Tell someone that you liked a 75 episode series about some kids playing with black and white pebbles and chances are he will think you are kidding.
Hikaru no Go is an anime made to promote one of Japan’s oldest and most famous games, that of Go. Now I wouldn’t want to go into details of how the game is played; basically you place black pebbles, while the opponent places white pebbles, on a big squared board, and the objective is to take the opponent’s pebbles by surrounding them from all four sides with your own. I could mention how it resembles Siege or Othello but both are quite simplistic to count. For there are various sub-rules, such as specific areas granting extra points, the second player being given a few points just for playing second, and so on, and so on. The point is this is not a game that it’s as simple as it looks.
Game-based anime are nothing new at the time it came out. Six years ago there was Pokemon, and around the same time there was YuGiOh!, both prompting people to learn and buy the games. But the thing is, all such anime are to the most part nothing but propaganda, as the actual games have nothing to do with what you see in the series. Pikachu never levels up and Yuugi keeps using cards that don’t work like that in the actual game. But in the case of Go, that is not possible because there is no optical trickery. The pebbles don’t have superpowers; they are just positioned in a cross-section and remain there permanently, unless surrounded, where they become the opponent’s points. So what you see is really what you get. There is of course a ghost of an ancient Go player following the main hero around and telling him ways of how to win, but that is not cheating in the longrun because even that is following the rules of the game down to the tiniest detail.
Which is another thing that makes this show great. Unlike Pokemon or YuGiOh!, where the opponents cheat all the time or don’t play as the normal rules dictate in general, in Go there is no way to be unfair. The pieces are not hidden or moving around every time you turn your head, cards don’t drop out of sleeves and dices are not fixed to always show 6s. There is even an official referee and many on-lookers that further prevent you from even trying to move around the pebbles. That creates an extremely realistic and fair game.
Another plus is how the game is purely based on strategy and not on luck. You don’t draw cards hoping to get what you want or you don’t use electroshock, hoping to get a critical. All pebbles are equal and revealed to you from the start. In this regard, it is like chess where all the pieces are revealed from the start and there is zero chances of winning out of luck.
All the above create a very realistic approach to the game that doesn’t make you think that every match is rigged or conveniently happens as the scriptwriter wants to. Of course, it also means that it lacks too much of superficial entertainment for those who expect lasers and huge monsters o fill the screen all the time. Nope, there is no such thing present to make little kids wowing with brainless battles that have nothing to do with the actual game. It does however have a huge amount of internal monologue and a rather high amount of “depicted mentality”. That means that we are constantly shown what the characters are feeling with weird background colours or told by listening to their strategies and worries. There is a lot of that too in other game-based series as well but the retarded action is eventually making you care more about that than about the characters’ strategies.
Of course, this is still a shonen title and it still has some elements for the target audience to feel a connection to. The main hero for example is Hikaru, a boy who has no idea of how to play Go but after he releases the ghost of an ancient Go player, he is gradually more and more interested to learn and improve in the game. Initially he learns how to play thanks to the ghost, basically becoming its pupil as it can’t play on its own, and later as he learns he can now do his own strategies and thus follow his own path. That is an almost standard procedure for any shonen lead. He even has a permanent platonic girlfriend, a main eternal rival ala Kaiba, and various bystanders constantly interrupting the flow of the matches in order to comment what they think is going on. So it is not exactly a groundbreaking show full of originality; the difference is mainly at how more focused the show is on the characters and not on the promotion of the game. You can see how Hikaru is gradually improving and how he is not a mastermind from episode one. He even grows old later on. Well, all that don’t actually change him as a personality, since he is still the same hyperactive edgy shonen lead as in the beginning. It will probably feel bad for most.
The worst part is eventually the story, since it is too heavily focused on building up tension slowly and eventually ending half-way. Many episodes are made to slow down progress with the scene constantly switching to something other than the match or the main characters, such as commentaries by others or flashbacks and irrelevant every day events. That can count as skyrocketing your interest by feeding on your frustration to know what will happen next. It is like in Dragonball Z, where a whole episode is spent on just powering up and shouting without progressing the battle. It works, although it does feel like it overdoes it at times. This is not a story about the salvation of the universe but a simple journey of a boy going from one match to another, pitted against other Go players and not demons who want to rule the cosmos or something. Plus it doesn’t really end; it is left incomplete as a story. Although one would wonder what the ending could be. Him becoming the Go Emperor of planet Earth?
I leave for last the production values that felt just average for such a show. Nothing great or bad but nothing memorable other than Hikaru’s weird double coloured hair. And I find nothing to write about them.
It is a very good anime at making you care to learn about the game. It even teaches it to you as it really is and not in a way that matters only in-series, thus I consider it the best in its subgenre. Other than that it is not exactly a show with great characters; just colourful ones. And its story is quite tedious and incomplete. Plus years later shows like Akagi and Kaiji took the whole board game to far greater heights of excitement. Still worthy of watching, since there is no other Go-based anime and definitely no other so fair and honest boardgame-based one.
