Hikaru no Go

I have to say, I was never really an anime fan. In fact, until recently, I was pretty anti-anime. Of course, I had only seen bits of Sailor Moon and Dragonball Z, and a couple of really low quality, poorly dubbed movies on the Sci-Fi channel.

However, after watching Spirted Away (or, Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi as it's known in Japan) I became a little more open to the possibility that anime isn't entirely inane. From there, I watched a few episodes of Kareshi Kanojyo no Jijyo (or, His and Her Circumstance. Hah. Changed the order on you). It's an okay show, but rather girly... of course, I was watching it with my girlfriend at the time. That's a valid excuse... right?

Anyway, earlier this summer, my friend Greg came over, and we played some video games (also, this was my first stab at DDR. I sucked. But apparently not as badly as some other people...) then we played a bit of go. And Greg, having an encyclopaedic knowledge of lots of stuff told me about this anime about, well, go. Hikaru no Go. Sounded interesting. Anime Torrents has a bevy of episodes for download, so I started downloading them, and promptly watching them too.

The gist: this boy (Shindou Hikaru) gets possessed by the spirit of an ancient go master (Sai). Sai wants to attain the "hand of god" (I still have no clue what that is) but Hikaru isn't really into go. Sai's grief that Hikaru doesn't want to play go literally causes Hikaru to become sick, so he takes Sai to a go parlor to play a bit. There he meets a kid about his age (Touya Akira). Turns out Touya-kun is a straight-up go mastah. But with Hikaru playing the pieces for him, Sai beats him down. Thus begins the rivalry between Hikaru and Akira and the main conflict of the series.

Yeah, so it's goofy. But I love go, so it's a cool show to watch. Sometimes it's a little slow, and sometimes I want them to stop skipping huge sections of games so I can see what happens!! Typically, they show these dramatic shots of the fuseki (the beginning of the game. Fear my modicum of Japenese language skill) then they show the faces of the two players, then one of them bows their head and says "I resign" like they're about to cry. I realize showing a whole game of 19x19 go isn't a great idea as far as story development is concerned. But hey. I'm really just here for the go.

Actually, I just finished episode 35 (the beauty of BitTorrent) and I have to say, I'm rather addicted. Well, not in the sense that I've purchased any merchandise off Ebay or anything, but I feel rather obligated to download all the episodes and finish the story. Which (and quite frankly, I'm surprised too) I'm rather enjoying.

On that note, I'd like to say how displeased I am at the opening and closing themes of the show. The first few episodes have some pretty decent J-Pop during the opening and closing. But then after a maybe 15 episodes, the closing theme changes, and the provided J-Pop is much less enjoyable. Then! Then, Episode 31 or so totally changes both of the open/close sequences and the new music is awful!! I was extremely disappointed.

The final selling point of the show, that makes up for the now-poor opening/closing sequences is Yukari Umezawa's Go Go Igo segments: a series of kid-friendly introductory go lessons. These are valuable for several reasons: 1) Yukari-sensei is very cute. 2) The go lessons are pretty good. By episode 30 or so, they're up to Tesuji, which are very useful to know. 3) The fat kid is hilarious.

There you have it. I'm an anime junkie now.

Posted by Zach at June 25, 2003 05:06 AM