Last time I was at uni studying. There was some students playing chess on the desk in front of mine. I never learned how to play Chess, I asked myself why. It never interested me. As much as it is portrayed both in real life and in fiction as the most intellectual game ever, it always seemed very primitive to me. In the end, no matter how complicated it gets, the only strategy in Chess is predicting your opponent’s moves. No more no less. Sure there’s different tactics, like the stuff I just read on Wikipedia about the Indian Defense and whatever, but it’s still about predicting.
After that, I started to look up if there was a manga on chess. And there isn’t as far as I know. Sure there’s some with Chess elements, and a lot of manga use it to show some sort of intellectualism possessed by the characters like I said in the first paragraph, but there isn’t a pure Chess one. Like you know, the typical shounen manga about a young boy who has a hidden talent playing Chess called La Main de Déesse and how his father left him a king piece before disappearing, the boy now plays Chess in order to find the truth about his father’s disappearance. It’s because you can’t do such a manga with Chess, or maybe you could but it would be extremely difficult. You won’t be able to make the matches exciting, make the audience’s blood boil, or make the boy pull off crazy moves that would make the readers want to learn them and use them themselves while playing, because such moves simply doesn’t exist in Chess. You can’t do the Yu Gi Oh or Saki of Chess.
After that, one could think it’s because Chess isn’t popular in Japan enough, being overshadowed by Shougi. Everyone says Shougi is the equivalent of Chess but as I don’t know how to play both I can’t really confirm this. Anyway, even then there’s only a few manga on Shougi. The only one I know of is Shion no Ou. And the anime was awesome, though I never finished it. I should do that and also read the manga someday.
I feel like it’s the first time I wrote a post that could be so full of crap, I’m nervous just like Wendy wearing a mini skirt. It was fun though.
Nekketsu Nikki 