Kenji Eno was a visionary game developer who constantly explored new ideas, from a sound-only game for visually-impaired players to incorporating fashion design into his storytelling. He also made a game about beating up perverted men by crushing them at mahjong. We’ll be talking about that one today.
18+ strip mahjong games are nothing new, ranging back to several titles on the PC-98. But Kenji Eno wanted to do something different:
“I remember thinking ‘Man, I’m really tired of games where you play mahjong to strip girls, I want to make one where you save them!’ and that’s how we somehow got to whatever this is. At first, we didn’t plan on having anime cutscenes or a theme song, but somehow it just all became a bigger project than anticipated. I hope everyone’s satisfied with it!” – Kenji Eno, Producer
From this quote alone, we can tell this wasn’t a project to take seriously. Let us done our hero cape and become a champion of justice!
Our story begins as a high school girl walks home alone at night, only to be assaulted by a pervert who flashes her with his camera and begs for her underwear. Then he flashes himself, revealing he’s wearing nothing but pink teddy bear panties. Clearly in a pinch, she calls for the Oyaji Hunter!
Alright, so to get this in the right order: the pervert is tazed, then Hunter flies in from miles away and punches him to the ground. I’m not sure how he shocked him from a mile away, but I have to admit he’s good at stopping an attack in progress. The best part of all these scenes is the obviously forced segue into mahjong:
“The hero of justice, Oyaji Hunter, is on the scene!”
“You bastard, looking for a fight!?”
“I can’t just stand by and watch your despicable acts, lolicon with a fetish for used girl’s clothing!”
“Then beat me at mahjong!!”
Just like, Hunter already beat the crap out of this guy, but he’s like “play mahjong with me” and for some reason, Hunter just silently nods and they walk to the nearest shady mahjong bar. Just listen to the music for the first stage and tell me it doesn’t feel like you walked into a lonely bar, the stale stench of years of tobacco stinging your nose. The place doesn’t make you happy, but here you are yet again, playing mahjong until the light hours of the early morning.
This seems the right place to mention I ripped all the music from the game and uploaded them to YouTube. I even subtitled the very important opening theme~ Have fun! (Stage 1 is around 2:19)
Anyway, enough of that, time for the gameplay! Now I only learned riichi mahjong (Japanese mahjong) a few weeks before this, so I’m still learning by playing hot anime gacha mahjong with friends online.
Once you sit down at the table, you’ll be greeted by a facecam of your opponent, followed by a very muffled “I won’t go easy on you.” The game plays like standard riichi mahjong, except each round is with only two players. Each player takes turns discarding tiles until either someone wins or the discard pile is full. Calls such as kan, pon, chii, and riichi won’t be displayed automatically like in some mahjong clients, so you’ll have to press B to see what’s valid on that turn. If nothing is valid, your player will just say “dame (no)” every time for every button press, meaning you can be a DJ and dame to the beat~
The discard pile only fits 18 tiles, which makes the rounds feel short, especially since you only have one player to call tiles from. So for many hands, you might have problems finding the last tile you need. Thankfully, the game has you covered. If you’re one tile away from winning and declared riichi (1,000 point bet that you will win the round), but then the round ran out of tiles, you’ll enter what the game calls Last Hunter Chance.
In this mode, several tiles, including the tile you need to win, will shuffle very quickly on the screen. If you can follow the tile with your eyes and select it, you’ll draw that tile and win the round! It’s a really nice bonus, but it’s hard to get consistently (unless you’re save stating on an emulator~).
Each player’s score doubles as their life and if you win the round overall, you deal your hand’s value as damage to your opponent! You may be thinking that getting 50,000 points is a huge number to hit (or not, maybe you’re better at mahjong than my sorry ass), but no fear, there’s multipliers!
You’re given the chance to hit the pervert, and what you land on determines the attack. You’ll want to aim for Hunter Beam, which gives you a whopping x10! If you score above a point threshold (only happened to me like once or twice), then you might see Hunter Bomb appear which is an instant kill.
Keep in mind however that your opponents aren’t just punching bags. If they win the round, they get a “Punishment Time” where they inflict their creepy fetishes on you and cause damage.
Similar to the Last Hunter’s Chance, several “punishments” will be shown before flipping over and mixing up randomly. The punishments range from x1 damage, no damage, to the game-ending x10 damage. The more points the opponent had, the more deadly the cards will be. These ones are a bit slower to mix up, so it’s not too hard to keep yourself alive.
