with the settings on my capture hardware and get some better looking screenshots later.