麻雀のマーヴル VS. カプコン：三麻 | The Marvel vs Capcom of Mahjong: Sanma
Good afternoon everyone! I've got some time off from work, and I've been relaxing and playing plenty of mahjong. This morning, the 18th, fighting game fans got a special treat: The Marvel vs Capcom series of fighting games that are beloved here in the West got a new collection for release.
I know a lot of my old FGC buddies are really excited for both this MVC collection, and the potential of a future NEW Marvel vs Capcom game. I hope that Marvel may have finally realized that it was, in my humble opinion, their partnership with Capcom that gave them essentially ANY sort of bonifide foothold in the gaming community, and that the work of Bengus on the marvel vs games was the definitive introduction to the attitudes and designs of so many fans of these characters in the West.
Every time Marvel flounders at the box office because the corporate suits do not understand why people like Marvel characters, they come back to Capcom to get another game. If this is gauging support for a new Marvel game, they had better let Capcom dictate most of the game in terms of characters and story direction. Marvel ruined MVCI, a game that could have succeeded on its own merits if it had existed more for its own sake and less as an advertisement for Infinity War 2 or whatever.
I don't think I'll be buying this game however, unless my wife wants to play. While I am happy that Marvel vs Capcom games can be released now, Marvel games and myself are not always on the best terms.
My Marvel Career Was Doomed From The Start
For me, I have a very bittersweet history with the Marvel series. When I was in high school, the MVC2 machine was one of our heaviest rotation cabinets at Time Out, even when I started working there during college. I never had a meta team, just playing Guile/Cammy/Captain Commando. I never really cared for it, because I was destroyed by people playing meta, and didn't really want to play meta in that game. MVC2 was also the impetus game for me to set out and find the FGC in the year 2001. It led to discovery of Shoryuken.com, and GGPO.
When MVC3 came out in 2011, I went to a friends house to play it at launch.
It was one of my most embarrassing moments in public! I was screamin like a banshee about how unfair I felt the game was. Andy, if you're reading this, I'm sorry I acted like such a shithead (but I know you also had to be feeling yourself a little bit, tilting someone that hard by doing next to nothing) I HATED playing MVC3, even though a lot of our local Huntsville community ended up being contenders in the Southeast, like Marqus, Wandler, and Merkyl. It was a weird period, as I preferred more "correct" fighting games like Street Fighter IV. Here's one of my favorite matches from that game.
I loved the push and pull of this particular matchup. Patience was key, and being keenly aware of all of your frame data, as well as your positioning on screen and what tools were available at different ranges… THIS was a real fighting game. Marvel was just random! Undignified! X Factor was an annoying comeback mechanic! Taking attention away from the PROPER fighting games that were out!
I'm really glad I got over that mentality.
I knew that I would never want to PLAY a game like MVC3, but I soon learned through my enthusiastic friends that MVC3 was all the game Street Fighter was, and more, even if PLAYING it did not appeal to me. One of the moments that really changed my opinion was one of the rare Final Round tournaments that I was actually in the building for. The whole set is great, but it's the final match that really got everyone so excited!
Lots of rough play! Dropped combos! Situational ignorance! Marn! Why is everyone so excited about all this?
Because it's HYPE! It's EXCITING! And more importantly, it fits inside of the parameters of peoples expectations. It was true that the game had X factor, an incredibly strong comeback mechanic that could instantly reverse your victory, but both players have access. It was true that incoming mixups were not fair, but both players can set one up. "This is the game we play!" became a rallying cry in the Ultimate MVC3 days, when simple X factor 3 Vergil comebacks or Morridoom would cause people to doubt their own faith. A rallying cry that says 'embrace the bullshit. bathe in the bullshit. do your own bullshit'. There are plenty that would say that the competitive years of Marvel vs Capcom 3 is the high water mark of the modern FGC. I don't really think I could disagree.
But recently, I've been hearing some of these familiar comments.
"It's not a real game".
"Nobody really plays it or thinks about it".
"It's just random, there's no skill involved".
"People who like it just don't have the talent to play a proper game".
Thinking about it to myself, I really felt the sentiments were similar to the way I felt about Marvel so long ago. And of course, they were about what has puzzlingly become my preferred way to play mahjong, Sanma.
A Brief, Not Very Well Researched History of Sanma
So, 3 player mahjong had some sort of rules in the beginning of the Showa period, but really started booming in Osaka in the 1980s. (Osaka had Sanma and SNK? I think I'd rather stay in Osaka and visit Tokyo than the other way around at this point). It seems that from there it exploded in popularity. Sanma is 3 player mahjong. It is usually played with a different set of rules, cutting out most of the manzu tiles, no calling Chi, and with more Doras.
