An even and unbiased review of various online mahjong clients by the second-place winner of the 2025 Riichi City Tenkaichi tournament (2/2)

Today we're gonna talk about niche choices, and I’d say that everything beyond Riichi City is a niche choice. Some of the clients I will describe here don't have English versions; though riichi apps aren’t exactly complicated, you will have to find your way around Japanese-language interfaces.

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Amatsuki Mahjong

Payment model: Free unlimited play and character gacha; identical monetization to Soul
Anime: 7. Designs are on the cute side and highly derivative of other sources.

I haven’t played a lot of it, but Amatsuki is a pleasant Mahjong Soul clone that also allows players to play Hong Kong, Taiwanese, Singaporean, and Sichuan mahjong. Riichi isn’t all there is to mahjong, and it’s great to see the other Asian variants get more accessible platforms. And of course, it guarantees Amatsuki an audience.

This is always subject to change, but this game does seem to have significantly less sexualized, more “all-audience” characters than Soul or RC. The designs are also very derivative; I spotted fake Amelia Watson and fake Ichihime right off the bat. This game's gimmick is that character win animations are full 2D animation– like Riichi City does for yakuman hands– but a lot of the animations are kinda cheap-looking.

I would warn that during the beta I played, I learned how far down the bunny hole the gacha in this game goes: we were given more paid currency than I would ever buy, and I wasn’t close to awakening any of the characters I got (this requires rolling the same character over and over again). As such I didn’t really play this game much; there was something about seeing that rich wasn’t even enough that made me very sad.

Sega MJ

Payment model: Pay-for-play currency and “gold” currency for cosmetic gacha or games. (some freebies)
Anime: 3/10: the “Yakuhime” were added ten years into the game’s life and are completely optional; you can turn them off.

Japanese language with some English menu options and very funny English announcer voice. Cluttered JP language interface might be tough to navigate without low-level language skills.

I am, as you know, a Sega man, and as such my client of choice for many years was the Japanese PC/mobile exclusive Sega MJ. I first fell in love with the arcade version on trips to Japan and was delighted when Sega started a mobile version. (There was an English version of Sega MJ released for Android, but it died fast.)

Maybe my tastes are just old, but just like I wish every video game had AM2 presentation, I wish that every mahjong game had Sega MJ’s presentation. Jazz fusion guitars, missile sights locking on when you place a dangerous tile, the “god hand” animation when you draw your winner… ah, it’s the best. If I squint hard enough I can tell myself that AM2 still makes video games.

(This game was originally built by AM2 for arcades; the mobile version ditches the more immersive “real table” 3D camera work and flashier effects present in the arcade game. We can safely assume AM2 are long gone at this point, but not so long gone that “am2” isn’t in the name of the install directory.)

Adapted from the arcade game, Sega MJ has a focus on a faster, more casual online experience. You can play a regular east-south 4p game here, but that was added years into service and people mostly play either east rounds or 3-player. The emphasis is on a game you can play in 20 minutes, with rules specifically designed to move things along with significantly fewer dealer repeats.

If you understand how much uninterrupted time a full east-south round can take— and how uncertain that amount of time can be– you might understand where Sega MJ is coming from. I can get the mahjong bug without necessarily having 40 minutes, 90 minutes, or even two hours of uninterrupted time to play a single game. Now that I’m playing ranked really seriously over on Riichi City, I can’t play until night anymore, when RC's top lobby in not empty and I’m guaranteed not to be interrupted by a pressing real-life matter. Sega MJ is kind of an antidote for that way of playing; you can just get in on a coffee break and not worry that you might still be playing in two hours.

There are a couple of downsides, the biggest being that this is a pay-per-play and gacha game. The currencies are on the top of the screenshot above: MJ chips allow you to play games and can be won for free, C chips are for the casino games and effectively get converted to MJ chips when you win them (learn jacks or better video poker, it's easy), and Gold is for gacha, BUT if you have G on your account, it will spend it on matches first in a cruel attempt to push players to the gacha.

People are horrified by this system when I describe it, but I pay way less per year on Sega than I would on Riichi City or Majsoul. The Sega MJ gacha is underwhelming, expensive, and exploitative: imagine having to roll a character avatar multiple times to get all their special effects, for example. You get a lot of perfectly good avatars (from bizarre old-Japanese-nerd sources, from Japanese comedians to pachinko mascots to characters from the old strip mahjong game Suchie Pai) for free, so I stick to just paying the game money. When I’m active on Sega MJ, I pay the game maybe $20-30 for a year’s worth of currency: it’s important to only buy in during their sales, which usually double the value. (I like the casino chip deals, because I can blackjack or video poker my way to much more currency than I actually paid for.)

Gacha avatars with voice and cut-ins have replaced the legacy customization from the old arcade game, which was dressing up a 2D doll-like avatar. This was a pretty cool system, but Sega is greedy and arbitrary, aggressive item limits– along with the fact that there haven't been new clothing items since the game launched– make dressing up your guy a lot more trouble than it's worth. I locked my avatar in years ago, when a) I beat Kana Ueda and got her autograph (voice of Saki, Rin from Fate, I didn't cry at all), and b) they did a Garo collab.

