I’m Obsessed With Yakuza 0 On The Switch 2 — But For All The Wrong Reasons

For over a month now, I’ve been testing out the Nintendo Switch 2. But I must confess that my primary game of choice is not playing Cow in Mario Kart World or Mario’s primate rival in Donkey Kong Bananza — but mahjong in Yakuza 0: Director’s Cut. It’s been 10 years since the original Yakuza 0 was released and the Director’s Cut makes significant changes to the game’s narrative. But rather than concern myself with the story’s main campaign, I found myself returning again and again to the game within a game — the small tables of riichi mahjong, filled with non-playable characters’ chatter and the sound effects of shuffling tiles.

This 200-year-old game has already occupied me for multiple evenings, from its elaborate rules to its increasingly challenging opponents. What began as a small detour has quickly turned into a full-blown obsession, turning summer nights into meditative sessions trying to build the perfect, winning hand. Before I knew, I’d look up and it would be past midnight.

I’m not alone. This rabbit hole within a rabbit hole has trapped countless players before me. Do a quick search, and you’ll find dozens of people pleading online, asking for strategies on how to improve, or maybe even how to cheat their way to a quick victory. From angry fist-shaking to frustrated complaints, it seems I’ve stumbled upon a well-trodden path. Instead of trying to progress in Yakuza and help Kazuma Kiryu clear his name once and for all, I’d rather spend hours deleting my opponents in riichi mahjong, a Japanese variant on the popular East Asian game with 30 pages of rules to memorize.

My journey to learn mahjong took place over a week’s crash course. On Sunday, a couple of my friends gathered in one of New York’s Chinatowns to play on a motorized table that automatically shuffled the tiles for us. The room was bright pink, taped with Supreme knockoff stickers, already smoky from our neighbors plus past inhabitants, filled with cigarette holders and places to store our bubble teas in equal measure. We taught a former Inverse editor and another Chinese language classmate how to play Hong Kong-style mahjong.

The basics resemble poker: Each player, besides the dealer, starts with 13 tiles, and must draw one and discard one until four sets of three (either three of a kind or a straight) and a pair are formed, and a winner is declared. When an opponent discards a tile that you happen to have two of already, you can call “Pon” (meaning “touch”) to add it to your hand, bringing you one step closer to victory. One more wrinkle: If the player whose turn is just before yours tosses out a tile that you can use to complete a straight, you can call “Chi” (meaning “eat”) to take the tile if you’d like. These two aggressive measures are first come, first serve, though, so in-person matches include a lot of quick movements to grab the winning tile. While at first there was a learning curve, soon the hours started to slip by as even the beginners at the table began to declare that they had become obsessed with mahjong.

Once the party was over, though, I had grown enthralled with mahjong, and I luckily knew of a surefire way to keep playing: hitting up Orchid Palace Mahjong on Nakamichi Alley in Yakuza 0. Ignoring the various calls to continue the plot, I settled on my new goal: helping Kiryu climb to rank 1 in riichi mahjong. (As of this writing, I have climbed from rank 30 to rank 10, with a ways to go.)

Riichi mahjong poses significantly more headaches than the Hong Kong variant. Instead of being able to win with any hand, and eat your opponent’s tiles on a whim, you now must guarantee your hand is valuable enough to win, meaning it has to meet certain criteria. All told, there are around 30 possible winning hands, but many of them involve playing with a concealed hand, meaning you cannot touch and eat to your heart’s desire, so there’s no taking tiles from your opponent’s discards, and instead you must hope to draw the winning tile on your own (what’s called “Tsumo,” or literally “self-touch”).

When you keep your hand concealed and you’re one tile away from winning, you can declare the eponymous “Riichi,” which simultaneously warns all your enemies that you’re about to win and they should start playing defensively, and also earns you extra bonus points for when you actually win the game. Declaring “Riichi” doesn’t necessarily mean you win, though — someone else can still cinch the victory for themselves.

What this really translates to is a much slower, more deliberate game where you slowly and quietly amass an expensive and valuable hand, hoping all the while that you aren’t tossing out a tile that your opponent can steal to siphon away all your points.

With this more complicated rule set, all kinds of silly situations can emerge. There were times when I was often one tile away from winning, but I was forced to discard a random tile, useless to me, and it was an opponent’s winning tile, thus costing me around 10,000 points and ending the game. This sort of infuriating moment happens a lot, as mahjong is also a game that demands a lot of luck.

Another scoring rule involves four winds: If you sit on the prevalent wind, then you’re the dealer, so if you win the round, the round repeats, and if you lose the round, you lose extra points. That opens up ridiculous, vexing scenarios like being stuck in a seemingly never-ending game of mahjong, with the winning dealer always siphoning away a thousand points away from me — a loss by a thousand cuts. Or sometimes, I would be building toward two different kinds of hands, and failing to build either, just lacking the win condition to end the game. I can’t tell you how many games led to a slow stalemate across the board, as everyone failed to draw the right tile, and we ultimately ran out of tiles.

Eventually, I grew tired of AI opponents and an endless timer, and I wanted to test my real skills, which led me to download the mobile game, Mahjong Soul, where you can play online against mostly people in China, South Korea, or Japan, and deal with a six-second timer. Now I’ve graduated to running mahjong events at my house, too. Overall, I’ve found myself embarking on an unexpected journey across time and space, picking up a little-known practice. Whatever your skill level and experience is, mahjong can be a surprisingly rewarding game, and an all-too dangerous way to pass the time. Hours later, I’ll emerge, feeling peaceful and content. Just don’t say I didn’t warn you about the time commitment.