There’s not exactly ever a precise turning point, the series just gets better and better, and pulls you deeper and deeper.
It starts pretty cheery, even wacky, feeling exactly as you would imagine a shounen story about teenage boys following their dreams to be, but over time, it veers away from that simple if entertaining narrative to become a quest to help a friend, then a fighting tournament, then a crime thriller, then a video game, then a zoological odyssey that I don’t even know how to adequately condense and communicate with words but it is amazing. The series tackles many stories, large and small, over the extent of its run, unified by the inclusion of at least a couple of these four characters, and these stories expand the series’ genre, tone and thematic specialties tenfold. It is the beginning of Hunter x Hunter, the mere stepping stone for the entire journey to come.
The Hunter Exam itself is only the first arc of Hunter x Hunter, taking up approximately the first twenty episodes, of which there are one hundred and forty-eight (forty-six if you skip the recap), and that is because the Hunter Exam is not Hunter x Hunter. (They are somewhat similar to Mass Effect’s Spectres, if you are familiar with that series.) Hunters are licensed by the international Hunter Association, which allows them to go almost anywhere and do almost anything in their pursuit of knowledge and glory. The titular Hunters of Hunter x Hunter are elite individuals with incredible physical prowess, a myriad of strange abilities and an unquenching thirst for adventure. Once I got started, it did not take long to finish. Nonetheless, in mid-March of this year, I decided to finally bite the bullet and see what this Hunter x Hunter business is all about. The vast majority of series I’ve seen would fall into the one or two cour camp, with hardly any at all being more than four. But, I don’t make it a habit of watching long anime. It is for this reason I tried out Gintama a little over a year ago, and well, we all know how that turned out. However, sometimes there comes along a series that is so popular and so acclaimed, despite its length, it is nearly impossible to ignore. Time is limited and it can be hard to convince yourself that long anime are worth watching when you could consume three or four shorter ones in relatively the same amount of time. For me and likely many others, once a series is over a certain length, the prospect of even just actually starting it seems insurmountable.