Honestly, this disappoints me more with every episode. I was really worried that a second season would focus more on the lolis (since, let's face it, that's why Saki was popular ¬_¬) instead of the mahjong, and it's increasingly looking like that's what's happening. I've only ever been interested in the awesome mahjong games (and frankly, the non-mahjong parts of Saki were pretty terrible), so I'm not particularly impressed.
I suppose there's still a chance they'll get into the nitty-gritty mahjong matches now they've reached the nationals, but at best I think it's lost a lot of impact now we're suddenly there watching a totally different group of girls who we've never even seen play a match before, as opposed to Kiyosumi, who we've spent 25 episodes getting attached to. At worst, they won't go into any detail at all, and it'll just be boring.
And I have no idea what they're thinking by organising the story like this, either. Aside from my last point, in going through the nationals with this other team, they're going to have to reveal what would be most of the major plot twists in a proper second season of Saki (which teams win each rounds, who Kiyosumi beats, and most importantly, who wins the nationals - unless they stop halfway through, which would be an equally stupid decision). Since the Saki manga is still ongoing, and still progressing through the nationals, we can safely assume that there will be a proper second season if this does well, so the way they're organising this seems like a very strange way of doing things.
Yeah, that turned into a bit of a rant there, but Saki is one of my favourite anime of all time, almost solely because of the mahjong, so to see the sequel pretty much entirely leave that out is more than a little frustrating
