Hello and welcome, this is my first anime review, my first review of anything since Budokai 3 and my 2nd review in total. I guess After-Thought Reviews didn't really pan out in terms of expectations.
Anyway, I just got done watching Hunter X Hunter a few days ago and I would like to provide my extended thoughts on them. If you read any or all of the comparisons between this and YuYu Hakusho, you may be disappointed to find out that I'm going to be covering a lot of familiar ground but without any comparison to any other anime, at least not anything direct, unless it's warranted for the purposes of providing context. For those of you that haven't seen any of those, however, you're in luck, you won't have to read those to find out my opinions of certain things.
Fair warning, this review is working under the assumption that you are one of three types of people: A. You have already seen this anime and you want to know what I think of it, B. You have not seen this anime but you're reading this so you don't have to watch it, or C. Have not seen it but like to use spoilers to have some general idea of what to look forward to in the event you watch it later down the line.
As I said, this will be an in-depth review and discussion, so spoilers are abundant, though let's be honest, many of you who are looking at this review right now have probably heard of and are completely caught up on this, the manga, and the 1998 adaptation so that shouldn't be too much of a problem.
This anime for the most part has 2 main characters and 2 almost-main-secondary characters, in order of overall screen time they are Gon, the protagonist of the story, Killua, the young Assassin who wants to be Gon's friend, Leorio the taller than he should be money-grubber who is money grubbing so he can become a doctor, and Kurapika, the last survivor of a near-extinct clan called the Kurta, who is now seeking revenge against the ones who caused it, The Phantom Troupe. And this is where my first problem comes in.
Now, as I said, the order of those listed characters was in amount of screen-time, from greatest to least. This isn't really much of a problem for Gon or Killua because all of the arcs have something major for them to do, and though Leorio doesn't get much more screen-time than any other character, the only other character besides Leorio that you could argue gets more focus is the antagonist/occasional anti-hero Hisoka.
Kurapika out of those four gets by far the least amount of screen time, which is a bit of a shame because I also felt he was the most promising of the main four. Gon has a goal (To meet his father) and a motivation (To Find out why his father became a Hunter) but he doesn't really have much in the way of plans or experience. Killua has the most experience and training in terms of combat and other hunter skills, due to being a member of an assassin family, but his motivation is so tenuous that it only really works in the context of his character (Because he wants to be Gon's friend), and his goal is pretty much achieved shortly after it's introduced (To be Gon's friend), no matter how much Illumi might disagree. Leorio has a goal (To become a Doctor), and a decent enough motivation (To save lives) but experience and plans are even worse than Gon's.
Kurapika, by contrast, has a goal (To kill the Phantom Troupe and retrieve his clansmen's stolen eyes), a motivation (Because of his clan's desecration), a plan (Gain Wealthy Clientele with Underworld Connections to get more reliable information on the Troupe or at least an increased chance of running into them), experience (some degree of combat training is evident at several points in the first arc, though not to the degree of Killua initially), and he even has an internal conflict later down the line (Killing the Troupe isn't easy because they're not as soulless as he initially led himself to believe), which is unique to him because of the nature of the previous four categories.
Of all of the main four Kurapika has the strongest foundation for an intriguing character and story arc but after Yorknew ends, which is the halfway point of the anime, Kurapika gets two small cameos, three if you count the last episode's credit roll, and that's it.
Kurapika is the only character who has this problem, too. Bisky doesn't get introduced until Greed Island but she has a decent amount to do with the Chimera Ant arc as far as getting Gon and Killua up to the required level for dealing with Neferpitou in particular, Hisoka's only arc of absence is the Chimera Ant arc, for whatever reason, and while you could argue that other major players from the first arc fall off pretty quickly as well, specifically Hanzo and Pokkle, you could make the argument that neither one of them was ever made to be a main character. Kurapika's presence in the first two arcs, and the driving force that he is in Yorknew indicate that there was far more he was supposed to do.
