Last week I went and saw Mamoru Hosoda's Summer Wars with friends, including Carl and the Reverse Thieves. After we had gotten through all of the other cool stuff that had happened in the movie, somebody had to get to the heart of the matter:
"Wasn't that Yu-Gi-Oh scene great?"
Yes, there was a Yu-Gi-Oh scene in this movie. It's not coincidental: the scene is deliberately staged and directed like one of Yugi's card battles, down to the rapidly fluctuating life point counters displayed on the screen. The climax of the film is the same hand-to-the-sky card-playing sequence that so often ends a Yu-Gi-Oh episode, except it's about ten times as majestic. If you've ever watched that show, it is impossible not to notice this direct resemblance.
In Summer Wars, the characters are playing the Japanese hanafuda card game. I don't understand it at all, the viewer isn't expected to, but the scene is made to be exciting despite that. We see cards being played rapidly, the characters making aggressive, resolute calls at every play, and those life points plunging and swelling as a direct result of the action. We understand that this is a hard-fought struggle, and it's compelling on those grounds, but we don't understand exactly what is going on.
It's all about presentation: this is why Nobuyuki Fukumoto's mahjong series
Akagi is a cult classic in Western anime/manga fandom despite the fact
that the vast majority of us viewers have absolutely no idea what the
hell is going on. It is always clear that Akagi is toying with and crushing his enemies: if not via the game, then through the tension in the air and the looks on people's faces.
Technically speaking, Yu-Gi-Oh spawned a real-world card game with real-world rules, but the characters in the series are not bound by said rules. They do whatever the writers decide they can do at any given moment in the name of entertainment. Actually knowing how the card game is played detracts somewhat from the cartoon, because you know everything they're doing is total cheating nonsense.
The nail in the coffin for viewer interest is hero Yugi's writer-granted power: this guy believes in the "heart of the cards". What this means is that when the chips are down, Yugi just believes, and in so doing wills the single card he needs for a complete turnaround victory into his hand. This deflates any possible tension, of course: not only do we know that our young hero will always win, it takes that extra step into predictability by letting us know exactly how. It's a kids' show, of course, but even kids get bored of this stuff.
And so, when in my recent Japanese mahjong research I watched Saki, I immediately said to Carl "what is this Yu-Gi-Oh bullshit and when do they start playing mahjong?" He had me skip the first arc. The mahjong in Saki is an actual game when the small fries are playing and Yu-Gi-Oh when a major character gets involved. Saki doesn't need the viewer to understand the game either: if you're watching this it's a lot more likely you're in it for the blatantly suggestive camera angles and the longing gazes between girls that form the majority of the show.
By the final table, we've got two characters with entirely ridiculous mahjong powers that all four players understand to be absolute fact: when heroine Saki calls a kan (a set of four of the same tiles) and draws a tile, she will win. When reigning champion Koromo draws the last tile, she will win. This will happen 100% of the time, no matter what. What's funny is that we start to see the characters take this into the logic of the game and attempt to maneuver around the craziness: for example, calling to shift the turn order so that Koromo doesn't draw last (Koromo just calls again and resets the situation). In the end Saki calls a lot of kans, wins with the heart of the tiles, and nobody is terribly surprised.
I found the bits with the lesser players more interesting because I felt like they earned it. My favorite character in Saki was the one I like to call Bad Odds Girl, because she just bets on lousy odds over and over again. Sure, she wins, but it's thanks to a conscious decision on her part. It's admirable. And of course, Shigeru Akagi doesn't so much play mahjong as he masterminds the interaction between four human beings sitting at a table. He earns it: he's on another level of earning it.
Summer Wars isn't actually about hanafuda, of course. It's about a large, tight-knit family out in the Japanese countryside using Web 3.0 to fight off a rogue AI. (It's also about Terry Bogard.) We feel like the heroine earns the final hanafuda victory because she has grown in so many ways over the course of the film, and she is at the peak of her being when she slams down that card. Without a soul behind it, the whole spectacle-- the light of heaven beaming from under the cards, the observers flipping out in the background-- would be empty. It's just some lucky guy you can't empathize with. Kinda like Legendary Gambler Tetsuya.