If you know the developer Cave at all, you probably know them for their arcade shooting titles, but they actually do a lot more business than that. It's just not stuff gamers on this side of the ocean would particularly care about: games that only run on Japanese phones, social games, stuff like that.
Case in point: Cave just announced a mahjong game and I jumped in on the closed beta. I didn't know what I was getting into because Cave released very little info aside from the words "social mahjong", but hey, Cave and MJ are two tastes I love. And since this is now a closed beta, I figure I would let you all know what's up with it.
Mahjong Rokumeikan is a mahjong game as accessory to a much more conventional social game. The player starts with a little, tiny house and, as far as I can tell, acquires items to make it bigger... by playing mahjong, of course.
The atmosphere is all butlers and aristocracy (my rank is mid-class baron!) and there's a definite otome game feel. Of course, the first thing you do in this game is pick a butler or maid. That premise doesn't really go anywhere, though: the characters only appear between hands and in the menu screens, and the same graphic is always used. No voices, either. Well, it is the beta, I guess. It definitely feels like one: despite the nice art, the interface is neither as flashy as Janryumon nor as elegantly simple as Tenhou.
The idea is that every time you finish a round (East-only) you get a certain amount of items which you later combine to raise your rank and make your butler-house look a little nicer. The specific items you get seem to be divided up by age and gender, so it necessitates playing with lots of other people and friending them to get more stuff, you get the idea. A "social" game, but only in that the other players are tools for getting more items, like any Facebook game you can think of.
I get what they're going for: this sort of item-grabbing thing is popular, but it's a model built more on feeling obligated to obtain those items than, you know, actually enjoying yourself by playing a game. This isn't really the service for serious ranked mahjong grinders like the audience for Tenhou or even the much more casual Janryumon. If you were curious about it from that point of view, you're really not missing anything here. To be fair, Rokumeikan pretty clearly isn't intended to compete with those products. It's first and foremost a game about building a little house, and I think Cave will see more success making that game than they would making any other sort of MJ game.
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