Even better than Chessmaster.
Right alongside Mahjong, the SG-1000 delivered what would eventually become one of the other inevitabilities of a console launch in Japan: A shogi game. As with Sega’s Mahjong, Serizawa Hachidan no Tsumeshogi appears to have been the first proper work of its kind ever to appear on a games console.
If the single-player, two-position Mahjong offered only a faint impression of the format, Tsumeshogi is so faint as to be downright spectral. At least Mahjong offered a full match, albeit one without real competitors. Tsumeshogi doesn’t even manage that. Tsumeshogi does not attempt to recreate the entirety of a shogi match. That might have been a literal impossibility for the SG-1000, given its storage and working memory capacity restrictions. Shogi gives chess a run for its money in terms of complexity, and, until more powerful consoles entered the picture, shogi games were strained to say the least. Even the mighty Super NES couldn’t simulate shogi properly without the use of supplementary processors many times more powerful than the console’s CPU.
Rather, Tsumeshogi works more like a puzzle game in which players need to solve a variety of play scenarios. You can choose from a series of easy, advanced, or expert situations, and from there you simply need to make the correct moves to maneuver your pieces out of a jam while setting the opponent’s pieces up for failure.
While perhaps useful for aspiring shogi pros as a training exercise, it’s vexing for newcomers; even after reading up on the pieces and their legal moves, I still can’t beat even the most basic puzzle here. Tsumeshogi won’t let you make illegal moves, and it seems to restrict many moves that seem like they should be legal. It will, however, allow you to make fatal mistakes and lose a round. This is not shogi for the faint of heart.
According to the website Sega Does (segadoes.com), the “Serizawa” in the title looks to be a reference to a professional shogi player from the early 1980s named Hirobumi Serizawa. “Hachidan” means “eighth level dan”—one of highest possible rankings a professional shogi player can earn. So I don’t feel so bad about my complete failure to function at this game; after all, I’m up against one of the world’s greatest shogi players. As Serizawa-sensei sits at the top of his shogi mountain, he looks down and laughs at me as I struggle to remember what the basic shogi pieces even are.
Unfriendly as it may be to newcomers, Tsumeshogi demonstrates Sega’s interest in making its new game console something more than just a dumping ground for frivolous score-chasing action games. This is serious, mentally taxing content endorsed by a pro, after all.
SHOGI, EXPLAINED
Shogi constitutes one of the fundamental pillars of uniquely Japanese video gaming, sitting alongside simulations of go, pachinko, riichi mahjong, and horse race gambling as a genre you simply don’t see produced anywhere else in the world. Of all of these, however, shogi comes closest to being familiar; the game hails from the same primeval origins as chess, and as such its pieces, play, and patterns will be instantly recognizable to any Western player who has managed to graduate beyond checkers. Which doesn’t mean that shogi and chess play identically; the two have just enough differences to be frustrating until you learn the fine distinctions and rules.
Shogi, for example, lacks an equivalent to chess’ Queen. Instead, two Gold Generals flank the King piece as its protectors,but they lack the overwhelming power and flexibility found in the Queen. Whereas a Queen can move as many spaces as she likes, a Gold shogi piece can only move one space at a time, and it can only move in six directions rather than eight as backward diagonals are forbidden. Most pieces that reach the far side of the board can optionally be promoted to Gold, trading their movement patterns for that of the Generals. The exceptions to Gold promotion are the Rook and Bishop pieces, which normally move exactly as they do in chess: Any number of spaces in cardinal directions or diagonals, respectively. They promote to Silver, retaining their movement options while adding the ability to move a single space on their previously forbidden axes.
Besides Rooks and Bishops, Pawns and Knights also work more or less as they do in chess. Pawns can only move a single space forward and capture opposing pieces straight ahead rather than at the diagonal used in chess, and Knights move forward in an L-shaped pattern. Unique to shogi is the Lance, a sort of super-pawn: While it can only move forward, the Lance has no restriction on the number of spaces it can traverse in a single move and can easily zip across the entire board, should it so desire.
These minor movement variations, alternate rules, and additional pieces arguably make shogi a more complex game than chess, which has made it difficult to render on humble 8-bit systems. SETA would find huge success with 1985’s Honshogi for Famicom [see NES Works Gaiden Vol. I] and followed up by creating a cottage industry for itself of publishing shogi cartridges with built-in co-processors to help speed the poor CPU’s overloaded decision-making capabilities. But here the limited problem set of Tsumeshogi made sense for a simple Z80-based platform like SG-1000.