REVIEW: Another World Mahjong Girl


Title	Another World Mahjong Girl
Developer	A.R.T. Games Co., Ltd.
Publisher	EastAsiaSoft
Release Date	Oct 20, 2023
Genre	Adventure, Board, Casual
Platform	Nintendo Switch
Age Rating	Teen
Official Website

A while back I remember saying I would cover it, should EastAsiaSoft ever put out a “real mahjong game,” as I put it. I had already reviewed one of their mahjong solitaire games before and wasn’t interested in covering numerous other nearly identical mahjong solitaire titles. And thus, being that I’m a huge fan of Riichi mahjong these days and the fact that EastAsiaSoft was finally localizing a Riichi mahjong game, I decided to take on this review.

Now, I am by no means an expert at Riichi mahjong. However, I have been playing it a lot these past few years, mainly against other people via apps on my phone and at this point I’d say I’m a proficiently skilled amateur. I can’t look at a hand and know immediately how many points it’s worth in total, I don’t have every single unique hand memorized and I never do too well in tournaments. Nonetheless, I know what I’m doing when playing digitally and can at least hold my own against much better players. Now with that being said, let’s get into discussing Another World Mahjong Girl and what I thought of the game.

Another World Mahjong Girl is not your typical Riichi mahjong game. It’s been formatted as a two-player affair. The player, you, are there to teach various girls of assorted humanoid species how to play mahjong. You’ll take control of one of a few different girls and play others across a magical world. There isn’t more to the story than that. You simply go from place to place, chapter to chapter, taking on girls in mahjong. You can read a bit about each girl before you battle them and then you’ll face them in numerous rounds until you whittle their points down to 0. If your own points hit 0, you fail and simply have to start over against whichever girl you were facing. You’ll have to face almost every single character two times, for multiple rounds each time. I didn’t find this to be the most exciting Riichi mahjong game, seeing as they made it a two-player thing. Typically, Riichi mahjong is played in either three or four-player matches. This could’ve been better had you played multiple girls in at least three-player matches.

In between facing these characters in mahjong matches, you can “discipline” the girls available for you to play as by buying and using items to raise their stats. This is where some of the game’s ecchi aspects come into play. The girls make sounds as you discipline them. Other ecchi aspects of the game come into play when you take away their points at the match results screen and in the gallery where you can touch the girls and they’ll make some sounds and cycle through one of three different lines. I don’t normally tend to play ecchi games, I took on this review for the mahjong, but I know there are much better ecchi games out there than this. The ecchi content seemed to be bare minimum.

That wasn’t the only issue I had with Another World Mahjong Girl. I felt like there were numerous issues throughout playing. First of all, from what I know about Riichi mahjong, this game doesn’t seem to have the standard romanization for the different Yaku. Yaku are essentially hand patterns and/or win conditions. If you break apart your hand and don’t go for Riichi, then you have to have a Yaku to win. A lot of Yaku require you to go for Riichi though. Anyway, the romanization choices were less common and I just found it to be strange. I also thought it was odd they seemed to use a white dragon tile which looked more like the one used in Chinese mahjong. But I suppose this is a fantasy game, I mean neither of these aspects are necessarily wrong, they’re just unique choices.

I did run into various legitimate mistakes and glitches as well though. In some of the character bios there were huge spaces after any quotation marks or apostrophes. Another mistake was whenever I was on the results screen at the end of a round, if a Yaku/point description took up two lines, then the next one would overlap it rather than being on its own line further down. Not only that, but when I started the game for the very first time and was sitting inactive on the difficulty choice screen, trying to decide if I should go with Normal or Hard, the game completely froze my Switch in a way I’ve never had happen before. My controller was still on but it was totally unresponsive. I had to put my Switch to sleep using the power button on the main system and hold it for a few seconds to get my Switch to light back up and be able to shut down the game. One final issue I had was the incorrect use of Ron. Any time I got a winning tile from the wall, which is a Tsumo not Ron, the prompt to call my win was displayed as Ron. Whichever girl I was using, her voice actor would correctly voice Tsumo. Tsumo would also be displayed in the match results afterwards. But the option to call my win during the match was incorrectly displayed as Ron.

In the end, I personally would not recommend Another World Mahjong Girl, not to fans of Riichi mahjong, nor lovers of ecchi games. The mahjong aspect wasn’t super terrible. I mean, as you went through each opponent they gradually got better and the chance aspect was never unfair, it wasn’t hard to get good hands. But the two-player part of it wasn’t as fun as playing regular three- or four-player mahjong and there are much better sources for enjoying Riichi mahjong, some of them free-to-play and against real people. Also, as I mentioned earlier, the ecchi features in this game were very bare minimum. You can find much better ecchi in other games. I simply found this title to be priced too high for what it was. I got through the whole game in only about five hours on Normal and in my opinion, it’s not worth the full $10.