How to beat Mahjong for the Against All Odds sub-story

The Yakuza series is known for its multiplicity, each game spanning a wide range of tones and playstyles. Each game’s campaign will have players ping-pong from a tense crime drama to light activities like singing karaoke and coaching a baseball team.

In addition to varying the pace and expanding the cast, Yakuza’s minigames and substories allow players to somewhat customize their experience. They can focus on the parts of the game they like and disregard the parts they don’t. But this can pose a problem for completists.

Yakuza Kiwami 2 features a sub-story called “Against All Odds”, where a desperate gambler begs Kiryu to take his place in a high-stakes mahjong game that is going bad. It’s already a tough challenge, and it doesn’t help that most of the international audience doesn’t know how to play. Fortunately, the developers came up with a simple solution.

Mahjong is an amazing board game, but it’s also complex and takes some time to learn. Yakuza Kiwami 2 gives players enough tools to learn on their own, but the “Against All Odds” sub-story is a poor place to learn it, considering the player starts with minimal points and cannot lose a single hand.

The game instead gives the player a way to cheat during the match. But they must learn the absolute minimum, just to understand what’s going on.

Mahjong is a game that is like a combination of Rummy and Poker. Players take turns drawing and discarding tiles to make sets of three: triplets, like 1-1-1, or straights, like 4-5-6. Most winning hands will be 4 sets of three and a matching pair of spare tiles, although there are some exceptions.

Whoever completes the hand first wins the round. They are scored according to your hand value. For example, a hand of all triplets is awarded more points than a hand of all races.

Yakuza Kiwami 2 features a hidden cheat item called the Peerless Tile. When using it in a mahjong game, the player will be dealt one of the strongest hands, a yakuman, on the first turn, instantly ending the game.

Conveniently, the game places one next to the sub-story location. Just below Lulluby Mahjong in Kamurocho is a small office building, with a wall of boxes near the back wall. Behind him they will find the peerless tile on the floor. If the player has already found and used this one, there is another one above the game room in Sotenbori later in the game.

Once the player has the tile, he can sit down at the table and the game will ask him if he wants to use it. If they say yes, this automatically gives them a game winning hand. From there, they will have the option of “Riichi” or “Tsumo”. The player must choose the latter, as he is declaring a victory.

Yakuza Kiwami 2 is available now for PC, PS4 and Xbox One.