Super Real Mahjong: Venus Returns delivers the quaint nudity of another age

Many years ago, I had the unique pleasure of witnessing an arcade strip mahjong game in its natural habitat: the back corner of a retro floor at the long-defunct Try Tower arcade in Akihabara.

There is something audacious and forbidden about the existence of these games in public. It’s one thing if you’re quietly walking into a 1990s software shop and buying the new sex-packed PC adventure in a big box to take home; that’s between you, the clerk, and Elf.

But it’s a totally different thing to sit down at a big, loud arcade cabinet and pop in perfectly good money to strip a suspiciously lucky anime girl over a simple round of mahjong. To make a public event of it. To let the world watch you lose to her improbable draws over and over again, yet doggedly continue to hurl 100-yen coins into the abyss, in hopes of eventually getting to watch her strike a tasteful nude pose in front of God and passer-by alike. This takes guts.

I was witness to one such man, as he sat smack in the middle of the strip mahjong row, deeply engaged in a round of Jaleco’s Kirara Star, a space-faring stripping adventure. It’s a hazy memory these days, but I recall a truly classical Japanese otaku, looking like Toshio Okada in Otaku no Video: a little chubby, decked out in plaid, hauling a big bag on his back. As the games played out, he chuckled and giggled, mumbling to himself and whispering to the girls on the screen.

This guy didn’t give a fuck, and he wouldn’t have given a fuck if there were a hundred people in that room instead of just me. I’ll forever associate him with the experience of this subgenre. When I play these games in the privacy of my own home in emulation— particularly Kirara Star— I sometimes hear him in my head, chuckling to himself, in his own world with a two-dimensional dream girl. Ah, Aya-san. You’re a bold one, aren’t you?

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Most of the other games in the mahjong row at that arcade were from the Super Real Mahjong series, Seta’s genre king. “Super Real” was originally in reference to realistic details from the first game that quickly became standard, like the sound of tiles clacking, or animations of the player character’s hands actually drawing them. But “Super Real” came to stand for an up-close and personal experience: a first-person stripper. Full-screen, lushly animated and voiced cinematics directed from the viewpoint of the player tell the same story in most every installment: you’ve just walked into a house, wherein wait a set of young women who are surprisingly eager to play a game of strip mahjong with you.

Super Real Mahjong doesn’t approach its titillation cynically, as some tawdry gimmick for horny idiots (as did the fathers of the genre over at Nichibutsu). Quite the contrary: Super Real is the genre king specifically because of its shockingly high production values. Seta turned to the anime industry early to make sure its girls looked the best in the business, using real anime studios (like Fantasia, you know, from Agent Aika, the one with the panties) and handing character design to veteran animator Ryo Tanaka. All of the game’s rivals followed this approach— notably Suchie Pai’s use of Kenichi Sonoda— but Super Real was a tough act to follow.

The arcade strip mahjong era ended in the late 90s, and Seta’s been gone since the days of the Gamecube. But Super Real re-materializes for a retro throwback every couple of years, from Neo Geo Pocket and GBA de-makes with spicy pixel art to the obligatory mobile gacha game to a full-series retro collection on the Switch. And that brings us, finally, to this new revival.

If not faithful to the letter, Super Real Mahjong: Venus Returns is extremely faithful to the spirit of the venerable series. Switching to 3D graphics and making a full VR game isn’t an arbitrary gimmick here: it’s in consideration of the first-person atmosphere of the original games. The developer touts “zero-distance” stripping: intimacy as the key feature.

The folks tasked with this project are Illumination, an offshoot of Illusion, the deceased and infamous creator of 3D porn games. (Illumination’s other game on Steam is a much more direct VR sex game. Be warned if you research Illusion that their games sometimes got extreme, even disturbing.)

Much has been made of the quality of the 3D animation, and Illumination approaches their task with the obsessive level of detail that only a fetish-oriented work would bring. The long and short of it is that animating fabric clothing in 3D is prohibitively hard, and since it’s not typically important to a game or narrative, most games skip it or use shortcuts. Consider Like a Dragon: Kiryu reaches for his collar, the camera cuts, and in the next shot he’s shirtless and tossing the shirt and jacket away in a single stroke.

Now Kiryu whipping off his top is an important dramatic moment, but in Super Real, disrobing is literally the game. And it doesn’t take shortcuts. The first thing you see in this game— before you’re allowed to do anything else— is the lead heroine Showko removing her sweater, which realistically deforms as she wiggles it up over her head. The developers on this game have noted in interviews that because this is a VR game, the camera can’t cut away, so they animated all of these sequences the hard way: frame by frame.

