Review of Hunter x Hunter
Hunter x Hunter manages to maintain an impressive quality over 148 episodes, this is quite the accomplishment. This anime may satisfy a somewhat broad audience (29yo in my case), because it evolves into many different styles and atmospheres across the acrs, and is rich in many ways, the characters behavior make sense (it is such a rare thing), don't let bright colors fool you, it does get dark and bloody at times, heads roll. The characters are well-constructed, devellopped, deep, interesting, and colorful. The world is rich, in terms of places, characters, creatures, items, mysteries, abilities, rules. The sense of danger and tension is made very palpable,particularly in the second half. The story is compelling, you are almost never fed with meaningless information/scenes, wich is usually such an irritating characteristic in shows/animes in general. There is always something to look forward to.
It starts on an adventure note, Gon Freecss leaves the Whale Island to become a Hunter, with one goal in mind: find his father, a mysterious Hunter. It's an amazing adventure, growing darker, where Gon will stumble many many times.
The story is made of 7 arcs, of very different length and tones. The first arc illustrates the hunter examination. It managed to hook me just a little quite easily because you follow the candidates perspective and the trials and characters are mysterious and tricky, and it's more about tricks than fights. The second arc is the weakest arc story-wise, but I would not recommend skipping anything as fights starts to get interesting and you learn about the ground rules of the fights, the climax point of this arc was however vey very satisfying. The following arcs gets more and more serious as they progress, and more importantly switch entirely in tones and genras.
Utimatly you reach the 6th arc (Chimera Ants) wich contains 60 episode, on a 148 episode anime, something huge is at work, with a 34 episode-long epic climax (111 to 135). The magic happend for me, it was simply amazing, I was completly overexcited episode after episode after episode.
Hunter x Hunter is clever, beautiful, intense and dense.
I wrote this review while I just rushed it in a very unhealthy amount of time (a few days), I had never seen it before, and I am sad. I am sad because I won't get to re-experienced it for the first time ever again, and it left me with this feeling that every anime I have yet to watch is very poor in comparison.
Needless to say, this was my favorite anime among my slightly above average anime experience (~30).