I ... think Hunter x Hunter is overrated. Don’t get me wrong, there is some good parts, but the bad is so egregious that I cannot give this show a 10/10. To explain, I am going to break it down in reviews of the individual arcs in chronological order, with the music and characters being their own categories. By the way, this will probably be a long post, so I will add a TL;DR at the bottom when it's all done.
Hunter Exam Arc. This is my third favorite arc of the whole series and easily hooked me into HxH. With its friendly, upbeat atmosphere and cheerful protagonists, it managed to give the world a very childish texture, even when dark elements did pop up now and then. In fact, I would go so far as to say HxH has ALWAYS been dark right from the get go, they just hid it better.
A point that I am going to make during this review is that each arc had a “protagonist” are someone who we saw the story through. In this arc, it's Gon, and Gon’s optimism really made the story interesting and accessible.
The basic premise of this arc is the Hunter Exams, which are more or less a series of trials one has to go through to prove themselves to become something called a Hunter. What a Hunter actually does is never made clear throughout the series as many of the Hunters our protagonists will encounter have varied powers, experiences, and goals. Each Hunter Gon, Killua, and anyone else that might be with them have distinct powers and personalities and their designs often reflect that. This is most evident in this arc, as even the background characters have personality.
The best thing about this arc was the different tasks the examiners made the candidates do.From running to cooking to hunting to fighting each task is different and tension is evident in every one of them as any moment someone could drop out of the exam. Bonds are formed between characters as they team up, such as Gon with Killua, Kurapika and Leorio. When I was watching this arc, I thought that this was going to be the entire series and that all of the different arcs were just tasks set up by the examiners, and I would have been totally fine with that. (In fact, now that I think about it, it totally could have been that way. Maybe the Chimera Ant arc could have just been a task set up by Examiners with the goal being to defeat them to go into the net phase. But I digress).
My favorite part about this arc was probably the way Gon, Killua, Kurapika and Leorio bond. Gon and Killua become best friends instantly, while Kurapika and Leorio have to fight before respecting one another. The banter between them is pretty good, and they probably wouldn’t have passed the exam if it wasn’t for the help of one another. (Especially Leorio. He is probably the weakest character in the entire series, but more on that later) Another good part is the hunting section, as Gon learns hunting tactics. It was pretty gripping how Gon had to hold in his emotions and had to keep on following Hisoka so that he could steal his badge (which become a Chekov’s gun later).
Overall, I would give it a 8/10 and I felt that this arc was fairly standalone. In fact, I probably wouldn’t have minded the anime ending right here. But instead it keep going, leading into the
Zoldyck Family arc
This is my least favorite arc of the entire series precisely because of how disappointing it was. See, I enjoy these types of arcs. Character has shitty family, everyone goes to save him, family gets convinced to leave him alone, etc. Mother’s Rosario is my favorite arc in all of SAO precisely for this reason as I could relate to Asuna with her overbearing mother. So I was pretty excited when Gon, Kurapika and Leorio showed up in front of the Training Gates to save Killua.
However, it never really got to live up to its hype and just kinda deflated. Togashi (the author) has this habit of making his villains a tad bit more overpowered than his heros. On paper, this sounds awesome as we don’t get “emotional power up asspulls” that other shounen anime like Fairy Tail and DBZ has since the characters have to rely on strategy. However, HxH is not the only anime/manga that does this. JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure is famous for this, as most of its fight rely on tactics. Each of the final boss fights in JoJo have that arc’s JoJo fighting a massive overpowered villain and figuring out a way to stop them. This makes these fights very satisfying. Apparently Togashi heard about this and decided to add this into his manga with ... mixed results. Yes, some fights do have JoJo style tactics based battles, but some villains are so overpowered that not even the author can think of a good way to defeat them. This is evident both in this arc and the Chimera Ant arc, along with some moments in the Yorknew City arc. Togashi made Killua’s family too overpowered, and at the power level Gon and his friends were at, they couldn’t possible defeat them. So instead Killua was allowed to rejoin his friends for some weird reason after they all played a game and everyone went on their merry way.
Rating: 6/10
Heavens Arena arc
This is apparently a “tournament arc”. I highly disagree. If it is, then it's probably the worst tournament arc I have ever seen. There are only like three fights and only Hisoka and Gon’s was interesting. The rest were extremely short. However, I don’t think this WAS supposed to be a tournament arc, but a training arc. Most tournament arcs come after the main characters have trained really, really hard (see Dragon Ball’s first tournament arc to see what I mean) but Gon and Killua don’t even know what Nen is yet.
Nen is this anime’s magic system. Every action anime (and western stuff too. Avatar, Steven Universe, and Harry Potter all have good magic systems) needs a interesting magic system. A bad magic system will usually result in a bad anime and visa versa. There are exceptions, as Hamon in JJBA’s parts 1 and 2 is not a very good magic system, but the way they used Hamon in their strategies more than made up for it. As such, a good magic system lets one be flexible. Brandon Sanderson (the author of books such as Mistborn) has three laws of magic. The first one I think is the most important: An author's ability to solve conflict with magic is DIRECTLY PROPORTIONAL to how well the reader understands said magic. In other words, good magic has strict rules, and the characters must use these rules to their advantage. JJBA does this with Stands as each stand has strict rules and clearly defined powers (except for Star Platinum, but Jotaro follows the rule of cool, so we will ignore him). This makes the fights in JoJo all the more interesting as it's not the powers themselves that makes you powerful, but how you use them. Okyasku has probably one of the most powerful characters in the entire series, but he really dumb so he’s actually one of the most useless characters in Part 4.
Nen Users sorta do this. Hisoka’s OP not because he has loads of aura, but because his ability is really flexible. But that ability is still OP. In fact, like I said before, most villains in HxH have ridiculously overpowered Nen abilities. Illumi can control people with his needles, Chrollo can steal anyones ability, and Merumen ... just has a lot of aura and can’t be killed because he’s the king or something.
What Nen does do is follow to a T Sanderson’s third rule: Expand on what you have already, before you add something new. Nen is made up of 5 key elements and every single Nen ability is created out of the combinations of these five elements. As such, whenever Gon and Killua are training, they are not “learning a new spell” like in something like Harry Potter. Rather, they learn how to build off of what they already know to create something new. Gon and Killua’s special attacks are something they came up with themselves based on what they already know.
Anyways, I don’t consider this a tournament arc as much as a training arc. As a tournament arc, this would be a 4/10, but as a training arc it's a 7/10
Continued in Part 2! (coming soon!)
Submitted January 08, 2017 at 04:18PM by valorzard http://ift.tt/2i3Er3r
No comments:
Post a Comment