I’m afraid to say it, but this episode was won by the first Hunter X Hunter series. It’s here where the difference in direction and acting unfortunately worked against this series’ favour. The difference is very much in the details, but there are a lot of details here that when stacked up, unfortunately weigh this episode down quite a bit.
First of all there’s that character design of the female prisoner. That was just… way too much. The whole mind game between her and Leorio had much less impact due to Leorio’s overacting. Then there are these details like when Leorio had to grope the girl to confirm whether she told the truth: there they came up with a creative way to censor it. Here, it’s just the same. Or take the part where the ninja manages to finish the trial: the joke the first series had there, with Hisoka and that other guy, worked much better.
Killua’s match was the real downer, though. This is supposed to be one of the worst mass murderers out there. Why then did they play this cheesy rock tune when they explained who he was? The gore was toned down, showing that while this show is willing to get quite gory, it won’t cross the usual borders. There, that scene really made impact, but here it just lacked something.
The strange thing about the music of this series: it’s composed by Hirano Yoshihisa. This guy is usually awesome. He composed the soundtracks for Himitsu, Real Drive, Death Note and the Book of Bantorra. It would have been great to hear his epic and experimental style here, but it really doesn’t sound like he’s trying for this series. What gives?
Rating: * (Good)
The first half of this episode, I think it actually worked better than in the first series. It was simple and more to the point, just like Gon really. It had a nice build-up of “oh, this is going to take forever”, only to solve things in minutes afterwards. Although, Gon’s voice actress was trying a bit too hard again in this episode. It’s mostly her range. She’s very easy in just yelling all of her lines.
The second half however… it was a bit of a mess. And it’s not the pacing really. When you just look at pacing, then the new series is actually better than the first. It’s just that the voice acting is so much, much worse. The voice actors are trying too hard and especially the blue guy (why is he suddenly bright blue?) was hamming it up. Compare that to the first season, which had fantastic voice acting and which had voice actors who knew exactly when they should be subtle, and when to raise their voices.
What’s even worse is that we suddenly got to see entire inner monologues of that blue guy, which killed off all of the tension that was there already. It added some nonsensical stuff, while it cut out the stuff that made him quite charming (like the way in which he broke his fist, for example). Also, I’m surprised here: the way in which he refused to wake up, was actually a filler of the first season? I really would not have guessed. That really was something good they added back there.
And then there was Kurapika, who really managed to save this half when he saw the spider. It again suffers a bit too much from acting too hard when compared to the first series, but the moment where Kurapika got his red eyes: that was just wonderful. It wasn’t just a great scene. It also showed that the creators here know how to deliver the darker scenes.
Overall I’m quite positive of this series so far. The creators might actually nail it. However, there is one character who I’m positive that they’re going to ruin if they keep going on like this: Senritsu. I won’t say why, for the sake of the people who aren’t familiar with Hunter X Hunter, but I really cannot imagine her with the current focus on overacting from this series.
Rating: * (Good)]]> 
… just get on with it already!
Seriously, the pacing of this series is terrible. We’re already struggling to put a 80-hour game into just 26 episodes, and here this episode decides to go and waste time on nothing but teenaged antics and even throws the girls into swimsuits. I mean heck: if you’re going to waste time, at least do it in an interesting way. Why does everything have to be teenaged antics that we’ve seen hundreds of times before? Seriously people, jokes about how girls are bad cooks have been done countless of times before. It’s not funny anymore.
One of the two sole salvations of this episode was that finally Seiji Kishi put his act together and at least delivered a bunch of jokes that actually made me laugh. About three times near the end of the episode. That in no way makes up for the obnoxious rest of this episode. So in the end, the only thing that I again can praise is the camera guy here. This show looks unique and the camera angles show it.
Look, for my preview of the upcoming winter season, I complained relatively little about how there’s nothing but teenagers there. This is because there have been plenty of series about teenagers that were really good. The thing however, is that these series are great for a reason. Just stuffing in random teenaged antics and just hoping that it’ll work somehow… that just doesn’t work.
Because this show won the contest, I’m stuck with it at least until the end of the year, but this has been the worst show that you ever forced me to blog. Even including Kimi ni Todoke. At least that show was well acted.
