Riichi City - Japanese Mahjong

To start, I'm going to be heavily comparing this to Mahjong Soul because, well, they're very similar games. Mention of Tenhou too, though they are much less similar. If you don't want comparisons check a different review. So, if you want to learn Riichi Mahjong or you know how to play and want a casual experience and don't mind or even enjoy the anime girls and gatcha, I think Riichi City is the superior client to MS. There's one specific area where RC falters, but it's understandably a deal breaker for a lot of people: RC's characters and outfits are very over sexualized, and of lot of those characters are underage girls. Not a great look. There is a 'SFW Mode' in the options that hides some of the more egregious outfits but it's not great and honestly it kind of sucks that it has to exist in the first place. Mahjong Soul also has this issue, but not to the same extent. RC seems to want to give every character a half nude outfit and throws them in your face every time you open the shop, where as MS only has a couple and they're much less frequently seen in my experience. In case you aren't aware; if you just want to play Riichi Mahjong and don't care one way or the other about cosmetics, both RC and MS are completely free, nothing that costs money has any gameplay effect. If you're very serious about Mahjong or can't stand the anime/gatcha stuff, Tenhou is probably the client for you. I've never used it so I can't speak to it too much, but from what I understand it's just pure Mahjong. Anyway, here's what I think RC does better than MS: - Really good tutorial with a DuoLingo style check in to get you to review Mahjong info to learn how to play. - The wall is visible during a game. Both RC and MS show the number of tiles left in the center of the compass, but actually seeing the wall makes it much easier to visualize how much longer a hand will go before exhaustive draw, at least for my specific brand of neurodivergence. - RC is way more generous about giving out free cosmetics. It's still a gatcha game that wants you to pay money to gamble for anime girls, but you get way more free gatcha pulls in RC compared to MS, and gives out a lot of other cosmetics just for doing missions and competing events. I've only been playing RC for about a week and I have not given them any money yet, but in several categories I already have more cosmetics than I do in MS and I've been playing that a few years and have put maybe 100$ into it. - They recently introduced 16 tile mode which as I understand it is based on Taiwanese Mahjong. From what I hear it's not exactly the same though. (I'm only really familiar with Riichi) Yeah, so. Overall unless MS is doing a specific collab from your favorite anime or game, I don't see a reason to pick MS over RC outside of the gross outfits thing. I think it's really between RC and Tenhou depending on your tolerance for gatcha/anime and how seriously you take the game.