I like it because it adds a little bit more savagery and speed to the game, and an extra dimensionality of hand evaluation. For starters, it's faster with one less player, and with the 2-8manzu tiles removed. It's much easier for everyone to have a strong hand simultaneously, which adds to the risk of aggressively pushing. You can see the North tiles on the table, and evaluate how strong everyone's hand is with more obvious information. The purity of 2 suits also means that honitsu/chinitsu hands are easier to form, and in a sense, also easier to defend against. Big swings make attention to discards more paramount, and defense a stronger priority, but a faster play time means you have less time to wait for a better hand to win or defend with. Many apps have their own flavor of sanma as well, which makes for a granularized experience that's fun to adapt to! I think newer players of mahjong apps also can gravitate to sanma, as mashing on calls ends can be less calamitous, one less suit (that requires language knowledge to read) can feel less stressful on the player, and it's easier to accidentally win.
So, I will try to remove the scales from your eyes, like my marvel friends removed them from my own sanma naysayers!
If You Don't Think Sanma Is Real Mahjong, You're Just Wrong.
LET'S BE REAL OF COURSE: THIS IS NOT ME SAYING THAT YOU HAVE TO EVEN LIKE SANMA. That's whatever. Everyone has their own tastes. I'm not trying to sell you on anything. Sanma is not some secret, everyone who is reading this article has probably played plenty of it. I'm --DEFINITELY-- sure that you don't think Sanma is fake mahjong just because some nerd on the internet told you it was fake and you just want to conform to some weird mahjong nerd ingroup. You're a free thinker, right?
What I am saying is that it's not some -fake- form of mahjong, just a mahjong that requires a different set of expectations. It's like Street Fighter is Yonma, and Marvel vs Capcom is Sanma. While there are skills that are required to excel equally in both, they both have different expectations and tests of player skill and player fortitude. Four player riichi mahjong, in the traditional manner, gives you a lot of creativity. Hands increase in complexity, awarding those who manage their way through that complexity. Patience is rewarded in almost every aspect of the game. The depth is vast.
But friends, sometimes I just wanna fuckin go in! I want my situational analysis to be more important than the theory, and play less with my head and more with my heart. To me, that's sanma. You're never safe, you're always in danger! That's the game I play (tm). For all the cries of sanma being "random"…
I hate to be the one that bears this harsh truth to you dear reader, but all Mahjong is "just random".
If you zoom out far enough, mahjong is just about navigating the best probability that comes out of the 30-35 tiles you are dealt, plus calls. If those tiles don't form a winning hand, then it is impossible to engineer one. Sometimes, hands just can't win. When you accept this ultimate truth about mahjong, then the idea of "real mahjong" falls apart. Is Sichuan not real mahjong? Hong Kong rules? American? Philippine? Taiwanese? Vietnamese? Wright-Patterson? Who are you to tell the entire world they're playing a fake game? It's the era of globalism! You just sound like a prick! If you're making mahjong decisions, you're playing mahjong obviously. And you make the same sorts of decisions in all these different rulesets. You decide your level of risk, evaluate the maximum potential of your hand, and review short and long term play goals. Some of these rulesets are more complex than others, or reward different skills.
There are even variants of Sanma out there! One of the variants I wish I could play in an app is Kansai Sanma!
Kansai Sanma, The ULTIMATE MVC3 Of Mahjong
Kansai Sanma is a little wilder than the sanma you can play in apps. For a good rundown of all the rules, please consider this website.
Here's some of the main differences:
EVERY 5 is red. This essentially increases the value of 3-4-5-6-7 dramatically above the other numbered tiles, and increases the live dora in a given hand to 16 without ura!
FLOWERS are played. They must be revealed when drawn, and increase your dora value by 1. Norths are yakuhai. If a Flower is a dora indicator, it increases the dora value of all other flowers by 1.
SHIROPOCCHI: A special haku that becomes whatever winning tile you want if you draw it while in riichi! Now that's a strong finish!
NO DEADWALL. You play up to the dora indicator, which allows for 2-3 more draws per player! This makes only the dora and uradora indicators the only ungettable tiles.
NO FU. The score table for this sort of mahjong doesn't count fu, making for a much simpler scorechart to remember.
There are plenty of other differences, like playing with shuugi and additional yaku, letting you use 4 copies of a tile for 7 pairs…
I wish that I could play this style of sanma!
