From this news, I think it's on the way waiting for official announcement. What do you expect from this? Should it be film or tv series? Should it faithfully follow original manga, adding additional contents, or be completely reboot?

I'm interested to see what they do with it. I really like the anime - I think it's really well done, and I'm surprised at the amount of drama and tension they can wring out of the subject matter - but I can't imagine a live action version.

I've been rewatching the anime lately, and I'm surprised at how well I can follow the flow of the games compared to when I was a beginner.

Curious to see how faithful they stay with the original story, script, chacracters, and dialogues, etc.
Whether they keep the entire historical background stories and the geographic location.
Also, there's a little entity in 2015 that didn't exist in the late 1990's.

The new Sai >>> AlphaGo

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http://tchan001.wordpress.com
A blog on Asian go books, go sightings, and interesting tidbits
Go is such a beautiful game.

and now it is realeased https://www.imdb.com/title/tt13364846/

Description of the first episode begins with "Chu Ying was the one of best weiqi players in ancient China..." -- so we know a few of the details have been altered

https://www.iq.com/play/1d4mf8z153x (You need to bear with the long ad)

AFAIK the first month or first 4 or five episodes are free.

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“The only difference between me and a madman is that I’m not mad.” — Salvador Dali ★ Play a slooooow correspondence game with me on OGS?

The English subtitles are far from perfect

I have watched the first 16 episodes. Apparently more are scheduled to be released over the next few weeks.
You can join the network for one month free but you must be sure to cancel the auto-renewal when your free 30 days expire or you will be billed. If I understand the episode release schedule, 12 more shows will be released by the time my free trial expires, a total of 28, but I do not know how many shows are in the entire series.

The complicated conceptual transition from the Japanese go tradition to China's longer weiqi history is rough in some places but one cannot view this series merely as a live action adaptation of our favorite manga. This Chinese production is a derivation and should be viewed objectively for its own style, story arc, and entertainment value.

I have enjoyed the shows and there are moments when the scripts track very closely to the original. However, the story took forever to get to the interesting parts and I really don't care much about the main character. He is a typical, deeply flawed teenager (not violent or asocial) and the writers give him many growth opportunities only to allow him in the next episode to revert back to being a lying, selfish, and manipulative jerk. The incidental and supporting characters are far more interesting and sympathetic.

The production values are quite high: good photography, stereo sound, solid editing, credible settings and scenery, understated effects. The acting is excellent and I really liked the little boy who played Hikaru in the first two episodes. I wish for stronger female roles to show up but doesn't seem likely.

I do have One Major Complaint with the series: The go/weiqi scenes are accurate and believable but terribly frustrating for knowledgable players to watch. The shots of the boards are too brief to see what's going on (pause and take a screen shot?), there are no fun discussions between characters that reveal the tension in the games, they do not analyze the games' critical events to make go's beauty and complexity a palpable part of the story (there are many poetical allusions to weiqi's beauty but no tangible proofs), and the central character's advance in skill is implied without proof on the board. This One Major Complaint is understandable if we look at the show objectively, from the producers' points of view: the series is family entertainment; it is not necessarily a national weiqi recruiting effort.

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David Bogie, Boise ID
I play go, I ride a recumbent, of course I use Macintosh.

But that's in the spirirt of both the manga and the anime, isn't it?

As a "knowledgable" player I found my later viewings of the anime simply hilarious as even the most mondane atari gets a really strong reaction from one of the players. At the same time all the games both in the manga and the anime were real professional games, when I remember correctly, so the advance in skill had to be potrayed through other means (beating other players, becoming an insei, rising up etc).

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My "guide" to become stronger in Go

Did this end up working for you? I clicked on the banner for the free trial, found I had to register for the auto-renew plan, did so, but then immediately disabled it. I found that a few days later I was charged the 6.99 by the Apple Store. After a month my subscription lapsed as expected.



I agree, he was great.

oh wow! I was hoping netflix would do something like this

This kills the whole point of a free trial. Some kind of divorce for money. Although the amount is not large, the very fact of such deception is unpleasant.

Do you speak from experience or are yo adding an editorial opinion to this thread?

For me, the entire process was easy and quick. There was no deception, no divorce, no hidden charges, no penalties, no unpleasantries at all.

Most of us had zero complications joining the Chinese streaming network for the free one-month trial and we happily binged the series.

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David Bogie, Boise ID
I play go, I ride a recumbent, of course I use Macintosh.

I was very late to the party, fearing the charm of the series to be riddiculed by a live action play. However, I watched the series a few weeks ago (only a few episodes left, but those with Sai gone are so... sad and I couldn't bring myself to watch them yet) and I really enjoyed it a lot. I like the changes they made to show the Chinese way of e.g. doing the pro qualification or the part with the monks and the friendship between "Waya", "Isumi" and "Hikaru". And as far as I know, the whole series can be watched with English subtitles on their website without any registration? Why would you need to register? Because of the ads? I also found the subtitles pretty good - I don't know any Chinese but I could follow the story more than well enough.

Here's the link to the series, just for futures reference of anyone who wants to watch it - Bonobo's Link seems to still work, but it references to this link (1st episode starts to play right away): https://www.iq.com/play/slxk4ry5to

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This is my opinion based on the posts I read in this thread. Most likely, I misunderstood something and hastened to draw conclusions.