I'm not saying he could've appeared in every arc, but a reworking of his Chain Jail in terms of its Vow and Restriction could've made him a great asset during the Chimera Ant Arc at the very least. I'm not saying he had to have as much significance as Gon or Killua but it really felt like he was cut out merely because there was no way to fit him into these arcs. That said, I get the sneaking suspicion that the source material is to blame. Let me elaborate.
The manga Hunter X Hunter has been going on for years, it started a few months before the manga Naruto did (feel old yet?) but Hunter X Hunter has a far smaller number of chapters despite being a part of the same weekly magazine, that being Weekly Shonen Jump. Why is this? Well, there's some conflicting information on that.
Some people have stated that Hunter X Hunter ended at the Chairman Election Arc and that The Dark Continent in the manga came later due to fan outcry. However, the consistency of the release of these chapters seem to suggest something else. This is evident where the Chimera Ant Arc in Weekly Shonen Jump lasted so long because it's frequency of appearances averaged out to about 30% of a chapter per week. And since releasing incomplete chapters is obviously not a good business strategy, the only conclusion I can come to is that Hunter X Hunter never officially ended and Yoshihiro Togashi just misses a lot of deadlines.
It is because of this that I feel like some arcs didn't last long enough for certain characters to make an impact. I'm not saying these arcs would've benefited from more chapters but a more consistent meeting of these deadlines and getting more chapters in the manga overall could have given the Phantom Troupe and Kurapika the attention that I suspect they were initially supposed to have gotten.
While Kurapika is perhaps the most underutilized character, which disappoints me greatly, the character roster on the whole is really solid. Every character is likeable to some extent and even the characters you're not supposed to like, such as Hisoka, benefit from being so charming in a really disturbing way.
The anime is divided into 7 arcs spanning around 6 seasons. Of the seven arcs, the first two are combined into one, as are the third and fourth, which reduces the overall number of seasons from 7 to 5 but some sources have told me that the Chimera Ant Arc is two seasons, and the 13th Chairman Election Arc spans exactly 12 episodes and that, along with a change in the opening and ending song sequences, suggest that that is its own season, which brings the total back up to six.
Hunter X Hunter has a lot of cool characters but what I like more are the power sets. In Hunter X Hunter, there is a super natural power called Nen. The way Nen is described in its entirety basically makes it the same as Spirit Energy in YuYu Hakusho. The difference, however, is that spirit energy seems to be a prototype for what Nen would eventually become. I'm going to state a few applications for comparison.
Yusuke's Spirit Gun is an Emission Type Application for Hatsu.
Kuwabara's Spirit Sword is a Transmutation, which is evident in how similar it looks to Gon's Jajanken Scissors attack.
Kurama's Plants seem to be Enhancement Type.
Hiei's Fire Abilities could be achieved with Transmuter Abilities but his actual use of Fire seems to be more of a Conjuration type application.
Genkai's Spirit Wave reverts her age to her prime, which other characters have shown to be able to do to some extent in Hunter X Hunter, the primary examples being Bisky and Illumi.
And Rando's power stealing move is a Specialist type, especially given that Chrollo Lucilfer, one of the Phantom Troupe, has a very similar ability, though Meruem might be more comparable to be honest.
Souketsu's use of flight is an application of Ko.
Sensui's Sacred Energy Armor is clearly a Conjuration.
And I could keep going but you get the idea.
The reason I say Spirit Energy is a prototype for Nen is because a lot of the applications are the same but Nen has more rules that give any given user more possibilities for their Nen. The biggest examples of this are Vows and Restrictions.
Vows are promises you make to enhance the power of your Nen, and Restrictions are punishments for breaking those Vows. Some of these characters have Vows and Restrictions that are just enough to make each weapon useful, like Kite, whose Vow is that he has 9 Weapons that are chosen randomly and cannot be reverted until the selected weapon is used, and a final tenth number, which I have ascribed the number 0, is a restricted number that only comes up when Kite is desperate to live. Kurapika vows that he will only use Chain Jail on a member of the Phantom Troupe and, if he breaks this vow, he will die. Knuckle gives aura to his opponent and charges interest on it and, if that interest exceeds the amount of aura that person still has in their body, they will be forced into Zetsu for a month. The restriction seems to be that the effect won't work if they pay back the full balance in time.
