Clearly there is a lot of high praise for this anime which for the recorded from the start I never understood. I completely ignored it for a long while which is standard, if your not interested you wont watch it. Then I saw the reviews and on top of this friends recommended it to me. At this point I thought I had just misunderstood and went ahead and watched 10 episodes. it was horrible, it dragged and I dropped it even going against my 3ep rule.
Now were here, I've forced myself to watch it all after constantly being told it would get good after 20 or so episodes, fair enough it did finally started to pick up at this point but barely and for what cost. the whole show seemed inconsistent with no group of episodes where an event had a climax.
lets talk about the 'story telling' this show had a horrible nack for struggling to build suspense where it clearly should be but throwing it all away once the next episode starts. this was first evident during the fight against the spider troupe and it was most evident in the ant arc against he king.
I'd like to point out that the fight between the leader of the troupe and the clown guy was clearly hyped like something to finally look forward to and it was dropped just like that, its laughable how they could crush that suspense so easily. constantly things would be instigated and not take place.
I felt like the story wanted to cover too many things at once, every move made by every character in all their individual conflicts, again most evident towards end. this is the source of the issue, this killed any suspense built in conflicts, once ground for a fight was made in once place it would be put on pause to start a new conflict elsewhere with a different character. it would cycle round and once it came back f**k all happens. the story needed more focus, I don't need to see every move made by all characters.
I called them conflicts because it was basically who ever had more tricks up their sleeve and was more prepared won. i can honestly say the only fight i enjoyed was the spider troupe arc when the big guy was killed. its funny because i expected the arc to only excel from that point with more interesting fights and WOW WAS I WRONG, it became this tedious waffle that dragged.
I have no structure for this review and I've failed to cover everything I'm angry but ill end it here. For the record I very much liked the character diversity and the development in relationship between Gon and Killua.
Overall I give this a 3, if you can't find interest in the first arc give up on this anime, it doesn't get much better.
