Oh yeah, that’s absolutely the way to keep the tension
mounting in your huge shonen war epic. The heroes can just walk out of this
dangerous occupied territory and take their time, sparring against a schmuck
with a pompadour who was very probably trained by Dan Hibiki. Give that five
episodes worth of space. It’ll really escalate the sense of danger.
This was the first time I gave in to the temptation to fast forward. I
put the player on 8X speed and watched 110 odds minutes of redundancies fly by.
It was wonderful. Like I unlocked some Nen ability. I read some plot summaries afterward, to make sure I didn’t miss anything
important and - - nope! - - there was nothing in the actual show itself
which wasn’t adequately covered in the micro recaps at the top of each episode.
“Greed Island” may have explicitly tried to be a like a video game, but
this is the first time I’ve run into an arc (or ‘mini-arc’ or whatever)
which felt exactly like playing some inconsequential side quest in an RPG. Need
to get your XP up for the next level? Here, go chat up the NPC with the pompadour
and grind on some little challenges that have no bearing on the rest of the
story.
When I first started writing for this site, I had trouble wrapping my
head around the notion of ‘filler.’ I don’t care if this is portion is
beat-for-beat from the manga: every second of screentime concerned with Knuckle and Shoot is textbook filler. It’s stuffing in the turkey, fat on the steak - -
padding that creates the illusion that a weekly serial has got a story to tell,
week to week.
Yes, I know that you all warned me about this. I still like HUNTER X
HUNTER, on the whole, but - - I can’t believe I’m actually saying this now
- - but you really do have to power through the bland parts to get to the juicy parts. And, good lord, was this bland...
Don't even bother watching these episodes. Just read my comments on the previous episode and skip ahead in the arc.
About the Author
 | Tom Pinchuk’s a writer and personality with a large number of comics, videos and features like this to his credit. Visit his website - - tompinchuk.com - - and follow his Twitter: @tompinchuk |
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