It's not in any video game that I know of, and I don't have a play group, and even if I did, they wouldn't play this sanma, so I have to just have to live vicariously through people playing it on youtube. Here are some of my favorite sanma Youtubers!
Some of My Favorite Sanma Youtubers
https://x.com/majantokka
Wakebe-san seems to travel around to different jansou around Osaka (and other places too), to highlight the rules, and a little bit of what makes each place special. If you like seeing a bunch of different jansou, a jovial attitude, and love listening to Nintendo music from the SNES/N64 era, this Mahjong channel is great! There's a lot of sanma jansou on this channel. Usually you can tell because all the fun colored tiles are in the thumbnail.
Here's a Yakuman video to get started.
https://twitter.com/tikinnyaro
肥えD has a fun youtube that contains a lot of footage from the Jansou Quasar, where they are conjuring up all sorts of new ways to play mahjong. Super Bingo? Crazy Cherry? Seven's Rush? Grand Slam? Check their livestreams for a look at some of those wild rules. They also post a lot of fun videos. How about you get your proper stretches in with some Mahjong Calisthenics!
These two youtubes make it through my rotation, but recently most of my mahjong viewing has gravitated toward a certain youtube, the Zan League.
Zan League, The Mahjong League For People That Just Want To Enjoy Themselves
https://twitter.com/thanm_sanma
I'll be honest, the Zan League is the only mahjong I really watch anymore. It's on Youtube, in its entirety, without needing a VPN or Abema Premium or anything weird like that. Sanma is faster, so videos last only 20-50 minutes on average. There's a relaxed requirement for etiquette, so everyone just seems more chill. No pro test is required, so sometimes the matchups are wild, but it also means players that don't conform to the standards of a pro organization can still enjoy their time playing fierce mahjong and appreciating the limelight!
I didn't set out to watch sanma specifically. I have tried to become a fan of plenty of mahjong out here, but there were just so many roadblocks that made it more difficult to do so for a guy in the west.
I wanted to follow Saikouisen, but I just couldn't find the time to watch 5-6+ hour videos. I respect the power of the Strongest League, I am too weak.
I wanted to follow Saikyosen, but Abema is really weird with the streaming links, delaying the appearance of the program on demand after the broadcast. By the time I could easily watch the footage, the winner had been spoiled for a week or longer, really diminishing the experience. Kind of an upsetting outcome after having written a whole blog about it. I'll have to catch back up in the second stage.
M League is fine, but it's over. I guess I am truly a Raiden fan, because I didn't really spectate much of the semis or finals without them in it.
M Tournament is sort of not as appealing to me without having done the American thing and filled out a bracket first.
It was the path of least resistance that led me to Zan League. No hoops, no hurdles, just subscribe to the channel (or don't) and enjoy all the different leagues they host. Once I learned more about the game they were playing (full Zan league rules here), it was relaxing to watch people enjoying mahjong in a semi competitive setting. For an FGC comparison, it's like watching a streamed local. Some players are stronger than others, and you get all types of players from all types of backgrounds, as opposed to the "esports" types. The play you see may not be the highest level all the time, but when it's good, it's great! If you want a good place to start with Zan, I recommend the Corporate League.
For me, it's kind of interesting to see what sort of businesses fielded teams. You have Tenhou (like the app, can we see Tenhou adopt Zan rules?), ramen shops, host club franchises, Cambodian real estate, plastic surgeons, a group that helps the elderly enjoy mahjong in assisted living, even a group consisting of ero girls just kinda vibin (I honestly thought SACCU BASS made custom musical instruments before I did my research!). The A1 league is great to watch and try and improve my own sanma game. Sometimes I will watch it with my wife because sometimes goofy stuff happens, which is more important than the mahjong being played to her. She's really good at predicting who will win just on the vibe of the players. I wish she'd use her powers to play mahjong, or at the very least give us the winning lotto numbers.
Go Forth, and Play Some Freakin Sanma
I think what I want to communicate more than anything else in this article is that if you find yourself attracted to sanma more than regular mahjong, that you are 100% valid. People find their happiness in playing sanma as a main game, or as a nice change of pace. There are people who do not treat sanma as the side dish, but instead as the main course. That's valid. Like there are many different fighting games, there are many different styles of mahjong. What makes the act of play special is not what you're doing, but who you're enjoying your time with. The community of players that surround a game, whether it's mahjong, fighting games, sports, or anything we do on this earth in the time we have, just find your community. So even if 4P riichi seems like it's the game that will take over the world finally, save some space in your heart for Marvel. Save some space in your heart for the wild and crazy Sanma!
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