Riichi City Japanese Mahjong Online: Bond and Awakening Guide for Characters

As is the case with every character gacha game, Riichi City comes with a character bonding system as a means for players to interact with the characters. It might seem a bit daunting at first but this guide will show you that it is very simple and not that complicated.

“Bond” in Riichi City refers to what the game calls “mahjong sense”, which is the term I will use from here on. The more mahjong games you play with a character, and the more gifts you give them, the higher the mahjong sense. There are six mahjong sense levels: Level 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5. Every character starts at mahjong sense level 0. At mahjong sense level 5, your character is maxed out on mahjong sense and now qualifies for “awakening” which will be explained later.

To check the mahjong sense levels of your characters, all you have to do is do the following:

From the main menu, click on the character portrait in the top left of the screen to go to your profile.

Click on the “Char.” button on the bottom left of your screen.

And then click on the portrait of the character you want to check. The mahjong sense level will be in the top right corner.

In this example, my mahjong sense level with Isshiki Seibi is level 4.

The maximum level of mahjong sense a character can have is level 5.
Once you reach level 5, you cannot raise mahjong sense anymore. Both via playing games, or via gifts.

Once a character reaches mahjong sense level 5, they will get access to a feature called “Awakening”. When you awaken a character, you get to unlock a special voice line, special emotes to use in-game, and also a special outfit for the character.

If you want to see what awakening gets you with a character, you can preview all of these things in-game. For example, if you scroll down on the bio of a character, you will see all the emotes. As you can see, I did not awaken Seibi yet, so her awakening emotes are locked to me.

To find the outfit, you can click on the “Change Outfit button, and scroll sideways to see all possible outfits. As you can see, I did not awaken Seibi yet so her bond outfit is locked.

For the voice lines, hit the “Voice” tab and scroll down a little bit and you can find all the voice lines that get unlocked by increasing mahjong sense.

On top of mahjong sense levels, there is also a mahjong sense meter. Once you have enough mahjong sense in the meter, you can progress to the next mahjong sense level (kind of like exp and levels in a RPG). You can raise a character’s mahjong sense by two ways:

1. Play games of mahjong in ranked or in official tournaments
2. Give gifts to your characters

Different game modes give different amounts of mahjong sense. It can be confusing to remember. But thankfully the devs included a helpful info box you can check in-game. If you click on the big diamond with the “i” where your bond level is, it will give you a more detailed list of what game modes give you what mahjong sense at the bottom. I’ve included a screenshot here:

For those who don’t know, there are two types of games, length wise.
“East Only” games (or also known as “tonpuus”) are shorter games where everybody gets at least one round as dealer each.
“Hanchan” games (or also known as “East-South games”) are longer games where everybody gets at least two rounds as dealer each. Double the length of East Only games. I’m sure you’re already thinking “well that means I should only play East Only games for efficiency” and if mahjong sense gains over time is the only metric you use to play Riichi City, that would be correct. But I would suggest against that. If you play a game of mahjong, it should be because you want to play it, not because you want to grind mahjong sense. Otherwise, you will just burn out from overgrinding. If you like playing short games in general, that’s fine. Just as long as you’re not doing it for the sake of grinding mahjong sense.

Remember that winning or losing does not affect mahjong sense gains. So you don’t have to stress out over winning or losing. You only have to worry about playing your best and having fun.

Other than playing games, the only other way to increase mahjong sense is to give them Gifts. There are many kinds of gifts, and they give different amounts of mahjong sense. Characters also have gifts they prefer and gifts they dislike and that affects how much mahjong sense they will get from gifts. For a complete table of values of which gifts give how much mahjong sense, look in Appendix A.

There are many ways to get gifts in Riichi City. You can get them via:

1. Daily login rewards
2. Doing daily missions, weekly missions, and lifetime missions
3. Buying them from the shop
4. Rewards for ranking up on ranked ladder
5. Rolling on the gacha

 

The primary way people will get gifts is from daily logins. Every time you log in, you will be greeted with the 7 day login screen.
While you don’t have to login in 7 consecutive days, the 7-day check in does reset every week on Sunday 5am UTC+9. If you don’t live in the UTC+9 timezone (aka. Japan), I recommend figuring it out by asking Google or however else you deal with different timezones. This reset time is important because the game basically revolves around it so be sure to remember it (with one exception not related to bonding).

Back to the daily rewards, after the first two days, you can get one gift a day and on Days 2 and 4, you can get an Awakening book. On Day 6, you can also get a special reward, usually in the form of an extra free ticket or a special decoration so be sure to not miss logging in every day!

If you ever want to check on your login reward status without closing and re-opening the game, you can always access it via the big billboard on the main menu on the left.

From the main menu, if you look at the bottom of the screen, you will see a “Mission” option.