But if you fail…
So yeah, don’t let that happen.
In terms of accessibility, this game is import friendly if you know how to play mahjong. There’s a tutorial mode, but that’s not going to do you much good in Japanese. However, there’s plenty of English-language tutorials for learning riichi mahjong as well as free games like Mahjong Soul to help you learn. Most of the story is played out in cutscenes, so even if you don’t know what they’re saying, it’s pretty clear what’s going on.
The main things you’d need to know are the options to call, so here’s the Japanese with its meaning:
- アガリ (agari)
- Announce that you’ve won. I believe this is for both ツモ (tsumo, self-drawn win) and ロン (winning off an opponent’s discard)
- リーチ (riichi)
- Declare that you’re one tile away from winning and that you’re betting 1,000 points that you’ll win
- チー (chii)
- Call your opponent’s discarded tile to complete a sequence in your hand
- ポン (pon)
- Call your opponent’s discarded tile to complete a triplet in your hand
- カン (kan)
- Call your opponent’s discarded tile to complete a quad in your hand
- Announce you have a quad in your hand you want to play
- Add the 4th tile you just drew to a previously played triplet of yours.
Apart from that, the main Japanese text in the game is the victory screen where you’ll see the names of what hands you played. Those aren’t very important since you’ll either have an idea of what you played, or you’ll just see numbers becoming the big numbers and nod.
When you finally get enough of playing mahjong against a pervert, you’ll get a victory cutscene.
Usually the scenes end with the girl, previously in distress, taking matters into their own hands because you were spending all your time playing mahjong. Something about you winning at a gambling game gives them the courage to beat the shit out of their assailants. Girl power? I’ll take what I can get.
The story itself consists of 5 chapters against 5 perverts, ranging from S&M Hitler Pervert to Super Alter Mech Robo Pervert in the finale. Apart from the finale, the stages follow the same formula of girl in distress, beat the pervert up, play mahjong with them, then the girl beats up the guy (apart from one nice girl who forgives him).
In the finale, the pervert in the power suit doesn’t admit defeat, and you get treated to the only acknowledgement that Hunter literally just carries a mahjong table at all times.
The robot and Hunter engage in an intense final battle, where the robot fires a beam that conveniently removes all women’s clothing in a mile radius! Hunter is about to be incinerated by a laser beam when he pulls out his Hunter Shoulder Mirrors which reflect it back, destroying the robot!
Left behind in the rubble is what appears to be Gollum…
The tiny man explains that he had to take revenge on all women for calling him a short, ugly monster. Life is just so cruel, and it’s all women’s fault (uhhh).
So then these women come up and apologize to him on behalf of all women (UHHH).
As a reward for beating the game (and for reading this post for so long!), the game rewards you with a level select code to play any stage:
The game has no saving, so the above code is really useful if you need to stop or if you’re bad at mahjong and each round takes forever to win.
Now, as a fan translator and hacker, I always check to see how easily a translation would be if the game doesn’t have one. Considering I know the 3DO tools pretty well from translating Doctor Hauzer, it was easy to see what we were working with. Thankfully, nearly all if not all of the text is pictures!
So overall a translation effort of the game itself would involve a lot of image editing, but nothing too difficult there. The hard part would be translating the videos, since the 3DO doesn’t currently have the best tools for working with them. We’re playing around with writing our own tool at the moment, so if that pans out, then we’ll definitely translate this game!
Lastly, the game also contains a bonus section of mini-games and demos and also one unsolved secret. In the demo section, we see one game stand out like a sore thumb: the trailer for the cancelled M2 version of D’s Diner!!
When I first saw that, my heart skipped a beat. It turned out to be nothing new, but was still amazing to see the 3DO model of Laura in the D2 trailer!
Now, the unsolved secret involves going down to the basement, where you’re met with a sign that says “Cleaning in Progress.”
I searched online, but couldn’t find any way to access this room. I thought it might be like the hidden codes in D and the Director’s Cut that I helped find, but nothing in the game case that I could find. If you have any ideas or theories, let me know since I want to get in!
On the other hand, I do already know what’s behind the door due to aforementioned game hacking. You might recognize it from the café banner for the website:
As far as I can tell, entering the room shows you a pitch for none other than:
Even if I mostly know what’s behind the door, I still want to know how to get in there and see it myself! I tried searching online in Japanese to see if I could find it, but unfortunately the search terms mostly just got some not so safe for work things >//<.
