Reviews

From the back cover:
Hikaru’s classmate Ochi has won enough games to guarantee his place among the top three players who will pass the pro test. Hikaru, on the other hand, still needs to win more games, and he’ll soon face his friend Waya and Ochi himself, who has been preparing for their match with Akira’s help! When the dust clears, who will be left standing?

Review:
The pro test concluded with this volume. I really enjoyed the match between Hikaru and Waya, and how when Hikaru got stuck, he asked himself what Sai would do in a given situation. There was more focus on Sai this volume than there has been of late, as he began to realize how much Hikaru has improved and how he is becoming a capable stand-in for Sai himself.

I would’ve liked to have seen more of the match between Hikaru and Ochi, after all the set-up it received, culminating in a confrontation wherein Hikaru learned that Akira had been training Ochi nightly and deduced that it was all Akira’s attempt to gauge Hikaru’s strength through Ochi. There was a really cool panel where Ochi and Hikaru were sitting at the board with Akira and Sai behind them, respectively. But alas, much of their match happened off-camera. That said, I really liked that it was from Isumi’s perspective that we learned the result, since it meant the end of his chances of passing this time around.

The volume finished off with Hikaru doing some nostalgic eavesdropping on the middle school Go club to which he used to belong and with his mom wondering whether she ought to fret about his unusual profession. Little touches like these are what make this series truly excellent. I’m sad that I now have to wait until May for the next installment.

From the back cover:
The main round of the pro test has begun. Everyone’s feeling the pressure—no one more so than Hikaru’s friend Isumi, who has failed the test twice before. Fighting off his feelings of self-doubt, Isumi faces his next opponent, who turns out to be Hikaru. But a careless mistake lands the pair in an awkward position!

Review:
This entire volume was full of pro test goodness. Placements shifted a bit throughout these chapters, but it was always clear who was ahead and who’d fallen behind. The complete chart of each player’s wins and losses was also included at one point, which was neat to see. I liked that the focus wasn’t solely on Hikaru.

Once again, though all of the pro test stuff was great, my favorite chapters were those where Akira is dealing with his “fixation” on Shindo, as Ochi (who received a couple lessons from Akira) put it. I particularly liked the last chapter, where Akira recreated his first game against Sai for Ochi to explain his obsession. Ochi was appropriately astonished.

The art was really great, too, though that’s not unusual. I was struck again, though, by the variety among the character designs. No one looked the same, but Obata didn’t need to resort to unrealistic gimmicks to distinguish between characters. This series also has a lot of just average-looking people in it, which is something I appreciate.