The Mystery of True Love: Mahjong Bakuhatsu Junjouden

Sometimes, an innocent-seeming game can have a deeper rabbit hole than you think. Mahjong Bakuhatsu Junjouden seems to be a normal Nichibutsu strip mahjong game, on somewhat earlier hardware than Koi no Magic Potion. But there’s some weird stuff going on beneath the surface, with a lot more variations than I’d expect even from Nichibutsu. So let’s take a quick look.

WARNING: This is a strip mahjong game! There is no explicit nudity in this post, but there might be a picture or two of a pretty girl in lingerie.

Explosive Hardware!

So, I try not to do two mahjong posts in a row, and the last post was Idol Mahjong Final Romance. But in my defense, that post was back in August! Yeah, it’s been a rough autumn, with some medical issues and then a complicated move to the other side of the city. So I’m breaking out a PCB I’ve had for awhile to try to get a decent post in and get back in the swing of things.

My copy of Mahjong Bakuhatsu Junjouden is running on Nichibutsu’s hardware a generation before Koi no Magic Potion. Both use two Z80 CPUs. Compare to that game, and you’ll see a lot more discrete logic, and a lot fewer surface-mount parts. There are a lot more graphics EPROMs, but they’re 1Mbit 27C1001 vs the later game, which uses 4Mbit 27C040s. The audio hardware is the same YM3812 (and the music is quite good), but if you look at those two CPUs, you’ll notice another interesting difference.

Both CPUs on Mahjong Koi no Magic Potion were Toshiba TMPZ84C011; surface-mount Z80s with some extra features added in. On Mahjong Bakuhatsu Junjouden, they’re both standard through-hole Zilog Z80s. (A Z084 part number denotes being a CMOS part, but that doesn’t matter)

There is one Nichibutsu-branded IC, noted as 1413M3. This is, according to the reverse-engineers at MAME, a Fujitsu ULA, which seems to handle a bunch of useful functions like ROM banking. Even VCR control, which this game does not take advantage of. (Nichibutsu’s spicier games often used external video; their very last line used DVDs!)

Note that this IC was not present on Koi no Magic Potion, which instead had two Nichibutsu-branded NB19010 ICs. Graphically, Mahjong Bakuhatsu Junjouden is blitter-based, like the most of their mahjong games, but unlike Koi no Magic Potion, has just one graphics layer all of its blitting is done to, not two. This prevents the use of more complicated graphical effects, but it’s not really that big of a deal.

What game is this, anyway?

We start off with the title. Mahjong Bakuhatsu Junjouden, or, in English, “Mahjong Explosive Pure-Love Story”. But as is often the case with Nichibutsu titles, that doesn’t tell the whole story. Because to understand why this game is named that, we need to consider the use of alphabets. Typically, bakuhatsu, explosion, is written 爆発, using the kanji alphabet. But in this case, Nichibutsu used katakana, バクハツ. Now that on its own isn’t weird, using katakana for words to draw attention to them, especially action words like explosion, isn’t that odd. (Mahjong Koi no Magic Potion wrote the word “mahjong” in katakana! Though this game uses the kanji 麻雀.)

But then when we realize that there’s a 1991 film named Bakumatsu Jyunjyoden, we start to realize why Nichibutsu might’ve thought to draw attention to that word. Don’t mind the difference in romanizations, the Latin alphabet was made up to confuse the Yamato spirit.

Bakumatsu, as you might recall from the title-text in the second Neo Geo CD post, refers to the period where the Tokugawa shogunate (known as the bakufu in Japanese) came to an end (referred to as matsu in Japanese, at least in this context). It’s quite a famous period in Japanese history, when the country was open to the world but hadn’t started modernization. I haven’t seen the movie, but Bakumatsu Jyunjyoden appears to be a cross-dressing love story set in the period, which sounds like good fun and possible tragedy, idk.

But I strongly suspect that, just as Mahjong Koi no Magic Potion was likely titled to cash in on the song Koi no Magic Potion, Mahjong Bakuhatsu Junjouden was chosen to be a bit of a reference to a recent movie. The game, of course, has nothing to do with the movie. It’s not even set in the bakumatsu period; the game opens on a modern train platform. But it would explain the player character on the title screen above’s white robes.

The plot of the game is simple; our protagonist sees a girl at the train station every day, and wants to meet her. Obviously on the day he actually gets up the courage to do so, she’s not there, and he has to go on an Adventure. Where everyone demands he play mahjong.

While Mahjong Koi no Magic Potion waited until you went back to the future to give you a choice of girl, Mahjong Bakuhatsu Junjouden does so right away on the train platform. Neither of them are the grinning girl he’s looking for, though. Whenever you have to choose a girl, if it’s the right one you’ll generally just get the girl herself filling the screen without any text and the same music track plays, and then we go to the match.

If it’s the wrong one, you still have to play a round with her, like the “JAMA GIRL” in Koi no Magic Potion. This game has a lot more choices, and a lot more jama girls. Following the train platform, there’s a long segment in a forest with branching paths.

