In 1995, the game developer Kenji Eno (D, Enemy Zero) and animator Ichirō Itano (Macross, the pioneer behind the Itano "Missile Circus" shot ) released a Japanese-exclusive mahjong game for the 3DO about protecting anime girls from creepy middle-aged men. And now, after 28 years, it is finally available to play in English, thanks to a new translation patch from the translators/hackers SnowyAria, YuviApp, and BlametheRobots.
According to readme.txt, the hack translates all of the base game. This includes adding English subtitles for the cutscenes, as well as translating in-game dialogue and menu text. Therefore, the only barriers now should be whether you have access to a copy yourself or you are familiar with the popular board game it is based on.
In an interview with the defunct website 1Up (archive via GameFaqs), Eno said the game was created as a reaction to other mahjong games of the time that frequently focused on trying to get a woman to remove articles of clothing.
He told 1Up's reporters:
"Usually, mahjong games let you strip a girl if you win the game. The girl has to take off her shirt or whatever, and that was the main concept of most mahjong games. But in my mahjong game, I created it so whenever an oyaji — the Japanese term for a dirty, middle-aged bastard — tries to do something bad to a girl, you go and play mahjong to save this girl. So I flipped the whole concept of mahjong games."
If you want to try this out for yourself, you'll find the patch for the game on github. According to a note from the translators, there are some issues running the base game on ODEs/3DOs. The creators recommend using a burned CD-R if the ODE doesn't work for now.
There's also the potential to run it on an emulator instead, which should work absolutely fine.