Fairy Nights
What is it?
hentaimahjongg with the mahjongg edited out in the translation, 2000, Windows and Macintosh.
By no reasonable standard can Fairy Nights be called a game. It is
like a PowerPoint presentation that you click through, highly
entertaining, but without a single choice, without the slightest
random element. The developers were obviously well aware of this,
just look at the controls: these are the controls of a media player,
not of a game. With fast forward you can jump directly to the next
H
scene. Besides, the ever-popular photoshop is active from
the very beginning, you can look at all of the pics (really all of
them, not only the H
scenes) right from the start.
Fairy Nights is a sequel to Legend of Fairies, which I haven't
played (or, should I say, watched, for it is a game
of similar
kind) and so won't say much about. The main hero is Jango Abe, who is
surrounded by five Shikigami (the fairies
of the title). Though
they are more than a hundred years old, they have the mindset of
pubescent girls and are nore of a hindrance than a help as he tries
to eke out a meagre existence as a private investigator in Tokyo.
Besides being a luckless PI, Jango Abe is a professional Tobanjan
player, or fighter, as he puts it. Tobanjan is a sort of Battle
MahJongg which you, as the player, do not actually get to play (as I
said, there are no game elements whatever in Fairy Nights), but which
is used to resolve any conflicts. These conflicts always occur with
attractive females, of which you afterwards see a series of very well
done H
pictures. The idea is obviously that Jango gets to have
sex with them. Since this sometimes occurs in crowded places, it is
a bit absurd, but as I said about Peter Box,
enjoy and don't ask stupid questions.
For enjoyable Fairy Nights certainly is. It just isn't a game.
This thing with Tobanjan (which, by the way, is actually a very hot chili bean sauce and has nothing whatever to do with Mahjongg) and stripping beauties really puzzled me when I first played, or watched, Fairy Nights, but things became a lot clearer when some months later I added Don Den Lover Vol. 1 and stumbled upon the phenomenon of Mahjongg arcade machines in the process, for that is what Dynax otherwise mostly produced.
There are lots and lots and lots of Mahjongg arcade machines. Head on over to MamEnd, you'll find more than 60 under M alone. And more are hiding somewhere else in the alphabet because they have names like Super Real Mahjongg or Don Den Mahjongg or something even more off like Apparel Night or Bijokko Yume Monogatari.
None of these are, of course, are the solitaire game we have come to associate with the term Mahjongg outside Japan. They are all the real thing. And there is one other thing all those I checked had in common: They always pitted the player against female opponents which would be displayed in various states of undress, sometimes even sexual activity, upon victory.
My first conclusion was that the Mahjongg games in Fairy Nights were a sort of in-joke anybody who had ever played a Mahjongg arcade machine in Japan would instantly get. The association between Mahjongg and erotic pictures was already there, and Fairy Nights played on it.
But then, when I found the screenshots and translation of
Mahjong Chinmoku no Hentai, I came to another conclusion. In
this game, Mahjongg is obviously used as a metaphor for real combat.
A woman has been kidnapped by terrorists. John Airam, a helicopter
pilot and leader of the special forces Night Eyes
sets out to
rescue her, like in any old action game. Of course the terrorists
turn out to be shapely lasses, all of them, and he beats them in
a series of Mahjongg tournaments which cause them to shed most of
their clothing and their various armored vehicles to explode.
In a way, this is a bit like Karateka and many similar fighter games, where a series of duels is arranged to a sort of adventure stories. On the other hand, it did remind me a lot of Fairy Nights. And suddenly it dawned on me:
Most likely the Japanese original of Fairy Nights is a regular Mahjongg game, and JAST just edited this part out.
The more I thought about it, the more sense it made. What we are
playing
in the translation is just the surrounding narrative.
The actual game is gone, probably because JAST assumed that their
audience would not be familiar with, or even interested in, the
rules, and maybe they assumed correctly. In the light of this theory,
there is nothing strange about the fast forward button. In most
games you can shortcut intros, cut scenes, and the like.
If I still had any doubts that Fairy Nights was originally a Mahjongg game, they have been removed now. It is the third in a series called Waku Waku Mahjongg Panic! The first game in the series came out in 1995 for the PC-98. The second was translated as Legend of Fairies. It still had a PC-98 version as well.
Overall, an interesting story that has a lot of cultural, and mystic symbolisms in it. If you're looking for something different, that's more like a manga or graphic novel, visit JastUSA, and pick up these two games.
