Review of Hikaru No Go

How many fanboys started thinking that driving a Trueno would be cool after watching Initial D? How many kids got obsessed with cards and monsters after watching Yu-Gi-Oh!? How many anime fans found their steepled fingers dangerously close to a friend’s anus after watching Naruto? Like all forms of entertainment media, anime have influence (it’s just that in America the influence is usually limited to a very specific age group—at least that’s changing now). Some anime make you cry, some anime make you laugh, but truly powerful anime make you pick something up. Hikaru no Go is one such anime.

The title means “Hikaru’s Go.” Even in English translation, the words probably wouldn’t make much sense to many English speakers. Hikaru is a common unisex name in Japanese (if you know anything about Japanese music, then you must’ve at least heard of Hikaru Utada, the J-Pop Queen—let’s not discuss her attempt to break into the American market with Exodus), and go is a board game that is usually immediately compared to chess.

It originated in China thousands of years ago and spread to Korea and Japan. Since it was the Japanese who made the game known in America, in the West it’s known by its Japanese name, go (in Chinese, it’s weiqi; in Korean, it’s baduk). Go is easier to learn than chess but astronomically harder to master.

Like chess, it’s a two-player game, the players taking turns to place pieces called “stones” on the board (either black or white, the former always goes first). Unlike chess, once you lay a stone down, it doesn’t move—unless the group of which it is a part gets surrounded by the opposite color, in which case it is taken off the board as prisoner. The winner is the player with the most territory, created when prisoners are taken or when an empty area is surrounded. At the end of the game, prisoners are replaced on the board to reduce the opposite player’s territory.