Saikyō Habu Shōgi

The Good
The AI at the time was the best for this particular board game.

The Bad
No highlighting where places can move.

The Bottom Line
I knew when planning to experience all Nintendo 64 game that there would be some I would barely be able to play. In particular, Japanese-exclusive games. I don’t speak Japanese and, while some games have translation guides or even fully fledged fan translations you can patch into the game, there can still be some with difficulties.

Strongest Habu Shogi is an adaptation of the board game and features Yoshiharu Habu, the best Shogi player at the time. Shogi is a Japanese variant of chess, heavily modified and more complex. Some major differences are how captured pieces can be brought back onto the board, and pieces can be promoted to become stronger, with different movement rules.

One tool which is surprisingly handy for menus is Google lens, just point it at your TV and is will make rough translations. It’s not always perfect, but good enough for getting to the right modes and settings.

The biggest difficulty I had with Strongest Habu Shogi was identifying the pieces. They’re all the same shape with the name written in Japanese. Even using a picture of what each piece means and does, I found it very difficult to identify them, due to different fonts. To make matters worse, Strongest Habu Shogi doesn’t have any aids to show potential moves you can make, so I found it very difficult to play this version. I did try to practice using an online version of Shogi (with English pieces), but I was still utterly awful at that.

For people who understand Japanese and Shogi, this game did offer quite a lot of features. You can play against computers or another player, play a version where you only get 10 seconds per turn, play “reverse shogi” or play though the main campaign where you have to beat 18 other opponents of increasing difficulty. The AI is specifically tailored so that the same moves you make will result in the same responses, so there is a guide available that just lists moves that will make you win, although that’s not really beating the game.

It also has a bunch of teaching tools. One explains the rules (in Japanese) and there’s also a puzzle mode where you have to win matches based on the setup of a few pieces. There’s also a mode that lets you watch famous Shogi matches play out.

In Japan, Strongest Habu Shogi did not sell very well. It was one of three launch titles on the N64, but only 1% of N64 owners picked it up then. There are more shogi games on the N64 and the game is featured in Nintendo’s own Clubhouse Games series, with the Switch version featuring English letters to identify pieces as well as guides to show possible moves.