Review of Hunter x Hunter

After an almost 4 or 5 year hiatus from anime I am back to finally tackle HxH. Admittedly Shounen has probably some of my least favorite tropes or styles of writing and while some of it is present here I feel like it ultimately perseveres through my issues and wins me over entirely. That’s not to say I don’t have my fair share of problems with the show though. To start with the bad, my biggest point of contention that I usually have with Shounen is the writing. Often times I find myself rolling my eyes due to the pedantic nature that some of these showsexplain the rules in which the world functions or the explanation of fights. This might not be an issue for some but it comes off as exhausting after a while and kills the pacing, especially if the fight lasts for multiple episodes. While this is an issue in HxH it’s not nearly as prevalent. Not only that I think it takes this aspect I usually REALLY dislike in anime and uses it to its advantage( back to that later). Relating to the writing I feel like the Greed Island arc as whole was largely lackluster due to how much it leans on this style of writing as well as the villain just being kinda lame. The Hunter Exam arc also is an incredibly slow starter but if I ever decide to rewatch HxH I’d probably change my mind. My only other complaint is that I feel like the show ended when it was beginning to hit its stride and I can only hope it’ll be picked back up one day.

Now, the good! All the characters, important or not, all feel very distinct and memorable. One of my favorite aspects is how varied all the character designs feel. It’s almost as if HxH is a combination of character designs that are influenced from multiple different shows old and new (for the time). The animation is also pretty top notch, especially during specific fights. Now to kind of round back to the writing, as I mentioned before, this show takes aspects I hate about Shounen writing and uses it for specific situations. You’ll be presented with a conflict and sometimes that conflict is set within certain parameters with many rules, almost kind of like a game. So instead of the section just being a straight forward fight with episode long explanations of the actions on screen it uses the time to instead think of the possible outcomes and how to game the system. Makes things a lot more interesting when the situation isn’t boiled down to a series of over explained gotcha games. The pacing of the show is also incredibly fun as weird as that sounds. The sense of adventure with all the varied locations and characters really helped keep me engaged and made me want to care what happened to the characters and the conclusion of story arcs!

All in all it was a really fun show front to back and I highly recommend it to any Shounen enjoyers that some how have not got around to it yet!