Anime Review: HIKARU NO GO
Nov. 19th, 2023 04:40 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jennariaIt occurred to me after last week: is it still old school when the anime came out after 2000? (See also: Things That Make Me Feel Old.)
HIKARU NO GO – 2001-2003 (Japan), 2005-It’s Complicated Let’s Say 2011 (US), available streaming on Hulu
Amount watched: Somewhere around 50 episodes, out of 75? I’ve read all the manga.
Official description: (from MyAnimeList) While searching through his grandfather's attic, Hikaru Shindou stumbles upon an old go board. Touching it, he is greeted by a mysterious voice, and soon after falls unconscious. When he regains his senses, he discovers that the voice is still present and belongs to Fujiwara no Sai, the spirit of an ancient go expert. A go instructor for the Japanese Emperor in the Heian Era, Sai's passion for the game transcends time and space, allowing him to continue playing his beloved game as a ghostly entity. Sai's ultimate goal is to master a divine go technique that no player has achieved so far, and he seeks to accomplish this by playing the board game through Hikaru.
Despite having no interest in board games, Hikaru reluctantly agrees to play, executing moves as instructed by Sai. However, when he encounters the young go prodigy Akira Touya, a passion for the game is slowly ignited within him. Inspired by his newfound rival, Hikaru's journey into the world of go is just beginning.
Weeb rating: 9/10. Possibly 10/10. This entire series is focused on the awesomeness of a Japanese game so old-fashioned-Japanese that initially even the main character doesn’t understand it! Unfortunately, there’s also some less flattering Japanese attributes on display, especially during the Hokuto Cup arc – whee xenophobia.
Ass rating: 2/10. All the intimacy is mental and emotional only.
Shit rating: 1/10. More discussion below.
Violence rating: 2/10 – sometimes characters get hit with a (hand) fan, but that's about as violent as anything gets.
Crack rating: 2/10, because I can’t put 1/10 on a series about a ghost that teaches a teenage boy to play Go.
Actual opinion: So I am not a bit objective about this show (see note in the cut-tag about having written fanfic for it). It’s a love story – and I don’t mean the rivalry between Hikaru and Touya that leads to so much more, or the mentorship between Sai and Hikaru. It’s the love of the game of Go itself, and it shines through so clearly that even someone like me, who never got the appeal of strategy games like chess, bought myself a small book on how to play Go and tried to learn.
(I failed. But I did try.)
This is a series that takes so many shonen tropes, shakes them about, turns them upside down, and then sets them back to see how they look now. The most obvious: this is a Sports Anime, except the sport is a board game for old men. Likewise, Touya’s character arc isn’t just about playing the foil to Shindou: it’s about his relationship with the game (and whether he loves it for itself or just plays it because he's expected to be good at it) as much as his relationship with Shindou. Even Sai gets more to his character than just the mono-focus on Go that we see at first (and given that he literally survived as a ghost because he wanted to play the Best Game Ever, that's saying something).
Finally, the series understands how to sprawl. There's a large cast of background or side characters, of course, who all clearly have their own lives to live, their own goals to pursue, and who reoccur in a natural way. I never got the feeling that they’d been stuck in a closet somewhere until needed. The one down side, really, is that there's too few female characters - which fits the Sports Anime trope, but a girl could wish. At least there's no gratuitous love interests for a watcher to suffer through - just a boy learning a board game.
HIKARU NO GO – 2001-2003 (Japan), 2005-It’s Complicated Let’s Say 2011 (US), available streaming on Hulu
Amount watched: Somewhere around 50 episodes, out of 75? I’ve read all the manga.
Official description: (from MyAnimeList) While searching through his grandfather's attic, Hikaru Shindou stumbles upon an old go board. Touching it, he is greeted by a mysterious voice, and soon after falls unconscious. When he regains his senses, he discovers that the voice is still present and belongs to Fujiwara no Sai, the spirit of an ancient go expert. A go instructor for the Japanese Emperor in the Heian Era, Sai's passion for the game transcends time and space, allowing him to continue playing his beloved game as a ghostly entity. Sai's ultimate goal is to master a divine go technique that no player has achieved so far, and he seeks to accomplish this by playing the board game through Hikaru.
Despite having no interest in board games, Hikaru reluctantly agrees to play, executing moves as instructed by Sai. However, when he encounters the young go prodigy Akira Touya, a passion for the game is slowly ignited within him. Inspired by his newfound rival, Hikaru's journey into the world of go is just beginning.
Weeb rating: 9/10. Possibly 10/10. This entire series is focused on the awesomeness of a Japanese game so old-fashioned-Japanese that initially even the main character doesn’t understand it! Unfortunately, there’s also some less flattering Japanese attributes on display, especially during the Hokuto Cup arc – whee xenophobia.
Ass rating: 2/10. All the intimacy is mental and emotional only.
Shit rating: 1/10. More discussion below.
Violence rating: 2/10 – sometimes characters get hit with a (hand) fan, but that's about as violent as anything gets.
Crack rating: 2/10, because I can’t put 1/10 on a series about a ghost that teaches a teenage boy to play Go.
Actual opinion: So I am not a bit objective about this show (see note in the cut-tag about having written fanfic for it). It’s a love story – and I don’t mean the rivalry between Hikaru and Touya that leads to so much more, or the mentorship between Sai and Hikaru. It’s the love of the game of Go itself, and it shines through so clearly that even someone like me, who never got the appeal of strategy games like chess, bought myself a small book on how to play Go and tried to learn.
(I failed. But I did try.)
This is a series that takes so many shonen tropes, shakes them about, turns them upside down, and then sets them back to see how they look now. The most obvious: this is a Sports Anime, except the sport is a board game for old men. Likewise, Touya’s character arc isn’t just about playing the foil to Shindou: it’s about his relationship with the game (and whether he loves it for itself or just plays it because he's expected to be good at it) as much as his relationship with Shindou. Even Sai gets more to his character than just the mono-focus on Go that we see at first (and given that he literally survived as a ghost because he wanted to play the Best Game Ever, that's saying something).
Finally, the series understands how to sprawl. There's a large cast of background or side characters, of course, who all clearly have their own lives to live, their own goals to pursue, and who reoccur in a natural way. I never got the feeling that they’d been stuck in a closet somewhere until needed. The one down side, really, is that there's too few female characters - which fits the Sports Anime trope, but a girl could wish. At least there's no gratuitous love interests for a watcher to suffer through - just a boy learning a board game.