Akagi: Yami ni Oritatta Tensai

AKAGI, THE GENIUS WHO DESCENDED INTO DARKNESS is a lot of fun. I used this manga while I was learning to play Riichi Mahjong. It is not at all helpful for any kind of actual play but it is extremely nice for familiarizing yourself with specific tiles and different Yaku. In turn, it was kind of cool to slowly be able to understand what the hell anyone was talking about at any given time. Learning what Yaku you can get becomes very important once you get passed the first steps of learning to play if you don't want to just blindly play into whatever works loosely.

I'm not saying you need to learn Mahjong to read this, but god it makes it a much better time. Beyond that Akagi is just really wild. Lot's of real intense gambling over alternate rules Mahjong games. Some cheating but also just a lot of insane luck and mind games. Biggest problem with it is once you get to the part with Washizu it drags on for wayyyyyy too long. This is a good time you can probably feel free to put down whenever or skim through large chunks of.

Akagi is a manga about a youngster that willingly discards his life and safety for a gamble. In general it is a great manga, but some arcs simply seem too drawn out and slow. The art isn't very good meaning that, even though that all the characters look fairly different, you can get confused sometimes (the same thing sometimes happens with the plot). Still - it's a great manga, by my standards much better than Kaiji, therefore I recommend it to all of you who like mystery and gamble/mahjong manga with a lot of seinen elements.