Saturday, March 12, 2016

Hunter X Hunter 23



Hunter X Hunter, Volume 23 has the heroes entering East Gorteau to attack the Chimera Ant King.  The Chimera Ants absorb the attributes of creatures they've eaten.  First, they eat pirates at Neo Green Life, becoming intelligent, disorganized, and evil.  Then, they eat humans with powerful auras, becoming unstoppable.  Killua is in pitched battle with an octopus creature that wants to be a squid creature, who he befriends.  Hunter X Hunter is so weird, so convoluted, so complex, and so awesome that it's hard to put down.  There is a strange consistency to it, with its nen, its ren, and its aura.  What will Killua do when his opponents have the ultimate nen ability, a game of darts?

The "Chimera Ant" arc stretches from Volume 18 to Volume 30, a total of 13 volumes, of which Volume 23 is the sixth.  What makes Hunter X Hunter unique is how it mixes the playful with the serious.  There are a lot of games in this series, from chess and go to Greed Island and Gungi, Gungi being a made-up game for this arc which the Chimera Ant King plays with a blind girl.  It's a three-dimensional chess/checkers game that even the King cannot master.

Hunter X Hunter is inventive and engrossing.  Gungi seems like so much nonsense at first, but what makes it so intriguing is how the Chimera Ant King is obsessed by it after easily mastering difficult games like chess and go, defeating East Gorteau's champions in those respective games after playing for a few hours.  The King comes off as the super-genius he is, but when a blind savant goes after him in Gungi, he's mystified.

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