Rating: – (Disappointing)]]> 
The beauty of Hunter X Hunter: most other shounen heroes would probably have died by now if they also would have taken the exam. The start of this episode deliberately took its time, to show how stupid it is to just rush in without any idea of what you’re up against. Also, it’s interesting to see that the pacing has slowed down tremendously here: in this episode they only got to wrap up the fight with Tonpa. I think that in two weeks, we’ll get to the point in which the original series really caught my eye. That will be the point to see whether this series did a good job in building up.
As for the Tonpa-fight though, that is unfortunately something that the first series did better. This is because Tonpa already revealed himself to be a total bastard during the running exam. Everyone knew that he shouldn’t be trusted, and that made for a very awkward episode when they learned they had to work together with him. In this episode though, we had Leorio yell at him for no possible reason. At this point they had no reason to really distrust Tonpa, as the only one who realized the nature of the laxative was Killua. And perhaps Gon, if he put 2 and 2 together in his head about the laxative and the frog.
Still the crowning moment of this episode still did work. The point where Killua revealed the big prisoner’s strategy was just wonderfully done. It was hilarious, but at the same time it just showed how easily you can screw up in this series. And that’s also the beauty of the fights in this tower: they’re not just “spam powers and punches until the other side goes down”. No, the characters really have to use their heads here.
Rating: ** (Excellent)]]> 
Um… seriously? Was last week really all just building up… to this? Did I really want to see that?
Ah well. Seiji Kishi remains a comedy director, so at least he’d know how to deal with a chapter like this week. This episode was more interesting than the previous ones, because finally it did something unexpected and went away from its formula. This episode was fun in a weird way, and at least I like that the cast of main characters will be increasing with every persona that gets defeated, rather than just never mentioning them again like I first though.
But even then, this episode was strangely underwhelming in its execution. I mean, I know Seiji Kishi. I have seen many of his other works, and his comedy has this very distinctive style that relies on strong comedic timing and hard punchlines. This episode instead was a mess in terms of timing. The events didn’t flow into each other at all, and this episode would have been greatly improved if Seiji Kishi used his experience in actually timing this thing properly. It’s not even about the jerky animation: he directed Tentai Senshi Sunred for god’s sake.
It’s again the fault of this show trying to be too faithful to the original game. That’s not going to work. I know that everyone keeps going on about being faithful and all, but game adaptations NEED to have some freedom if they want to succeed on their own. They’re not like manga where you can just copy and paste a bunch of panels and get things over with.
The one praise that I do have for this series: whoever is in charge of the photographic direction really knows what he’s doing here. This show has some very good looking shots and camera angles and while it’s a pity that this constrains the actual animation a bit too much, it nevertheless looks very good.
Rating: (Enjoyable)]]> 
Here’s the strange thing with this series: at first you’d think that they’d try to rush through the first material Brotherhood-style in order to get to the new parts… only for the pacing to slow down significantly afterwards. This episode? It was just about Gon and Killua playing a game with the hunter exam chief. With this pacing, I assume that the creators are aiming to make every episode significantly different from the other, so that every week will be a different experience. Or at least that seems to be the plan until the arcs get longer.
The result is a bit strange. In this way, some chapters are rushed through (most notably this is what happened last week, but also the first episode had this), while others really take their time, like this one. I mean, next week will be completely different, and this episode just consisted out of the characters killing time before it happens. Less than 50% of the episode was spent on some very good characterization. The rest, more than 10 minutes, was spent on a simple game. If the creators wanted, they could have done this in about half an episode by clever cutting and pasting, however I do like the charms of this episode. Building up is always tricky to not drag on, but this episode had a very nice “calm before the storm”-atmosphere that is very different from the norm.
The standout point of this episode however was near the end, when Killua gave up and ran into those two guys. That was the proof that the creators have no intention to tone down the gore in this series and are not afraid at all to make it dive into the darker parts of the story. Now, all that I want to see is hints that they also plan the same with the dialogue. Meticulously detailed dialogue is pretty much a requirement for the Yorkshin arc.
Rating: * (Good)]]> 
You know, I’ve seen a lot of people badmouth the first Persona anime (Trinity Soul), but when comparing the first six episodes of both that show and this series, I really have to say that I prefer Trinity Soul over Persona 4. And considering how that series really took its time to get going, compared this show’s rush to skip those boring parts, that’s not a very good sign.
