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I really wanted to like this one because I keep seeing cool battle scenes. I started reading this after Naruto ended and dropped it around chapter 100, couldn't why. Recently I decided to give the anime a chance and restarted from ep 1 this time. I just finished ep 60 and I have to say I can't force myself to sit through this anymore.

Every character is a very one-dimensional anime trope whose entire personality can genuinely be summed up in a single photograph of the character. One-dimensional tropes are fine in the beginning as long as the characters continue to grow in complexity and ... nuance but each time the author attempts to expand on a character the backstory or development is shallow and even hollow leaving you wishing for more interesting material to care about.

Asta: The main character's personality is a marriage of Naruto and Rock Lee(with little more than the worst of both of them), and the offensive repertoire of Kenpachi Zaraki(he has two attacks). I'd say he is overly optimistic but to be real, he hasn't taken a single L this entire show. He has no business defeating anyone he's fought, and yet he comes out on top every time. His training does not appear to be anything besides push-ups, sit-ups, pull-ups and swinging a sword from above his head to the ground. This would be entertaining if the show used this trope in a comedic sense like One Punch Man does, but it seems to be as serious as a Naruto Talk-no-jutsu, BELIEVE IT!
While his swordsmanship is mediocre, his ability is unique in this world. His swords have the ability to nullify any and all magic. And in a world where magic is everything, this turns out to be pretty overpowered. With nothing but physical strength and a pair of magic-nullifying swords he is able to defeat enemies said to be many times more powerful and intricate as he is. None of his injuries amount to anything at all. Even the time his arms are diagnosed as irreparable, he quickly and easily regains the full ability to use them within days, using an instantaneous healing spell from the Queen of Witches.

Yuno: The other "main" character, or rival, is written pretty unremarkably as well. The quiet, pretty boy who is astonishingly overpowered thanks to fate, s the best group due to his God-given abilities. Basically he's a more quiet Asta. Interestingly, he has yet to turn "evil" but with the amount of tropes in this show I wouldn't be surprised. The only time he ever does anything interesting is when Asta is involved. Contrary to Asta, everything comes easy to him as he gets power-up after power-up which isn't exactly a bad thing but we never see him earn any his power. He just re-emerges in the story stronger or more recognized than ever(like Gary Oak) This is a bigger problem with the whole show.

The ing characters are not as generic but quite one-dimensional. I will not get into all of them as this is getting long but 1 major issue is that virtually every female character in the series is the same person: outwardly mad at a man but secretly crushing on him*yawn*.

The animation can get good at moments during fights but a shocking % of the budget must go to animating comedic moments that are repetitive and stale by episode 10 at the latest. These moments of good animation really only seem to happen when we are watching a fight between two characters vastly superior to the main characters in strength. An 'Ooooo' 'Ahhhhhhhh' approach. Sadly none of the main characters moments get the same level of animation as the Big Boys fighting.

I need to go to the gym at this point so I'm going to stop this review here. To summarize there is nothing that this show does that is remarkable and you can certainly find many anime out there that do every one of these tropes better. I mean I'm 60 episodes in and I don't care for anyone. By episode 60 One Piece had told far less story but made you care infinitely more about the world, the journey, and it's characters.

"I can see people calling it a fun guilty pleasure, but one of the highest ranked anime of all time is a catastrophic crime"

Hunter X Hunter 2011 is one I have heard of for years. In fact I caught up to the manga many years ago during one of the many hiatuses. I thinking the manga was pretty good. Anyway my brother told me it was his favorite anime. He is not usually into anime so I thought it would be a great thing for us to bond over if I watched it again. And so I started.

At first things seemed good, ... Gon and Killua, Kurapika, and Leorio and the rest of the cast seemed interesting. The world intrigued me. The Hunter Exam was fun. The Zoldycks were cool and even the arena was kind of entertaining. Yorknew was fine. Greed island was fun though a little elementary. But more and more flaws started standing out to me. In the storytelling, the ability to utilize multiple characters at a time, to give a compelling story without insulting your audience or pulling bs. I stopped caring for any of the characters pretty early as they just didn't feel worthy of investment or all that compelling. I mean Leorio is maybe in 10 episodes and yet you can tell he's considered a main character. It felt like an anime for 10 year olds the way characters speak and act at times.

Every arc drags just a little more than the last one until the chimera ant just puts you to sleep with an asmr narrarator who needs to recap for 5 minutes what you just saw 2 minutes of in real time. I am sure people hear a lot of negatives about the chimera ant arc and think, "It's just one arc it can't sink the whole series". Unfortunately, Chimera ant is nearly 50% of the entire anime runtime. It is horrendously long and dragged out. It dragged more than the 4th great shinobi war, which had dozens of more characters to balance to flush out and was about 4 times longer.

Ultimately Id give the first few arcs a generous 6.5-7 but the Chimera ant arc should have been a 7 if it was 1/3 its length. Unfortunately for that I have to take off 3 points for 40 episodes that felt like someone put me in time-out. When nearly half of the anime is a 4/10 I can't really justify more than a 5.

All in all, Hunter x Hunter is the single most overhyped anime I've ever seen.

I fell asleep to it many times, which is very unusual and I had to force myself to start the next episode on multiple occasions just because I wanted to talk to my brother. It felt awful. It has it's moments but they are very far between and don't justify themselves when there is so much better out there.