It’s been years, now. The last Greed Island OVA was back in early 2004, and since then the mangaka Togashi has (supposedly) suffered a mental breakdown - producing only half a story arc in the last seven years. Most of the younger crowd of anime fans now probably don’t even realise that once, HunterXHunter was considered the third of Shounen Jump’s ‘big three’, and probably more major than Naruto was. Bleach didn’t even get a look in.
The anime reached 62 episodes and would have run longer, but they were running out of manga material. What they would do now would be to start endless horrible filler and ruin the series’ reputation. Instead, Nippon Animation came up with a cleverer idea. They stopped the series and instead, produced a lot of OVAs. The impression we all had at the time was that they would finish the Greed Island arc, and then when the Soldier Ants arc finished, more OVAs would come.
But then the manga became a disaster. Artwork became mere scribbles, and Togashi’s little ‘breaks’ became months long – and then years. It wasn’t worth animating half an arc, so the series ended – and quite possibly the end of its relevance is why shows now don’t go down the route of stopping for a while and then resuming, resulting in Naruto and Bleach becoming jokes (though Bleach actually has some pretty good filler), and One Piece ending up with absurdly long intro sequences. And when Naruto recycles concepts from HunterXHunter, most of its fandom doesn’t even know.
It’s sad, because HunterXHunter is great shounen. It follows a young boy called Gon as he joins the Hunter Organisation to find his father. He was always strong, but even in the entrance test he finds people far, far in advance of him. Nonetheless he makes some close friends, and together they get ever stronger, and he inches closer and closer to his father – as well as helping his close friends.
As with Naruto, the best characters come from the mysterious criminal organisation who exist on the periphery of the story. Unlike in Naruto, they don’t end up all getting defeated absurdly easily and ultimately seem like very little threat after all. They’re also a good deal more eccentric, although possibly Bonorenof was a step too far in the end. Still, the only real shame about the Soldier Ant arc not getting animated is that some superb chapters with them never got shown in motion.
I still hold out some tiny hope that HunterXHunter will have a renaissance, one final arc…but realistically, the manga is going to finally end in a real shambles, the anime will never enjoy the advances of the last few years in animation techniques, and ultimately what was one of the very biggest shows around will fade into obscurity. Which is a shame, because at its best it was as good as anything else in Jump, and probably carries the torch of Dragonball better than any other. That said, it was the last arc that resembled Dragonball most closely, and that may just be the arc that signalled the series’ death knell. Too bad.
(A few months later I was proven wrong as HunterXHunter got a reboot)
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