Riichi City × STEINS;GATE 12+

勝ちました

I got the character I wanted from the gotcha. I am satisfied. (￣▽￣)y

Developer Response ,

Dear Captain

Thanks for your input on the game design!, it means a lot to us!
You can get free gacha coupons through weekly events, free redemptions in the shop, and by participating in occasional special events.
We will continue to optimise the game in the future to bring you a better playing experience!

Best regards
Riichicity

還不錯

介面很喜歡，但是內容不夠豐富

Don’t support this game until the developers address the problems with its design.

Wow this game does not know what it wants to be, and fails at trying to be nothing all at once. If you’re a veteran mahjong player, this game is not for you. If you’re a new mahjong player, this game will teach you nothing.

It’s thoroughly clear that the main thing developers care about is making anime characters and profit, because you can bet your bottom dollar that they’ll spew out a new $25 outfit every other week, but implementing changes to make the game tolerable for actual play, not a chance.

I won’t have enough space to write about the few positives it has, just know the game runs smoothly, minus connection stability, the UI is clean, and the characters are not yet carbon copies of one another.

Now let’s talk negatives:

If you haven’t played mahjong before, or only loosely know the rules, this game flips you the bird and says figure it out on your own. The fact that there isn’t even a glossary of all the different terms used in Mahjong is deplorable. A new player is going to sit there frustrated asking “ What is Furiten?” “What does dealing in mean?” “Why can’t I make a call on this hand?” and so on.

The characters, while unique, add very little in terms of playability to the game. That is to say, the “bonding” aspect of playing games and ranking up with a character accomplishes little to nothing. With every character, you will reach a stop gap where you MUST use various currencies to “awaken” the character, which usually involves multiples of gacha specific currencies that are not readily obtained. And even if/when you do awaken a character, all you get is two new emotes, and a few more tiers to unlock a title and a picture frame. There’s no further progression, no unique animations, or extra emotes or voice lines to unlock to use mid game.

On the topic of characters, boy do the developers love sexualizing characters that are perceived as minors. They explicitly leave out the age of characters, but several of them are very clearly children, and yet they are being dressed/posed in ways that are very unsettling. Not to mention having some of these characters posed in wedding dresses after you bond with them, suggesting even more problematic issues.

Let’s also circle back to rewards because this game royally screwed up the ranking/reward system for the game. For context, you receive/lose coins, rank and rating depending on the outcome of the match.

The coin aspect simulates the irl gambling aspect of playing mahjong, wherein every player puts in a certain amount of money, and players receive a certain amount of that money depending on their score at the end of a match. But the game even screws this up by having all players put in a certain number of coins, but coming in first can still result in receiving less coins than you put in. Meaning there’s either an invisible coin tax in the game, or their calculations are broken

The Dan rank is the only part of the rewards that works as intended and makes sense. Each Tier requires a certain number of points to advance, and you gain or lose points based solely on your place in the match. The values also scale when you’re at a higher tier in a division, but only for losses (meaning you may lose 25 points for a last place finish at a lower tier, but lose 75 points when you’re near the max tier). It would have been nice to have this scoring be dynamic, and change based on the skill level of who you are playing against. Someone who enters a new bracket at the bottom tier should be rewarding more point if they beat someone at the highest tier because that person supposedly is more skilled at the game.

Speaking of skill, this game actively punishes you for playing correctly. What I mean is that Mahjong is first and foremost, a game of chance. You can start a game and you will never be presented with an avenue to win a single hand. I know from first hand experience, going back and reviewing logs only to discover not a single decision I could have made could have won me a hand. So when I say the game punishes skill, I’m referring to playing defensively, making correct decisions to protect yourself from dealing in, and opting to both not win, nor lose the round. The game almost makes you think that they’ll give a damn about this by having another metric: the rating system. It’s the perfect metric to analyze if a player made the correct moves to ensure a win, prevent a loss, or actively made poor choices. With all the trainers out there, it should have been an easy inclusion to mimic those algorithms and have your rating adjust accordingly. Instead, the rating system is a bastardized mix of coins and rank, wherein you will really only gain points if you’re in first place and lose points if you’re in last, with the total number gained/lost being based on your final score in a game. This is the part of this game that actively pisses me off because it is demoralizing to not be capable of securing a win after a dozen games, and to have all the progress of building that rating up reduced to nothing, all from hands that never had an avenue to win. I guarantee this exact thing has turned so many potential players away from wanting to play this game regularly because why come back and play more if rng makes winning impossible and you’re penalized for the randomness of the game? The game already does that in coin loss and rank loss. Why make the negatives so flagrant?

Finally, all gacha is inherently predatory, embodying the essence of gambling. But unlike other gacha, the rewards receive from this are mostly useless, wherein games like Genshin, you might get items and resources that aren’t mind blowing, but at least have some use. Here, it’s just more gift items that you already get from login in rewards. Meanwhile they are charging as much as $70 for 30 rolls of gacha and at 5% odds, you’re likely only going to get one. And if it’s a duplicate, you get a single currency usually used to awaken characters, of which you need 3-5.

Developer Response ,

Dear Captain,

Thank you for your reply and providing your name to us.

We guarantee that the generation of Walls in games is 100% random.
And we use the SHA-256 system method that is more secure and closer to the real mahjong.
But mahjong is also a game of chance and skill,we greatly appreciate your understanding.
It is recommended that you take a proper rest and relax before playing against each other again.

If you have any other questions, please feel free to contact us.

Best regards,
Riichicity