The last mahjong game I played was the excellent Mahjongg Investigations: Under Suspicion, a game that managed to take the ancient gameplay of mahjong and tweaked it and made it new and relevant by incorporating little twists in the gameplay. Much like that game, Mythic Mahjong takes the traditional formula and makes it once again feel new with a fantasy adventure that will have you matching tiles in the name of saving your queen and vanquishing a dragon.

The story of Mythic Mahjong tells the tale of a kingdom that has been ravaged by a recently awoken dragon who has got its mind set on grabbing all the jewels of the kingdom. One such group of jewels belongs to the fairy queen, who will die if her gems are not gathered and brought back to her. You take it upon yourself to traverse the countryside, gathering the jewels the evil dragon dropped on its way to its cave, and ultimately battling the foul beast come journey's end. The story of Mythic Mahjong is pretty miniscule, really only be present at the beginning in order to provide the gameplay a backdrop. You'll occasionally receive a static cutscene with scrolling dialogue to progress the story a bit, but don't go in believing you'll walk away with a massively epic story.

Mythic Mahjong's gameplay is standard mahjong for the most part. Whenever you start a new level you'll be given a board with tons of differently colored and designed tiles placed and stacked in various designs. In order to complete the level you must remove enough of the tiles by clicking on likeminded pairs that either have their complete left or right side fully open and not touching any adjacent tiles. As you remove tiles you'll gradually discover two giant gems, which represent those that you are trying to find for the queen. Once the gems have been exposed enough to click on them like the other mahjong tiles, you'll then instantly remove all the remaining tiles, clear the level, and then move on to the next board.

Scattered among the tiles of the board you'll also find tiles with special abilities attached, such as letting you instantly remove a tile and a partner of it by simply clicking on one, quickly highlighting one match at a time in a row, or even showing all the possible matches on a board at one time. The spell tiles, I found out, usually happened more from accident rather than strategic thinking, which was fine by me since they still managed to get the job done more often than not.

Besides the usual boards, you'll also run across boss battles, which play just like usual for the most part. On the boss battle boards you'll find special tiles that will let you throw fireballs, attack with swords, or hurl bolts of lightning. Instead of needing to match two gems to win the level and move on, during the boss battles you'll need to eliminate the boss' health meter in order to win. If you're familiar with Puzzle Quest, it's nothing like that at all, as these bosses don't fight back and are really there just to switch the gameplay up a tiny bit.

Though you have the ability to use spells to help you out and have the computer shuffle the board whenever you want, Mythic Mahjong still remains a very challenging game that will try your patience and have you sometimes trying levels multiple times in a row before you're able to advance to the next level. The computer isn't the biggest helper either when it comes to shuffling the tiles, as they'll often only shuffle the board enough to give you one or maybe two matches tops before needing to make you shuffle the board yet again. The difficulty was so challenging at one time that I spent a good fifteen minutes just trying to attempt one level.

The game is pretty simple when it comes to graphics, because there really isn't anyway to make semi-flat tiles really standout and pop off the screen. The static cutscene images, meanwhile, are a little poorer in quality than everything else. In terms of audio the music and sound effects are fairly sedated, barely straining to be heard above a whisper and not really adding too much to the game in the process.

If you're a fan of mahjong games then you'll find a nice game to keep you entertained here, though it's far from a technical wonder and the difficulty can be terribly frustrating at times. Non-fans of the genre, however, won't find anything to make them think differently of mahjong games.

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