Retro Replay Review

Gameplay

The first hour asks you to accept a wonderfully odd bargain: follow a sci-fi adventure about defending Earth, then settle its biggest confrontations over mahjong. If that sounds like a joke at the genre’s expense, it is not. The game’s focus is firmly on playing standard Japanese mahjong, with plot-directed opponents and adventure scenes acting as the connective tissue between matches.

That makes this a more demanding proposition than its anime and adventure framing may suggest. You are not simply selecting dialogue until another scene plays out; you need to understand how to build hands and win under mahjong’s rules. If you already know the game, the structure gives each opponent a useful sense of occasion. If you do not, the central obstacle arrives fast, because there is no alternate action system to fall back on when the tiles are on the table.

The power system is the smart wrinkle. Points handed out after a round can be turned into bonus powers for later matches, so results carry forward instead of disappearing the moment a hand ends. It adds a welcome layer of planning without replacing the core game. The downside is equally clear: anyone hoping for a broad tactical sci-fi game may find that nearly all meaningful conflict comes back to mahjong.

Graphics

The game’s anime and sci-fi framing gives Divan’s Earth-defense mission a more heightened flavor than the series’ earlier setting. Its most distinctive image is also its premise: a young hero with a supernatural transformation facing an alien demonic threat, only for the confrontation to resolve at the mahjong table.

Story

Divan is a young man entrusted by military authorities with protecting Earth from an alien demonic attack. He also has the ability to transform into a powerful supernatural being, which is exactly the sort of oversized hook that suits this kind of early-’90s sci-fi anime premise.

What makes the setup stick is its refusal to separate the cosmic from the mundane. The evil minions are defeated through mahjong, not conventional combat. That is a deliberately bizarre dramatic engine, but it gives the matches a story reason to exist rather than treating them as a detachable minigame.

Do not come in expecting a direct continuation of Jantei Monogatari. This follow-up shifts to an entirely new setting and set of themes, so it works more like a fresh spin on the same broad idea than a conventional sequel. The Japanese-style verb-command sequences mainly serve to trigger the next part of Divan’s mission and the next required match.

Overall Experience

Jantei Monogatari 2 is niche, but it is niche in a way that can be genuinely rewarding. The combination of adventure-game progression, escalating plot-mandated mahjong bouts, and carryover powers gives it a rhythm that few games even attempt. You can feel the pull once the premise clicks: every bit of story movement points toward another table, another opponent, and another chance to improve your position.

Its frustration is easy to predict. Standard mahjong is the foundation, not decoration, and the game does not turn that foundation into something else for newcomers. A player who dislikes tile games will spend most of the experience waiting for the parts they want to return; they never really do. The adventure material is seasoning, not an escape hatch.

For mahjong fans with a taste for eccentric anime sci-fi, though, that commitment is the payoff. Divan’s mission is silly in the best possible way, and the power progression gives the repeated matches a little more texture than a straight sequence of hands. It is worth a chance if the idea of saving Earth through serious mahjong sounds irresistible rather than absurd.

Retro Replay Score

6.4/10