Hikaru No Go: No go.

Reviewer: Isaac Bernhard
Rating (out of 5): **½

It's surely a good sign for American Go enthusiasts that a sports anime about the game of Go, designed essentially as a recruiting tool for young people – a commercial, really – has been distributed in this country. This would have been unthinkable a few years ago. I decided to give Hikaru No Go a look mainly because, as enthusiastic as I am about this particular board game, watching an anime about Go sounded a bit like watching plants grow. Sure, I might be into it, but how could Go, a game which visually consists of black and white dots on a grid, be made interesting to non-players? How could a game which takes quite a bit of study and experience merely to begin to understand its subtleties possibly be given the Rocky Balboa treatment?

For those who aren't familiar with Go, a standard game is played by placing white or black stones on the intersections of a 19x19 grid, and the goal is to win more territory than your opponent by surrounding intersections with your stones. This single sentence sketches out approximately one quarter of the rules of the game. Sound easy? In fact its openness and its simple rules are precisely what make Go such a challenge. Consider, for instance, that during each turn a player can place stones on (almost) any open intersection – that means that there are 361 possible opening moves in a standard game. Today, many years after a computer defeated the world's top-ranked human chess player, the finest in Go playing technology cannot challenge a proficient amateur.

After watching the first volume of Hikaru No Go with someone who has never played Go, I can vouch for the fact that this anime manages to make the game interesting to non-players. This is partially because Hikaru No Go is quite good at giving the audience little mini-lessons as it goes, but more importantly it manages to imbue the game with a kind of mystical feeling. While the show does teach a bit about the basics, it also plays on the sense of mystery that many feel when they first encounter this game. That's perfectly fair; it is, after all, one reason people get into the game in the first place.

The show is, however, still very much designed for children, and it has the production values and aesthetics of a slightly above-average Saturday morning cartoon. The manga on which this anime is based managed to build an iconography around the game, the grid and the stones becoming slightly baffling but intriguing visual metaphors as well as effective leitmotifs. The anime, on the other hand, amplifies the earnest but charming dramatics of the manga to the point of absurdity. It's one thing to have dramatic, slightly silly close-ups of people placing stones on the board, but another thing altogether to accompany this action with whooshing sound effects and lasers shooting out of the stone. Adults will find little to keep their interest, but it is far from intolerable if you happen to know a young person who might be persuaded to take up this great game.