Review of Hunter x Hunter
This show was one that was long overdue for me to get around to and one I knew next to nothing about. I knew that it was considered one of the best shounens ever made with one of the most beloved power system put into anime and I was ready to dive into it. The beginning 30~ episodes I guess you can classify as rough because what these episodes do is serve as the groundwork and pillars of the entire show so it can move as crazy as it needs to without bogging itself down with repetitive exposition. Hell I would kinda classify the first ~30episodes as rough, but the fight choreography and characters we get introduced to are more than enough to carry it.
Once the Heaven's arena arc finishing the training wheels come off and we fully see what HxH is and what it does. The cool thing about Nen to me was how fleshed out the system is. Nen is broken down into 6 main categories which every Nen user falls into for their applications of Nen. The user can train into other areas of Nen but those powers are never gonna be as powerful in comparison to their primary categories. Instead of Nen being nebulous in the way the user applies Nen the user's abilities tend to be directly tied to the character's personality or previous life experiences. This creates a really cool premise for it's fights where everyone is gonna play out differently than the last. In a way this system very much reminds me of stand battles in a way with the way that its never a numbers game its applications of the Nen abilities of the user and being able to outwit the other participant in the fight. In addition to the core pillars of Nen there are a lot of other applications that tend to use the "storage of Nen" but these things lend themselves to more support skills.
The way this story handles it's characters and conflicts is one of the highlights in a show where highlights are the norm. Instead of having the big bad vs the good guys for the fate of the world or whatever the characters just exist and cross paths. Sometimes in the story the overarching antagonist never even meets Gon or Killua the main character that we follow for 80% of the story. Any of the characters we follow always have their own goals, this goes for any of the perceive "good guys" and "bad guys". Everyone has their own motives for being at the setting where conflict breaks out.
The morality of the characters in this show undertones pretty much everything anyone does in the series. Gon is a shounen protagonist so by nature of that hes a paragon (heh) of good right? For the most part yes but a lot of the character conflicts come from Gon viewing the world as a black and white when it comes to moral ethics and not knowing what to do when faced with a situation that are as grey as they come. The phantom troupe while they serve as the group of baddies to go against our heroes, you have to remember characters have personality, motives, thoughts and relationships with their comrades and even enemies in the world of Hunter x Hunter. The troupe of their own set of interpersonal realtionships. A few of the troupe are long time friends, some of them hate some of the others in their group and some don't even know much about others. Each member of the phantom troupe has their own goal and motivations for joining the group but just by virtue of them joining the phantom thieves means they have the raw skill to be able to run it with the best group in the world of HxH that specializes in killing people.
While I would love to talk about the crown jewel of the story: the chimera ant arc, I'm gonna exercise a bit of restraint on that because its one of the best arc in anime I've seen with probably my favorite antagonist of any story. Ever.
No part of the show feels under realized, the setting the characters, the ramifications of any action in the show or any of the references to real world history. While My Hero Academia sits at the throne for my favorite anime, Hunter x Hunter is eagerly waiting to take that spot away from it.