While all of the ones I listed were Conjurers, there is some evidence to suggest that Vows and Restrictions could be used by other types of Nen users. The biggest example is by far Gon, whose Adult form comes about as a result of a Vow and Restriction that are so powerful, he could only maintain that power for a small amount of time. Although we're not quite certain what these were, based on what happened and how it worked, I speculate that his Vow was to fight until Neferpitou was defeated and his restriction was that his body and ability to use aura would be permanently damaged once his victory was assured. While it's easy to argue abuse of this type of thing if you want ultimate power, if you're thinking like a gamer that is, you could argue that these vows and restrictions are probably the harshest any character has used since it caused the most dramatic increase in power and also had a penalty that was so severe, it took an omnipotent wish granter to reverse it. And, before you ask, no, I'm not joking, her name is Nanika, you can look her up.
While this character could also be seen as a Conjurer, Feitan also seems to have a small vow and restriction on his power, where he can only use it when he's taken damage, and doing so allows him to deal damage that directly correlates to how damaged his body currently is. Phinks gets stronger the more he winds his arms, which seems to be a vow and restriction that prevents him from fighting with anything other than his arms, since we have yet to see how he fights with his legs. Shizuku's Vacuum can only absorb objects that do not possess Nen.
I've said enough on the powers so let's get to the storylines.
The storylines aren't complex but they do offer a fair bit of variety and freshness to a genre that is plagued with bad writing. Hunter X Hunter starts strong and stays strong for its entire run. While Yorknew arguably had so much going on that I needed to take a break before getting back to it, there was not a single arc in this entire series that I could look at and say that it was bad, or at least predictable.
That said, the ending is a bit of a mixed bag depending on who you are. On the one hand, the last episode resolves Gon's goal of meeting his dad and finding out his desires. On the other hand, it presents the Dark Continent as where Ging is going next, so you could argue that it may be setting up for another season. If you think it is, you're probably wrong.
While the Hunter X Hunter story clearly isn't over, the last episode of the 2011 anime played out like the last episode of any anime. As a result, I can only speculate that if it does get a continuation, it will be more along the lines of Inuyasha: The Final Act or Naruto Shippuden where it's continuing the story but it's its own separate series not directly tied to the previous in any way other than umbrella franchise.
Visually, the anime is standard for what standard was in anime before the release of Fate/Zero and Sword Art Online. Though the animation is not bad by any means, it doesn't have a lot of the bells and whistles that those series do until later on where the lighting and texturing gets somewhat better in the last arc, particularly with Killua and Illumi. If you want an anime that looks more like Soul Eater and less like Sword Art Online, you'll probably be okay for most of the series. As I said, it's not a bad look, it's just lacking in detail, which is fine. The point of animation is to present a visual experience that can't be provided by Live Action film-making. If you make an animated work with the intention of making it look as real as possible, why not just make it live action at that point? That's all I'm saying.
In terms of the soundtrack, the music is good. There's a long list of tracks, which there has to be for a series this long but the thing is that some of the tracks seem to be attached to specific characters, settings, or groups. A lot of music from Yorknew gets abandoned later on because of this and several of the tracks from the Zoldyck family arc only show up when focusing on that particular family of assassins.
In terms of the opening and ending songs, I have to say those are pretty solid, too. Easily my favorite ones are Departure, the opening, the first ending and Hyori Ittai by Yuzu which is the last ending song for two different animation sequences. I enjoy those so much that I can listen to those by themselves without having to attach them to anything else.
Hunter X Hunter is by no means a perfect show: good characters get abandoned and have their potential wasted as a result, attaching a single song to a set of characters or scenery didn't really strike that much of a chord with me, and Greed Island didn't have all that much going for it for me outside of Bisky. But this series maintains a consistent level of quality and that quality is far and away higher than a lot of other Shonen that have a similar number of episodes.
If you don't really like Shounen, I recommend you try this just to see if it can change your mind, if you do like Shounen definitely give this a watch, and if you don't like anime in general, why the hell have you read this far? Thanks for reading and I'll see you next time.
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