As you have no doubt deduced with your amazing cover-reading abilities, it is a game in which you play Mahjong with cheating techniques called "Ikasama". The title means "Akko's Pon! The Ikasama Legend", which is a pretty descriptive title, all things considered. Now, the game is entirely in Japanese, and I only know enough Japanese to translate anime by sound. In other words, my kanji knowledge is very lacking. So you can imagine how lost I was when I discovered the barrage of Kanji that is Akko de Pon.
Look at all that Kanji!! Well, I somehow stumbled my way through the name selection screen (right), entering my name as "Akagi Shigeru", only afterwards realizing that Akagi is spelled with Katakana rather than Hiragana. I'm lucky I managed to figure out how to use the letter modifiers, or else it would end up as "Akaki Shikeru"... which would not please my fellow fukumoto fans. But minor details, I made my way to the main screen (left) to stare aimlessly at the seven buttons that lay before me. Thankfully they put "Story" in english, but being the dumbass I am I left that for last. I could read "Hitori de" or "By Yourself" next to the Story button, and "Minna de" or "With Everyone" next to that, so I assumed that it was single-player and multi-player. That just left the remaining four, one of which I recognized as "Options". I clicked on that, but...
The top-right brought me to what seemed like the Ikasama page, where they explained how to do the various cheats. I clicked around the tiles a bit, but it wasn't a tutorial, it was just another explanation. Slightly more helpful, but not nearly enough for my American ignorance. The bottom-left brought me to a long list of statistics, all of which were at 0 by this point. Another useless one. So, I started the Hitori de option, which thankfully took me to a Character Selection screen.
I recognized a few of them from the cover, but I had no idea what to look for. I picked out the one with the brownish hair at the bottom left because he seemed the most foreign and I certainly felt like a foreigner at this point. It then showed me how much ability he had by using stars, which I was impressed to see six total out of what I assumed to be 10. I then picked two more from the page, picking out the two that I found to have the most stars, thinking I might be choosing my teammates. It seemed as if the top star count showed their general Mahjong ability, while the bottom showed their Ikasama ability, from what I could grasp. I chose my supposed team and was thrown into another block of text with options, which I kept just the way it was. I was asked another Hai-or-Iie question, which I assume was asking me if the options were okay. I said Hai.
Suddenly, I was hit with the force of a thousand realizations. First of all, the feeling that I have just begun to play the game that I was trying to play for the last 15 minutes. Second, my neck is hurting. After adjusting positions, the more important realizations come. For example, WHAT THE FUCK AM I SUPPOSED TO DO?! I assume that this is my only chance to stack my wall the way I'd like to, so I am frantically clicking on tiles in futile attempt to pull them closer to me, but this is for naught, as they continue on what seems to be a pre-set path. After my mouse seems to be annoyed at me for clicking so much, the real game begins.
This game is exciting for me just because of how I need to figure out how to do everything, and also because of how unique the idea is. Once I can use Ikasama, the game will likely become very addicting; it's addicting even now, not knowing right from left. If you're into Akagi and Riichi Mahjong in general, get this game. I'll be posting my thoughts on the story mode as I go through it, but until then, I leave you with this post. Thank you for reading, and I hope you will continue to read my future posts.
