Hikaru no Go: Hokuto Hai e no Michi

Add to My List

Add to Favorites

Alternative Titles

Synonyms: Hikaru no Go: Journey to the North Star Cup

Japanese: ヒカルの碁北斗杯への道

Information

Type: Special

Episodes: 1

Status: Finished Airing

Aired: Jan 3, 2004

Producers: Dentsu

Licensors: None found, add some

Studios: Pierrot

Source: Manga

Theme: Strategy Game

Demographic: Shounen

Duration: 1 hr. 17 min.

Rating: G - All Ages

Statistics

Score: 7.94¹ (scored by 12,830 users)

¹ indicates a weighted score.

Ranked: #708²

² based on the top anime page. Please note that 'Not yet aired' and 'R18+' titles are excluded.

Popularity: #4491

Members: 24,065

Favorites: 38

Available At

Official Site

Resources

AniDB

ANN

Synopsis

Hikaru is given a phone call asking him to appear in the Japan/China/Korea Junior's Tournament but he finds out he will have to take place in a preliminary tournament to choose Japan's three contestants. Upon discussing this with Akira, he discovers that Akira has already been chosen for the tournament and will not be taking place in the preliminaries. Hikaru then decides not to visit Akira's Go Salon until he takes his place on the team with Akira. That may be tougher than originally planned, as not only does Hikaru have to battle with old friends for one of two coveted spots, but he may have a new challenger, in a promising player from the Kansai Go Institute.

(Source: ANN)

Edit

Background

No background information has been added to this title. Help improve our database by adding background information here.

Edit

Related Anime

Adaptation:	Hikaru no Go
Prequel:	Hikaru no Go

More characters

Characters & Voice Actors

Shindou, Hikaru

Main

Kawakami, Tomoko
Japanese

Touya, Akira

Main

Kobayashi, Sanae
Japanese

Waya, Yoshitaka

Supporting

Takagi, Reiko
Japanese

Isumi, Shinichiro

Supporting

Suzumura, Kenichi
Japanese

Ogata, Seiji

Supporting

Fujiwara, Keiji
Japanese

Fujisaki, Akari

Supporting

Kakazu, Yumi
Japanese

Kurata, Atsushi

Supporting

Iwata, Mitsuo
Japanese

Kuwabara, Honinbou

Supporting

Naya, Rokurou
Japanese

Shindou, Father

Supporting

Chiba, Susumu
Japanese

Ochi, Kousuke

Supporting

Matsuoka, Youko
Japanese

More staff

Staff

Endou, Tetsuya

Director, Script, Storyboard

Watanabe, Junichi

Episode Director

Ozawa, Kazuhiro

Storyboard

Obata, Takeshi

Original Character Design

Edit

Opening Theme

"Get Over" by dream

Edit

Ending Theme

"Everlasting Snow" by Dream

Reviews

Jan 23, 2024

kekekeKaj

Recommended

"Hikaru no Go: Journey to the North Star Cup" is a much needed fix for those of us who are suffering withdraw symptoms after the main series finished. Coming off the back of the series, I found myself settling immediately into this OVA. And no wonder - it retains much of same feel as the series, so much so that it feels more like a natural continuation rather than a standalone special, and it feels weird reviewing this separately. It re-uses the music from the series and even starts off with highlights from the last episode. It continues right from the point where the series ... ended, covering the part of the story from Hikaru's purchase of a fan after having that heart wrenching dream, to the qualifications of the North Star Cup, and stopping short of the preparation and participation in the cup itself.

[Note: This review contains spoilers from the original "Hikaru no Go" series, as I'm assuming that you've at least seen the series if you're reading the review for the sequel]

I love the original series, and since the feel of this special is so similar, it probably comes as no surprise that I really enjoyed this too. For me, two things in particular stood out about this special, and it's two things that represents the two aspects that the franchise devoted most of its attention to. The first one, representative of the subject matter go, is a go match played out between Hikaru and a very eccentric player. The match, allegedly taken from a televised exhibition match between two pros in real life, opens with a few incredibly unconventional moves, which leads to an exhilarating and complex battle that spreads throughout the board, marking it out as not only the most exciting game in this special, but also one of the most memorable matches in the entire franchise.

The second thing that stood out, representative of the outstanding character aspect of "Hikaru no Go", is Hikaru himself. The main series ended soon after Hikaru recovers from the shock of losing Sai, and although his growth after that event is evident from the remainder of the series, he was still changing by the end of it. And in this special episode, we can see that he has come a long way even from the end of the series. In anime - shounen anime especially - you often get these characters with a special aura. Those characters are cool, confident and totally awesome, but they're already like that when you seen them for the first time: people like Spike from "Cowboy Bebop" and Hiei from "Yu Yu Hakusho" seem to be almost born the way they are, and you never really see the process in which they become so badass. Well, having watched this special, I felt like I've witnessed one of those characters in the making. No longer the young brat who used to get nervous during the important matches, Hikaru now looks (both metaphorically and literally, since he's now rather tall,) every inch like a young, aspiring go player confident in his own extraordinary abilities to threaten even the very best. This is probably epitomised by his fiery exchange of words with Akira, where he confidently claims that he will *definitely* qualify for the North Star Cup. It's a scene where Hikaru simply oozed bundles of coolness and glowed with a formidable, tigerish aura. It's a spine-tingling moment, and I absolutely love it.

I really like this special, but it does have a major problem. What weakens this special is not what it contains however - it's pretty hard to fault anything that's actually in it- but rather what it doesn't contain. The title may be "Hikaru no Go: Journey to the North Star Cup", but like I said, this is much less about the North Star Cup as the title may suggest than just a straight forward continuation to the series. Everything about it reinforces the impression of the latter - the fact that a lot of it would be considered filler material if we take it as a standalone meant to deal soley with the North Star Cup qualification; the fact that these same "filler" material would fit naturally into a standard continuation of the series. This makes it all the more disappointing that there are no further sequels, especially when you consider that there is so little source material remaining that they probably just needed to make another hour plus special in order to finish off the whole thing. The fact that there is no follow up hurts this special more than anything else, as it is literally left dangling, both as a prelude to the North Star Cup and as a continuation of the series. And this is a crying shame, because overall, the adaptation has honestly been nothing short of superb.

Open

Gift

Nov 6, 2013

Marthgun

Mixed Feelings

Hikaru no Go needs no introduction to this small sequel,

an anime about a kid who plays go and the highs and lows on that journey.

When I finished the 70+ episode series, not gonna lie, i was pretty disappointed that it ended so weak, plus they wasted the last 15 or so episodes on hikaru crying and random stuff that no one cared about.

But i did also understand that this was a story about the journey, instead of a story about resolutions. Still doesn't take the sting away that the story had just started to get really good.

This, being a sequel special, I had high ...