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. Theres a reason why a 20 year old long running shounen with perhaps the least appealing art from anything made 20 years ago maintains its 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 its 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 selfimprovement1. 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 universe2. 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 hes 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 doesnt 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 doesnt 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 didnt 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 Gos 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 Hikarus matches early on being able to recognize that this isnt 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 Gos story is in the bittersweet 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 its 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 youve 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: 1Pinckard William n.d.. Go and the Three Games. In Bozulich Richard ed.. The Go Players Almanac 2nd ed.. Kiseido Publishing Company published 2001. ISBN 9784906574407. Retrieved 20080611. 2Tromp John Farnebck Gunnar January 31 2016. Combinatorics of Go PDF. tromp.github.io. Retrieved June 17 2020. 3: Yoon Sungwon 14 March 2016. Lee Sedol shows AlphaGo beatable. The Korea Times. Retrieved 15 March 2016.