I'm sure most people here have seen Hikaru no Go before, and it's a genre I'm rather interested because manga that deals with thinking-based games is actually pretty difficult to write. In a typical hero versus boss model, if a boss has power level 3 zillion it's not that hard for the hero to power up to 3 zillion+1 and overcome the boss. But in something that's based on intelligence, this model falls apart. For example in Hikaru no Go you can safely assume Sai is supposed to be the person with the highest Go Power rating. If Hikaru is to beat Sai in a game of Go, he must have some Go Power rating that's at least 1 higher than Sai, but in that case that'd mean he's actually the best Go player in the world already. It's also hard to reasonably argue how you can suddenly become much smarter during the middle of a game. I think Shion's King actually experimented with the concept of an 'intelligence powerup' where Shion suddenly learned the Hand of God (i.e. the perfect move) after remembering the traumatic events where her parents were killed after losing a game of Shogi and then beat the Meijin in a game of Shogi using the Hand of God, but to say this concept is utterly retarded is to to put it mildly.
Now Go is a completely deterministic game, so it might be especially hard to write about it in the classic hero versus boss sense since the better player should always win in a game with no elements of chance, and presumably the boss is the better player because otherwise he wouldn't be the boss. But even if you take something that has elements of chance, like say Yugioh, it's still tough. In Yugioh the enemy characters always have these stupidly overpowered cards (sort of like playing against power 9 in MTG without having your own power 9), and how does Yugi overcome these odds? By drawing better than than the opponent. It doesn't matter if the enemy has super strong cards as long as you can always draw exactly what you need to get out of a mess. In his AD&D game against Bakura I think he rolled the equivalent of natural 20 15 times in a row to overcome the fact that he was a level 1 fighter trying to take on 3 dragons at the same time.
But that, of course, is pretty silly too, since that basically says you don't have to outthink someone, you just have to outluck them.
Recently I downloaded a bunch of random manga on a lot of random subject, and found one that handled this situation quite well. The manga was on mahjong, which I know practically nothing about. The story starts out in a 2vs2 match against a boss that is your typical perfect player. So the story starts out predictably as the boss character builds up a nearly insurmountable lead that requires a hand that's equivalent of royal flush to even make up. In mahjong, harder to get hands are worth more points than common hands, so winning with an equivalent of royal flush might be worth 100 times compared to winning with an equivalent of a pair. During the break, the heroines discussed that they're behind by some impossible huge amount of points and their only hope is to draw the best possible hand at the end.
However, at this point it's revealed that their opponent plays this game as if she can see through the tiles, since by the virtue of her perfect skills and experience she can easily calculate any possible hand they might be trying to get. It Japanese Mahjong, it appears to get any decent score you have to declare when you're one away from having a winning hand, so if the heroines are to try to draw a hand good enough to make up for the deficit, they have to announce it first, and when this happens the boss will defend against that by drawing for a very weak hand and ending the round. It turns out that their opponent also has an extremely high luck rating so she'll almost always draw the stuff she needs to complete a weak hand.
So at this point the heroines also realize that's the kind of opponent they're up against, and against an impossible skilled opponent with pretty good luck, what they need is:
1. Even more luck
2. Cheating
The resulting strategy was that one of the two characters will just randomly claim to be one away from winning no matter what hand she has. This is supposed to be totally illegal, but since the boss will always calculate the hypothetical hand the lying character has to have to make such a call, and then defend against it perfectly, she'd never get to see what hand they really had to verify that they were indeed cheating (it seems like Mahjong the losers just shuffle their hands into the pile without revealing it). So after enough rounds of cheating, at the end the boss's calculated hands has nothing to do with what hands the heroines had, and not surprisingly on the final round the heroines draw the one hand they need to overcome the difference and won, but it was only possible because they cheated enough to throw the opponent off.
Actually, that sounds a lot like Liar Game, which I also enjoy. There is no shortage of strategic mumbo-jumbo in both, but given the fact that the good guys has to be up against someone who is better at the same game, the key ingredient to overcome skill is cheating. If you think about it, even Hikaru cheats in his first two games against Akira, since he can just ask Sai for a better move!
Now Go is a completely deterministic game, so it might be especially hard to write about it in the classic hero versus boss sense since the better player should always win in a game with no elements of chance, and presumably the boss is the better player because otherwise he wouldn't be the boss. But even if you take something that has elements of chance, like say Yugioh, it's still tough. In Yugioh the enemy characters always have these stupidly overpowered cards (sort of like playing against power 9 in MTG without having your own power 9), and how does Yugi overcome these odds? By drawing better than than the opponent. It doesn't matter if the enemy has super strong cards as long as you can always draw exactly what you need to get out of a mess. In his AD&D game against Bakura I think he rolled the equivalent of natural 20 15 times in a row to overcome the fact that he was a level 1 fighter trying to take on 3 dragons at the same time.
But that, of course, is pretty silly too, since that basically says you don't have to outthink someone, you just have to outluck them.
Recently I downloaded a bunch of random manga on a lot of random subject, and found one that handled this situation quite well. The manga was on mahjong, which I know practically nothing about. The story starts out in a 2vs2 match against a boss that is your typical perfect player. So the story starts out predictably as the boss character builds up a nearly insurmountable lead that requires a hand that's equivalent of royal flush to even make up. In mahjong, harder to get hands are worth more points than common hands, so winning with an equivalent of royal flush might be worth 100 times compared to winning with an equivalent of a pair. During the break, the heroines discussed that they're behind by some impossible huge amount of points and their only hope is to draw the best possible hand at the end.
However, at this point it's revealed that their opponent plays this game as if she can see through the tiles, since by the virtue of her perfect skills and experience she can easily calculate any possible hand they might be trying to get. It Japanese Mahjong, it appears to get any decent score you have to declare when you're one away from having a winning hand, so if the heroines are to try to draw a hand good enough to make up for the deficit, they have to announce it first, and when this happens the boss will defend against that by drawing for a very weak hand and ending the round. It turns out that their opponent also has an extremely high luck rating so she'll almost always draw the stuff she needs to complete a weak hand.
So at this point the heroines also realize that's the kind of opponent they're up against, and against an impossible skilled opponent with pretty good luck, what they need is:
1. Even more luck
2. Cheating
The resulting strategy was that one of the two characters will just randomly claim to be one away from winning no matter what hand she has. This is supposed to be totally illegal, but since the boss will always calculate the hypothetical hand the lying character has to have to make such a call, and then defend against it perfectly, she'd never get to see what hand they really had to verify that they were indeed cheating (it seems like Mahjong the losers just shuffle their hands into the pile without revealing it). So after enough rounds of cheating, at the end the boss's calculated hands has nothing to do with what hands the heroines had, and not surprisingly on the final round the heroines draw the one hand they need to overcome the difference and won, but it was only possible because they cheated enough to throw the opponent off.
Actually, that sounds a lot like Liar Game, which I also enjoy. There is no shortage of strategic mumbo-jumbo in both, but given the fact that the good guys has to be up against someone who is better at the same game, the key ingredient to overcome skill is cheating. If you think about it, even Hikaru cheats in his first two games against Akira, since he can just ask Sai for a better move!
