I have finally played a mahjong game, Mahjong Goku Tenjiku for the PC-FX! About two months ago, I tried learning the basics of mahjong, but then never actually tested my skills out on anything. I played a game that I thought was going to be a mahjong game, but it turned out to be a Donjara game.
This is based off Journey to the West, where you can play as either Sun Wukong, Sha Wujing, Zhu Bajie, and Tang Sanzang. From here you go on to have mahjong matches against what I'm guessing are characters from the novel. I haven't read it so I'm not sure. As you defeat them you go up through the ranks and I think unlock new areas with different conditions. I only played one match and that took me ~2 hours and I didn't really care to play more so I stopped.
I ended up playing on easy and using a lot of save states, trial and erroring my way into building winning hands, or at least not extremely losing hands. I'm still not good at it, I had to look up a lot of rules, yaku, etc., and even when I got winning hands they weren't high scores. On top of that there's a lot of customization in the rules you can do, but it went all over my head so I just left them as default, maybe there was changes I could've done to make it easier.
Aside from that I'm just glad I've finally played a mahjong game. Even if I'm not good at it, knowing just enough to save scum my way through it is about all I'll need for stuff I want to play. I may just get better over time!