The other downside— clearly intentional, as it’s been like this for a decade— is that the game has basically random matchmaking. Rather than matching players to other players of comparable skill, Sega walls off only absolute beginners and throws everybody else into the same pool. Skill level is all over the place, and since games are fast, there isn't time to adjust, and luck is a bigger factor. Even so, winning players win more, and losing players lose harder. “Events” and “Tournaments” are played for high-score streaks, meaning they are a madhouse of people playing zero-defense, swinging for the biggest hands they can possibly get. More so than the games we've discussed, ranking up in Sega MJ is much more about grinding it out than actually getting better. And as a pay-to-play game, Sega MJ obviously has a transparent motive to just get you to play as many matches as possible.

(If you're wondering if you're good there's an elo-style R rating, but it seems pretty useless/manipulated, like the system Riichi City recently got rid of. People have the max of 3000R.)

Sega MJ also has a suite of gambling games on the side. This seems random but it really comes from this game's genealogy of arcade medal games that have built-in fake casinos to play while you play. This client has— get ready— video poker, blackjack, two pachinkos, scratch-off tickets, a horse race featuring the Yakuhime characters, and two real-life classic Sammy slot machines (Aladdin A and Animal King.) And of course, you can play some real degenerate gambler 3p mahjong tables if you want to pay and lose about 10x the pay currency you use to play.

(As someone who doesn't really like the "pei-nuki" style of 3P riichi where North is a free dora, I actually like Sega MJ's 3P rules the best out of any existing service.)

Recent additions to Sega MJ— namely “watch an ad to get game money”, for which Sega seems to only have one advertiser, a sauna company— have made me wonder if the service’s time isn’t numbered. I still love it very much, and I advise any mahjong-head to check it out, even if it'll probably never be a "main game" for many of us.

Maru-Jan

Format: Windows client (Do not install Maru-Jan unless you are okay with or are able to remove the program it installs that randomly pops up windows telling you to play Maru-Jan. Japanese users will put up with more, apparently.) Android, and Mac.
Payment model: pay per match (some freebies)
Japanese language only; so old it doesn’t play along 100% with English Windows.

The actual oldest Japanese riichi client, 20 years as of this writing. Maru-Jan is maybe the most “hardcore” client as well; it has a “real” parlor aesthetic down to the full simulation of an auto table including dice rolls, and actual real-life high-res photos of tiles. It’s aimed squarely at very experienced players, with an aggressively fast match clock that requires an advanced player’s forethought to keep up. As such, Maru-Jan is consistently active, but only with really hardcore grinders. Likely old guys who really have been playing for 20 years, or longer. Marujan heavily engages these players with constant ranked events.

I like the pacing of Maru-Jan games and the tough competition, but it’s a pay service and I also don’t like the aforementioned pop-up, so it’s long been uninstalled. I'm really including it for completeness' sake.

Jannavi

Format: Windows browser, mobile and Nintendo Switch

Payment model: pay-per-play or subscription (some freebies)

Some real ancient stuff. Some Galapagos phone kinda stuff. I wonder what Jannavi’s original format even was. But the reason I'm including Jannavi is that you can play it on your Switch, and unlike the version on Clubhouse Games, there are plenty of people online actually playing Jannavi. There is no other active online MJ client you can play on the Switch— not even Mahjong Soul— and the Switch is theoretically a great device for mahjong, so I thought I’d bring this up.

I am pretty sure I got this on the US Eshop, but it's been a while and I could be wrong. Making a Switch JP shop account is pretty trivial, and you can renew your subscription via a US account, that’s for sure.

(AVOID) Mahjong Dream

I can’t speak for too many of the other MJ clients I see on Steam— it looks like somewhere along the line Hime Mahjong locked me out and wants a Chinese phone number to get back in— but I wanted to single out Mahjong Dream in particular, if it is even still around.

This game advertises 3D anime characters with your mahjong, and it does deliver minimally on that front, with a wide range of anime characters voiced by big-name seiyuu who all have the same animations when they win. However, the entire UI and systems are not just stolen but fully plagiarized from Riichi City.

Like, Riichi City is a Majsoul “clone” or “ripoff”, no question: it steals many of Majsoul’s systems, makes some adjustments, and has grown from that base. But Mahjong Dream copy-pastes Riichi City’s UI, rank/XP systems, character systems, pricing, universe-specific terminology, and even the entirety of its tutorial text directly. It is a different kind of thing, from a seedy-looking developer. I actually reported this game to RC when I first played it. Stay away.

Finally, I demand Mahjong Fight Girl

In conclusion, give us Mahjong Fight Girl, Konami, you fuckers. (This is currently an arcade-only game, and the gacha prices are so insane that it'll probably stay that way until the day it dies.) The animations are so godlike. Every mahjong game should have the other players go flying like Looney Tunes when you win a big hand and then some girls come out and do Nanto Gokuto Ken. That's what happens in real life.