Hikaru no Go is old, rough around the edges, and perhaps not about the most enticing of subject matters. And the game of Go itself appears to be plain and simple. For both, there is gold underneath the veneer. There's a reason why a 20 year old long running shounen with perhaps the least appealing art from anything made 20 years ago maintains it's 400 ranking on MAL. And indeed, why a game with only a few simple rules and one type of piece has been the longest continually played game in human history and remained relatively unchanged since it’s inception, with the 4000 year old legacy being carried by tens of millions around the world today.

For Hikaru no Go to be good, Go would need to be good as well. Go is not quite like chess or shogi, games more than worthy of novelization and more than capable of being arenas for characters to be constructed within, as has already been seen. Go is unlike any other game. It is a sprawling universe of your own creation, and a universe at war with another. It is said that chess and shogi are conflicts of Man vs. Man. Go at first seems the same, as it is a player vs. another vying for control of a board, with multiple battles typically playing out. But it is not. "An honestly ranked player can expect to lose about half of their games; therefore, Go can be seen as embodying the quest for self-improvement"[1]. Man vs Self. And when you are a beginner, you will lose far, far more than half of your games. Go is pure hardship distilled.

And so as expected- Go is complex and enormous in scope. "The number of legal board positions in Go has been calculated to be approximately 2.1 × 10170, which is vastly greater than the number of atoms in the known, observable universe"[2]. But the rules are beautifully simple and small in number. Any person can learn how to play Go extremely quickly. This polarized combination of simplicity and complexity is what first draws you in.

There is a moment in Hikaru no Go early on where Hikaru first discovers the endless wonder of this game: as he's playing a match, he starts to feel as though every stone he places is a new star, a new galaxy, in a universe of his own creation. He loses the game, but it doesn't matter. It has clicked for him, and he has seen and felt what every player who loves the game has seen and felt. And this is where it becomes clear that Hikaru no Go understands Go. That the people who wrote it, understand Go.

Hikaru no Go doesn't stop there. It constructs compelling characters and extremely compelling narratives in and around the world of Go. Outstanding arcs set within the context of this game. And individual games themselves, that are thorough and drawn out (as any real Go game is), and in the entire shows runtime they only become more and more engrossing and captivating. One example being when Akira (a very young pro player) is invited to play a match against a pompous influential public figure, and he must play the match such that it is exactly a draw (Go matches are determined by counting points at the end; Akira needed their point count to be identical, a Herculean feat). He was asked to lose by his colleagues, as the man held influence over funding for their Go association. But he didn’t want to for his own pride as a player. The ensueing match is so fun to see play out, the stakes are high, the characters involved are fascinating due to their motivations and the powers that they command.

Another of Hikaru no Go’s unique narrative devices is that of the ghost Sai, who has toiled on this earth long after his mortal death in search of fulfillment within the game of Go. He plays through Hikaru, telling him which moves to make. A legendary player from times long past- his connection through Hikaru making waves throughout the Go world, with many key people witnessing Hikaru’s matches early on being able to recognize that this isn’t any ordinary kid playing. This seems like just a fun idea at first glance and not anything particularly special but it develops so much more- from just a sort of power fantasy device and into a rich arc unto itself, with unexpected developments and outcomes. Hikaru soon desiring his own agency as a player, rejecting the free power given to him from Sai in favor of his own fulfillment. Both of them learning and growing together as people, in and out of the world of Go. Their relationship is so interesting, and very sweet and wholesome, and seeing their arc over of the course of the series is an absolute delight.

But the most affecting of Hikaru no Go's story is in the bitter-sweet portrayal of each best player of each generation passing along the torch to the next, and in the real world idea of “divine moves”. The best player of each generation enjoys their reign of greatness, but then watches as the next generation rises up to beat them- having believed that it was their destiny to remain at the top and coming to understand that it was instead their destiny to pass on their knowledge so that someone new can surpass them. In the real world of Go, this has been the pattern over the centuries, such that the current best players may be said to be the best players to have ever lived; every generation passed on it's knowledge to the next, lifted the next, so that the next could rise even higher, just as with all human pursuits. And in the divine move, a real term in Go, is the pursuit of a single moment of absolute pure greatness and genius, one above all moves in that game and in every game that player has played, so much so that it could only have come from some higher power, reaching down and guiding the stone onto the board. A move that when considered beforehand by onlookers it seemed to have been unwise but when then witnessing the rest of the game it could only be understood as being absolutely essential and changing the course of the match entirely. These two things are central to Hikaru no Go, and indeed, they were central to the single biggest moment in the real world of Go for our generation. The match between Alpha Go and Lee Sedol, where humanity reluctantly passed the torch to AI, which had in a single moment leapt several generations in Go development ahead of our species and defeated us calmly and bitterly. But where also, we saw a divine move like no other, played by Lee Sedol, in the only match of five in which he managed to defeat the unknowable force before him. A win that he called a "priceless win that I would not exchange for anything."[3]

It is thus clear how much this show deeply understands and loves Go. Go is so much worth pursuing. Everyone deserves to see the universe that is contained within the board. Let Hikaru no Go show you the wonders of this game, and the universe therein. And if you’ve already seen that universe for yourself, Hikaru no Go is the perfect narrative to engross you further, reignite your passions, live in the world of Go.

I revere Go. I am in awe of it, I fear it, I resent it. Whenever I play, whenever I play 20 or 30 games in a row and lose every single one of them, I catch a glimpse of the cathedral ceiling above me, the infinite stars in the universe that go out forever. There is nothing else like Go. Hikaru no Go does it more than justice.

[citations]:
[1]Pinckard, William (n.d.). "Go and the Three Games". In Bozulich, Richard (ed.). The Go Player's Almanac (2nd ed.). Kiseido Publishing Company (published 2001). ISBN 978-4-906574-40-7. Retrieved 2008-06-11.
[2]Tromp, John; Farnebäck, Gunnar (January 31, 2016). "Combinatorics of Go" (PDF). tromp.github.io. Retrieved June 17, 2020.
[3]: Yoon Sung-won (14 March 2016). "Lee Se-dol shows AlphaGo beatable". The Korea Times. Retrieved 15 March 2016.