I mean, series like No.6 and C may have been rushed, but that’s nothing compared to the utter speed at which this show is rushing through its stories. This episode blasted through eighteen days at once. That’s more than half a month’s worth of content. My biggest gripe with it however was that it didn’t really make use of its time. This episode was supposed to be about this typical tough guy with a heart of gold, but by the end of the episode we hardly saw anything of him, and most of the airtime here was spent on random hijinks and characters goofing off. It’s a bad sign that the thing that caught my attention the most was a “s bad it’s good”-scene. The chase scene was funny, but part of it was because how badly it was animated and acted.
Also, did the creators just skip a scene in the TV-world completely, only to pull a Tsubasa Chronicle and talk about that moment in flashbacks? Someone, please tell me that I have not been paying attention in the first four episodes. Pulling such a twist makes this just a show to please the fans. As someone who is trying to get into the story without having played the games, I feel more and more left out.
I can only imagine the games, in which that fighting dude probably did not come off as just another carbon copy of the tough character who actually likes cute stuff. I can only imagine how fun the games can be, where you’re just running around town and try to meet all of the characters at your own freedom. This isn’t a compilation of a game though. This needs to be a standalone story. Compressing a large story into a much smaller anime format has of course been done many times before, but it’s been a while since I’ve seen such a jarring cut-and-paste job.
Rating: – (Disappointing)]]> 
Well, it had it coming. This just is an episode that you just need to sit through. Even in the original series, it was by far the most out of place story of the entire series. It is a necessary one, because it showed a completely different side of Hunters than what we’ve seen so far (compared to for example Ninjas, who only do ninja stuff, or shinigami, who only fight dead guys for example). This world building is essential for Hunter X Hunter, but there is also a matter of storytelling: making the story you’re trying to tell interesting and enjoyable to watch. And that’s where this story just put too little attention in.
If this is how they did it in the manga, then I can understand the fillers that the first series used. In the first series, this exam was split in two parts: the pig catching was the task for the fat dude, while the girl’s task was to make sushi. The way they did it at least made this story more bearable and interesting because how only one examinee knew what the hell it was supposed to be anyway. That at least made part of this episode fun and diverse.
Also, Hirano Aya is turning into another Kugimiya Rie and Yukari Tamura: most characters she voices are made much more annoying than what they could have been, just doe to her voice.
Some more notes about this episode:
– Even the animators realized that this episode was just something that had to happen, because they put in no effort at all.
– The second part still had this “we depend on the knowledge of just one examinee to get everyone through”-bit.
– This episode did nail Todo, even though he had less screentime.
– What he hell happened to Hisoka?
Rating: – (Disappointing)]]> 
This episode was… annoying. In fact, I didn’t enjoy it at all, and I can only hope that the next people that the male lead runs into will be better.
I have no idea why this show suddenly decided that it wanted to be a high school romance for one episode. I mean, that is a really tricky genre to get right: it’s overcrowded and the competition there is huge, and this wasn’t really the best type of execution. I can see how the story of this episode would have worked on paper. Heck, the protagonist here actually got himself a girlfriend, though completely platonic. That already brings him further than 90% of all other male leads. But the delivery of this episode was just bland.
Also, I know that the people from AIC aren’t the best animators, but at least have them try to put a bit of believable emotions into its characters. I mean, there are more studios that have acting problems, for example Madhouse, but at least they try to actually emote their characters, even though they lack the budget for it. Aside from a picture, the male lead in this episode only showed two emotions: bland neutral and badly animated bland embarrassed. It just… did not work. The gimmick of this show is that this guy’s personality grows based on these game-like traits. I’m not seeing that.
There are a lot of these teenaged high school shows that start off promising… only to devolve into badly told stories that don’t go anywhere. Especially the past winter season left me a bad impression with series like this, and this episode was really starting to show the first hints of the likes of Kore wa Zombie, Dragon Crisis and Yumekui Merry. Please let it get better instead of dabbling on in mediocrity like this! The past winter season was bad enough, and I don’t want to lose even more patience than I already have.
Rating: – (Disappointing)]]>