Ookami Mio Escapes Hard Mode of Anomaly Mahjong After Clearing Normal in 43 Minutes

HOLOLIVE — Ookami Mio cleared both the Normal and Hard difficulties of Anomaly Mahjong (異変麻雀, Ihen Mahjong), a game in which something at the table is quietly wrong and the player has to catch it, in a stream of about 103 minutes that began late on Nov. 6, Japan time. She finished the Hard setting near the 100-minute mark, and said she had cleared it with some luck.

The game is played like a spot-the-difference puzzle. Each round either hides an anomaly or has none, and the player clicks on the oddity when she sees it. Missing one sends the game back to the first hand of the East round, and some rounds also set a goal such as winning a hand or ending in a draw. Mio started on Normal and said she had expected an easy win and it was nothing of the kind. Among the tricks she described were discards that changed after being thrown, a tile quietly taken out of the river, a 100-point stick passed off as a 1,000-point one, a fifth copy of the 8-pin tile and a four-of-a-kind Seven Pairs hand. She also said she missed things while talking, since she had to keep up commentary as a streamer.

“Wow, I managed to beat Hard.” — Ookami Mio, after the final win

She cleared Normal at around the 51-minute mark, with an in-game clear time of 43 minutes. On Hard she found the rules even odder: the bamboo suit (sozu) came in sets of 11 tiles, number tiles existed in quantities matching their value, the discard rivers vanished so that she could not tell which tiles were safe, and one round was labeled “Space Mahjong,” a name she laughed off as casually chosen. Late in the run she said the game seemed to be steering her through cursor movements, and she won by following it.

Chat kept up a running commentary on each anomaly, with messages piling up whenever a tile or stick looked wrong. Mio thanked viewers at the close and said she would leave the game’s top difficulty, Professional, for others to try, since she could not calculate scores and did not feel ready to call herself a pro. She added that she had another recording the next day.