Clicking on the Mission option will bring up the “Mission of Riichi City Station” window.

You will see a bunch of food, a number line going to 210, and a bunch of missions.
The missions themselves do not directly give gifts. They give you a small amount of coins (currency for playing games, and buying stuff from the shop. More on this later), and something called “Mileage” which is denoted by the lightning bolt symbol. When you finish a daily mission, you can collect the coins and usually 50 Mileage. Collecting Mileage will fill up the bar that you see at the top. At 50, 100, 150, and 210 Mileage, you can redeem a random reward. At 50 Mileage, you only get coins, but the higher you go, you start getting gifts too. You can click on the food items to see what rewards you can get for that tier.

Your Mileage per day will cap out at 300 MIleage per day, but this accumulates for the whole week. The accumulated Mileage doesn’t roll over for the next day’s rewards BUT they are used for the weekly rewards you see next to the number line. At 1,400 Mileage, you will get 3 gifts and a lot of coins, and at 1,700 Mileage, you will get a free gacha ticket.

Generally every day has a “Played 3 Ranked Matches” daily mission so depending on the game mode you play, it should take you about 30 mins to over an hour to complete all the daily missions. If you are going to play mahjong regularly, this is basically free gifts for playing games you would have played anyway.

There are also lifetime missions that can be completed once per account. They are under the “Regular” tab in the mission screen. Most of the rewards are generally coins, but some of them give gifts and other things. I don’t know the full list of rewards so I cannot list them in this guide so be sure to check them regularly when you finish one.

The second way to get gifts is from the Station shop. To get to the Station shop, click on the Station shop from the main menu.

Then go to the “Misc.” tab.

Here you will see a selection of six (6) gifts and two (2) books you can buy with coins. The more mahjong sense a gift gives, the more it will cost. This is a limited selection that changes daily, so don’t worry if you don’t see the gift or book you want. You can just come back in 24 hours when the shop restocks. For a full table of prices, you can check Appendix A.

On the screen, you will also notice that there is a “Refreshes in:” timer, and a “Refresh” button and counter. The timer is obviously the timer for when the shop resets. The time it resets is the same time that the daily missions reset. The refresh counter is the number of times you can refresh the stock today. For f2p players, this number will always be zero. More about this will be covered later but this is essentially a paid-only feature so if you are f2p, you don’t have to worry about it. But it does mean a little bit of waiting if you want specific items from this store.

Another way you can get gifts is by playing ranked games and going up the ladder. Ranking up on lower levels will only get you coins, but starting on 1st Dan (or “shodan”), you will start to get gifts and books too. So playing lots of mahjong and getting better is a surefire way of getting gifts!

One thing to note is that the gifts obtained this way are usually “locked”. Locked gifts cannot be Recycled which means that they can only be used as gifts for characters to increase mahjong sense. If you’re thinking “Of course, that’s all I care about” then you don’t have to worry about gifts being locked. But Recycling is a way to for players to get extra free tickets for the gacha so it is better for you to use your locked gifts first before your unlocked ones so that you can use the unlocked gifts for Recycling. Appendix C will talk about Recycling more.

Often times, Riichi City will have events going on. These events will often have their own daily missions to do which reward event points. You can use these event points to buy special event items from the event shop and also gifts. Each event is different so make sure to check the info boxes for details on how to get event rewards.

An example of an event shop:

The final way to get gifts would be rolling on the character Gacha. The gacha is where you spend money (or the occasional free ticket) for a chance at obtaining a character. At the time of writing, there is a 5% chance to get a character, 15% to get an in-game cosmetic, and an 80% chance to get a random gift. You can always check these numbers by clicking on the “Overview” button on the bottom left of the gacha screen. gifts are at the bottom.

If you go back to the character bio page, there is a [Bond] button on the top right with an electric plug icon. If you click on that button, you will open the gifting menu.

You will see a list of gifts that you have, and also a “Daily Gift Chances Left” counter. The counter is there because there is a limit to how many gifts you can give to a character. The default limit is 2, and this can be raised by spending real money on the game. This limit resets every day.

You can give characters any gifts. And most of them will give the amount of mahjong sense that their description says they will give.
If you click on the info box diamond by the bond level, it will bring up info on what kind of gifts the character likes and also the kinds of gifts the character dislikes. Gifts that a character likes get a +50 mahjong sense bonus, and also a 1% chance to double their base mahjong sense value. Gifts that a character dislikes will have a -50% penalty to mahjong sense value.

For example, Seibi likes Masks. Masks have a base value of +10 mahjong sense. So if you give Seibi a Mask, it will be 10 + 50 = 60 mahjong sense. And 1% of the time, it will be (10*2) + 50 = 70 mahjong sense instead.
Another example, Seibi dislikes Green Tea. Green Tea has a base value of +40 mahjong sense. So if you give Seibi a Green Tea, it will only give half of that so +20 mahjong sense (and you have to listen to Seibi complain).