You’ll see another difference right when you start the match. You’re given a choice of items; like Koi no Magic Potion you have to spend heart points to use them, but unlike that game, you have them all up-front. They aren’t dripped out to you over the course of the game. Of course, you still need to earn the points to actually use them.

Other than that, the mahjong gameplay is pretty much identical. Slightly simpler animations because there’s only one layer of blitted graphics, but that’s about it. Heart points work the same way as in Koi no Magic Potion, you win them based off of your han points; otherwise you still need to go through three rounds with every non-jama girl.

Now, let’s get into the nudity scenes. These happen after every win with a non-jama girl, and here’s where we get into an issue. Now, I’m a bit face-blind, but I wonder, the girl above, do you recognize her? Do you know her name? Because that’s what the first question is.

The kanji is 横山知江, Chie Yokoyama, who has a page on the Japanese wikipedia, and does seem to be the right age, and apparently did gravure modeling. And she does look like Chie Yokoyama to me from an image search; she even says in her second round that her favorite band is WINK, which the real-life Chie Yokoyama parodied.

So if she’s a real contemporary model, are the other girls in this game also? I don’t know enough; and that’s the thing, isn’t it? It really does drive home just how much these titles were artifacts of a certain time period. If these are known gravure idols, having questions about them isn’t as strange as I thought. It’s just a little quiz game tacked onto your mahjong.

Variations

Version history

In MAME, the game Mahjong Bakuhatsu Junjouden does not appear to use the hardware I described above. Instead, it’s emulated as using a single-plane version of the later Koi no Magic Potion-generation hardware, with the NM19010 IC. (In MAME terms, it uses the driver nbmj9195 instead of the driver nbmj8991) However, I don’t actually see any difference in the gameplay.

That being said, the program ROMs are different (which makes sense, since they’re running on different hardware with different CPUs). In case anyone else has one of these, here’s the SHA1 sum.

	SHA1 sum
Dumped Program ROM	6fe5896888fc181becce4821e45e6749a1c85868
MAME set (1.4c)	6cb950e72e4ff62cdee7343f612569f4fccfde46

Vaguely interesting! But as I said, I don’t notice any gameplay differences, though I’m sure there’s some.

I didn’t bother to dump the music ROMs, but I wouldn’t be surprised if there are differences there, given the lack of a Z84C011. I think mine is the earlier revision given that it runs on earlier hardware, though for all I know, Nichibutsu made it later to get rid of old previous-gen hardware they had lying around.

Feeling good

Now, the nbmj8991 does have a game that appears to share a lot with Mahjong Bakuhatsu Junjouden, even some of the graphics roms. Medal Mahjong Gottsu ee-kanji. I mostly don’t talk about them on this blog, but medal-type mahjong games have you betting medals (non-monetary tokens, non-monetary) on a game of mahjong. It was pretty common at this time for Nichibutsu to make medal variants of their games.

My understanding is ごっつええ感じ, gottsu ee-kanji, is Kansai dialect Japanese for “feeling really good”. And it was the name of a variety show, Downtown Gottsu ee-Kanji, which started in 1991 and was hosted by the comedy duo Downtown. Nichibutsu loves their references. (And, for that matter, their Kansai dialect) But you might notice something: our protagonist got new bangs.

It’s not just him. The girl he’s been looking for is also redesigned, more significantly this time. In this game you have to bet medals and win them, but you do still get the sexy pictures too. No quiz.

She looks the same here.

Feeling real good

There’s another game, this time on the nbmj9195 driver again, called Mahjong Gottsu ee-Kanji. And what it appears to be is a version of Mahjong Bakuhatsu Junjouden, but with the updated art from Medal Mahjong Gottsu ee-Kanji. Or possibly the medal game came second. And I will admit, I am not sure why this exists. Usually Nichibutsu stayed one-and-done, but this game remained on their shelf awhile.

Other than the tweaks, this seems basically like the same game.

Chie Yokoyama appears again, but doesn’t ask her name as a question. She asks about her debut song. (Well, in the screenshot above she’s just asking about her quiz at all)

Timing

Now, why am I assuming that Gottsu ee-Kanji is the later release? Well, for one thing, ArcadeItalia gives an October 1991 date for Mahjong Bakuhatsu Junjouden, which is before Downtown Gottsu ee-Kanji went on the air in December of 1991.

But there’s one more thing.

Look at this art from Mahjong Gottsu ee-Kanji. Notice something in her hair?

That line of pixels in the dithering is not present in the Mahjong Bakuhatsu Junjouden version. So it seems to me likely that the Gottsu ee-Kanji art is edited from there, not the other way around. Blocks were moved around in editing, thus creating horizontal artifacts.

I’ll stick with the potion

And that’s all I had to say about Mahjong Bakuhatsu Junjouden. More than I expected, honestly. Do I recommend you go out and get it? Well, if you’re going to get one Nichibutsu mahjong game recommended on this blog, I still think Mahjong Koi no Magic Potion is the place to start. But this one’s not bad either. It also has some playthroughs on YouTube, for those who don’t want to (gasp) play Mahjong. If this one has actual actresses, don’t expect a re-release anytime soon.

And welcome back to Nicole Express! Sorry about the hiatus.