Judging by Kenji Eno’s past secrets with D that involved dismantling your CD case to find a hidden code that you have to interpret as a password to enter on the final screen of both D and D Director’s Cut to get 2 separate save files, I’d imagine it’s something really esoteric and complicated.
…or who knows, maybe you just have to get a really good mahjong score. Or beat the minigames with a certain score. Or have a save file from another one of his games.
Lastly, there’s a few fun things in the manual:
We saw Kenji Eno’s above, but here’s the interviews from the other staff members!
“Somehow we managed to use more than 4,000 cells for this game’s animation! A thirty minute program might use something like 2,500 cells, so this was quite an achievement. For a mahjong game, it’s unheard of! Though most mahjong games don’t have missiles flying at you or battle scenes, so it’s definitely a lot of fun.” – Ichiro Itano, Animation Director
“For as long as I could remember, I’ve always wanted to play a hero of justice. With this role, I finally got to act out the ‘heart of a hero’ I’ve always held by acting in this game. Someone who was always there when you needed him and was smooth and refreshing like a nice soft drink.” Taiki Matsuno, Voice Actor
“Oh man, I have to do this too? Well, I sung the opening theme to Oyaji Hunter, if you could call it that. People who aren’t familiar with the game get a little weirded out when I say that, but those who know about the game get a chuckle out of it. You reading this paragraph, come join the world of Rumi Shishido! Your life will be filled with so much joy! Now, sing with me: ‘Oyaji Hunter~'” – Rumi Shishido, Singer
“Phew! We’re finally done.”
Two major industry pros met, and this big project is the result! They fought until dawn and gave a few honest words while their eyes were still bloodshot.
Eno: “Phew! We’re finally finished! I thought releasing this would forever be a far off dream! Really, good job to everyone.”
Itano: “Good work everyone. What even sparked this project anyway?”
Eno: “We were both lecturing at the same school, remember? Then we got talking and eventually mentioned that it’d be cool to work on something together…”
Itano: “Then you followed up and got the ball rolling. But wow, Oyaji Hunter Mahjong really took off into something big.”
Eno: “It really did. The animation was so well done, I’m glad you worked on this with me. At first, we weren’t even planning on having anime scenes. Then we decided to stick something of yours in and see how it went. After that, I knew it could only be you. At first we were only going to have 1,500 cells and call it a day there, but then somehow…”
Itano: “4,300 (laughs). And Eno, it wasn’t just ‘somehow.’ At first you said ‘Oh it’s in a game, so they don’t have to move much,’ but then you’d go like ‘Oh make that part flashier’ or ‘This is an Itano anime, we should really add more missiles. More missiles!'”
Eno: “Hahaha. I’m sorry, really. But the characters really do move a lot. I can’t imagine this as a 4,800 yen game!”
Itano: “You sure? It seems close to me, but I’m worried about next time.”
Eno: “No, this project was enough of a beast. We really put too much into this. But, I think everyone will be happy with it. How would you feel about working together again though?”
Itano: “If 3DO fans like this kind of anime, then I’d love to work with you again.”
This one’s strange in that it’s a picture of 4 random guys that says “These are Oyaji!” aka the creepy perverted men you’re hunting in the game. I’m not sure if these are programmers or staff being added for fun in the manual or what. But it basically says their type “Park Oyaji,” “Walking the Streets at Night Oyaji,” and “Festival Oyajis.” Then it has a small bio of their name, age, date of birth, sign, hobbies, and favorite type of girl. It must have been a great honor to have been, uh, listed as a perverted man in a game manual…
One final thing. I was looking through the manual for hints on the secret area and stumbled across this page:
This is mostly your normal warning of “don’t sit close to the television, take breaks,” etc, but I can’t help but feel suspicious at the highlighted characters. I’m wondering if this is how you get the secret room? Here’s the highlighted characters in order, then what color they were.
楽時下注喪験皆D性絶いソ米たをは
Red:
楽D性ソを
Blue:
時注絶は
Green:
下皆いた
Orange:
喪験米
Maybe that’ll give someone an idea…
But thank you for joining me this far! And remember; when you’re in trouble on the streets, just call for a hot guy with a sweet bod to play mahjong against your assailant~!
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