So throughout, Venus Returns is kind of shocking. Not at all in terms of its sexual content— which is again quite tame— but in terms of the level of detail, the pains taken, the way you can actually hear buttons unfastening. Turns out video games are art, after all.

It’s also charming. The trio from Super Real Mahjong PV— sporty Mizuki, perky Akira and shy princess Aya— display their personalities not just during the stripping scenes, but in their every mannerism and reaction at the table. They never quite sit still, and that makes them feel genuinely alive. Showko, the original heroine from SRMPII (the first game had no stripping; they hadn't figured it out yet) serves as both hostess, big sister and last boss, refusing to give up in an extended final battle.

As you win more and more, little conversations with the characters pop up, after-care sessions where you get miniature lore drops like Mizuki describing her 5km daily dog walk or Akira talking about growing up abroad in Taiwan. After all, Super Real Mahjong doesn’t just want you to strip these girls: it wants you to love them.

This brings us to the gallery. As you replay the game, you’re awarded with points to unlock items in a gallery of nostalgic (for 90s Japanese arcade nerds) items and merch. 3D modeled boxes of every single Super Real Mahjong home console release, full scans of the books of naughty (and censored) screenshots that came with every arcade board, and even the collectible phone cards from the series’ long-defunct fan club are available for your perusal. The mere existence of these items is proof and a reminder that people genuinely adored these characters in their day.

The developers’ love for this series and its characters reaches you through the screen. The cheery music is all arranged from the arcade games, and the VR locations are actually painstaking recreations of backgrounds used in the original games’ animation. Even some of the strip scenes are shot-for-shot from the arcade animation!

Where Venus Returns is not quite similar to the arcade games, mercifully, is in its difficulty. Anyone who’s played one of these games in their original form will tell you that they are cruelly rigged: you’ll be going about your business and the girl will pull a statistically nigh-impossible hand on her third draw, wiping you out instantly. Lest you think that it was a coincidence, you pop in another 100 yen and she pulls another one.

(The Super Real series has also historically had the twist of the girls putting their clothes back on when they win a hand, an outright evil touch which is gone in this version.)

Venus Returns has a range of difficulty options from Casual to the post-game “Super Real”. Though I imagine the game shuffles the girls better tiles based on your chosen difficulty (and perhaps you get better tiles in Casual?), its cheating is not blatant, like in the arcade games. I am a very experienced riichi mahjong player, and in Venus Returns the girls seem to get lucky with the kinds of hands that real players get lucky with, rather than regularly drawing monster hands that even serious players will only see once a year or so.

You will still need to know how to play Japanese mahjong: the “auto mode”, advertised for non-players, seems to purposely aim to throw out all of your best tiles first. This is neither a serious competitive mahjong game nor a training tool, so don’t expect that. You’re expected to earn your nudity. Lucky for you, I have a guide for that.

Whether you know tile or not, a combination of the game’s finger on the scale and the sheer luck of the draw will place you into unwinnable situations. (That’s mahjong, as we say.) You will almost certainly have to continue repeatedly to win in any mode but Casual, which I was pretty easily able to win on one credit.

But as you probably already understand, to say Super Real Mahjong is about the mahjong would be kind of silly. If you wanted to just play Japanese-rules mahjong, you’d be on Tenhou or Pro Mahjong Kiwame or something. Mahjong was chosen because the typical old Japanese guy who wanted to see some boobs after work was understood to likely know mahjong better than typical video game mechanics. Mahjong is simply the delivery method for anime girl striptease, and by modern standards, that's as quaint as a Playboy magazine. An Western version would be something equally easy to understand for the intended audience, like strip poker; or perhaps it was Adult Photo Hunt on a 2000’s bar-top Megatouch machine.

But that doesn’t capture what Super Real is, either. Adult Photo Hunt was cheap and tawdry, after all; it was meant for drunks to giggle at. Super Real takes its task more seriously, holds itself to a higher standard. It’s not ashamed of being a game about sex. It doesn’t apologize for itself. It doesn’t look down on the subject or on the player for being there. And god damn it, when it comes to strip mahjong, it’s going to be the top of the class. The developers of Venus Returns have carried that humble work ethic into the present day. It’s specifically their devotion— the sheer effort that ultimately resulted in those viral clips of a 3D anime girl taking off her sweater vest, and a sudden swell of interest in mahjong from thirsty anime waifu enthusiasts— that’s made this revival an unlikely hit.

That man in plaid would be proud.