>>96834488
the pieces honestly both in appearance and name, people see a bunch of samey looking pentagons with some moonspeak on them and immediately stop caring about that silly game they play on some island. the best they could come up with for international appeal is swap out the kanji for an pictograph of a similar chess piece.
chess pieces are sexy and simple to understand at a glance no matter what language you speak white horse, black horse, white castle, black castle ect, with shogi it's some kanji representing super alloy flying dragon general dickfucker of the west, and then the same exact kanji but upside down.
the issue of capturing your opponents pieces makes it so that there's no real way to have nice looking chess pieces for shogi without making unappealing compromises.

What is the Vidya equivalent of Chess?
A game that requires an extremely high IQ

>I hate how compfags in every genre insist on locking down the rules so that you're only allowed to play ONE faction/character on ONE map with ONE ruleset in ONE game mode and then insist they're good at the game.
If you truly good you'll be able to consistently win even when everything is set random. Make it best 2/3 or something if you're really that concerned about the possibility of your opponent lucking into the cheapest faction possible.