So the formulae will look like:
Total Mahjong Sense (preferred) = (Base mahjong sense) + 50 + (1% chance)*(Base mahjong sense)
Total Mahjong Sense (dislike) = 0.5 * (Base mahjong sense)

If you spend real money on the game, you will get special perks and benefits depending on how much money you spend on the game. If you check the “Bonus” section of the shop, you can see a full list of benefits. You can get items, an increased gift limit, a bonus multiplier to mahjong sense from playing mahjong games, and extra refreshes for the Misc. shop that was mentioned earlier.

I have not used this feature so I cannot comment further on how it works.

The main takeaway from this is that the majority of your mahjong sense gain will be from playing mahjong games and not gifts because the daily limitation will make it hard for gifts to give you much. Unless you spend a lot of money.

Once your character reaches mahjong sense level 5, the Bond button becomes the Awaken button. You will no longer be able to raise mahjong sense for the character and you will not be able to give them any more gifts. Instead, the Gift interface is replaced by the Awaken interface where it will tell you what items you need to Awaken the character. Here is an old screenshot example of what Awakening looks like:

The items needed to Awaken are different for each character. You can find that information in the same info box we looked at before that tells you how to raise mahjong sense and which gifts a character likes and dislikes.

There’s a full table for Awakening requirements in Appendix B.

Once you Awaken a character, you will get a little cutscene with the unlocked Awakening voice line and then unlock the Awakening bond outfit.

Description: “Used to awaken a character.”

* With the exception of Isshiki Seibi, every character needs 5 each of their respective books. Seibi only needs 1 each.

Because of table width restrictions, the table is broken up into two parts. Sorry.

 

There are a couple types of items required for Awakening certain characters that are not gifts or Awakening Books. This section will cover what those items are, and how to get them.

In an earlier section, I briefly talked about the Recycling feature. When you Recycle a gift, it turns into some number of Gift Fragments. The more mahjong sense a gift gives, the more Gift Fragments it will probably give (full table in Appendix A). Recycling can be done in the Backpack section of the game, accessible from the main menu. Just click on a non-locked gift you want to Recycle, and click the small Recycle button. Don’t click the big one or else it will Recycle everything at once. This is bad if you’re trying to save specific rare gifts like Laptops for Awakening.

There are two uses for Gift Fragments: The first is for Awakening, and the second is to buy things in the Station shop. The second use, buying things, is also of interest to players who are trying to Awaken characters. For every 50 Gift Fragments, you can purchase a free ticket for the gacha (up to 5 a month). This is important because the gacha is the only place you can obtain the other two special Awakening materials: Item Fragments, and Outfit Coupons.

The only place you can get Item Fragments* and Outfit Coupons is the gacha. Every time you roll the gacha with a free ticket, or with real money, you will get something back. 80% of the time, you will get a gift, 15% of the time, you will get a Decoration (aka. game cosmetics), and 5% of the time you will get a Character. These numbers can be found in the Overview section of the gacha.

There is no guarantee that a cosmetic or character you get will be unique. It is possible to get duplicates. In the case that you get a duplicate character, you will get some Outfit Coupons. In the case that you get a duplicate Decoration, you will get some Item Fragments. Exact numbers unknown because I have not gotten any duplicates myself.

Thankfully, you don’t have to roll too much on the gacha to get enough for Awakening a character. Every time you roll on the gacha (using either the free ticket or real money), you automatically get a Stamp Card of Gacha item. If you click on the stamp card counter at the top right of the screen, you can open a mini shop where you can skip the gacha and buy what you want directly using these Stamp Cards.

If you scroll all the way to the bottom, you will see that Outfit Coupons and Item Fragments are also available for purchase so you don’t have to keep spending money until you start getting duplicates. You can just roll to get enough Stamp Cards to buy the materials you need. Just a warning though, if you are planning on only using free tickets to get what you need, it is going to take you a long time since you only get 5 free tickets a month from the Station shop + whatever extras you get from other sources like login rewards.

*(A minor exception is that it is possible to get Item Fragments if you manage to buy a duplicate decoration from an Event shop. It is rare but it can happen.)

In short, while there are a lot of different parts to the system, overall what you have to do to get the most mahjong sense for your characters is simply:

• Login every day
• Do daily missions
• Play lots of mahjong

Hitting max level mahjong sense and awakening your characters will come relatively quickly.

Thank you for reading this guide, I hope it helped new players who wanted to understand how the system worked. If you see any errors in the guide, or think that something is missing, feel free to let me know so I can fix/add it.

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Thanks to solarpletex for his excellent guide, all credit to his effort. if this guide helps you, please support and rate it via Steam Community. enjoy the game.