What They Say:
Gon and his friends have teamed up with Hisoka and Goreinu to challenge Razor again. To round out the party, they recruit Team Tsezgerra. Their preparations allow them to breeze through the first few matches, but then Razor challenges them to a game of dodgeball.
The Review:
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
Bringing in Hisoka and his brand of lies and subversive is certainly and amusing twist to things, but it was expected that he’d get involved at some point once we saw him get involved in the game itself. With a few carefully worded lines about what the Phantom Troupe is up to, he’s engaged Gon and Killua in a good way so that he can use them for his own goals while still having a bit of fun. We got to see early on just how manipulative he’s going to be when it comes to them and the game with how he tweaked his cards in order to show them only what he wanted to. Hisoka has long been a favorite of mine because of his style and personality, so even though he’s not always a positive for Gon and the others, he makes for some engaging scenes.
With Hisoka on the team temporarily, and all of them now having teamed up with Goreinu as well, they’ve spent a week trying to figure out how to get past what Razor is doing to get the card they need. To beef things up, they also brought in Tsezgerra and his group and run numerous simulations so they can figure out the best approach for dealing with the range of activities that Razor will throw at them from their “castle up on high” that they operate out of. The matches are fairly fun to watch since they’re streamlined here after getting the knowledge we had from the previous encounter here and that lets events move forward quickly to the more important matches as things get closer and tenser. Which leads to the most difficult and dangerous game of all – dodgeball.
What becomes interesting is that we learn the real truth of what this team is all about as the reveal of where the game truly takes place comes out, making it all the more dangerous in a way. That gets Gon all excited since it means there’s a chance his father may really be here, but revealing that has Razor intent on taking him down because of his past with him. With some renewed incentives, and a smaller team to go up against Razor’s side in this, we get a few minutes of some pretty intense dodgeball (though I still think the live action Dodgeball movie is even more intense), but it’s fun to see how it all plays out as they take it seriously and fight in this particular way.
In Summary:
Hunter x Hunter has some fun things going on here, though it’s varied in what actually works. The dodgeball aspect of it could have been better since it was a lot of dialogue and posturing rather than action, but it does have some good bits as Hisoka gets into it. The big reveal of the episode is what works in its favor as Gon and the others learn the truth about Greed Island and that will certainly change how they interact with things now that it’s not what they thought it was. Going back up against Razor was expected to be sure and there was some fun in how it all came together, though they lost a lot of their team pretty quickly as things turned serious A lot of what we get here is just bringing together certain personalities to work together for a bit going forward more than anything else, plus the reveal. It all just made me wish for more with the dodgeball itself.
Grade: B-
Streamed By: Crunchyroll
Review Equipment:
Sony KDS-R70XBR2 70″ LCoS 1080P HDTV, Dell 10.1 Netbook via HDMI set to 1080p, Onkyo TX-SR605 Receiver and Panasonic SB-TP20S Multi-Channel Speaker System With 100-Watt Subwoofer.
