The final phase of the Exam gets underway, but it’s not what anyone expected.
What They Say:
Gon and his friends have advanced to the final phase of the Hunter Exam. The final phase is a tournament where the winners are out and the losers advance. The rule is that if you kill your opponent, you’ll be disqualified. The first mach is Gon versus Hanzo. Gon can’t do anything against Hanzo, but he refuses to give up. Hanzo is losing his patience and threatens to break Gon’s arm.
The Review:
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
With the island hunting match done and the Chairman having gone through some interesting one on one interviews with the final applicants, the show is moving to its last stage of the Hunter Exam where the Chairman has come up with a real doozy in order to test them since so many have made it to this point. While we’ve seen some excellent skills out of this group that’s made it to this stage, seeing them being put into a tournament mode is a bit worrying. But what the Chairman has done is to create a reverse tournament where the winner of the matches as they go along is eliminated with being told they pass. The matches work towards the inevitable end where it’s one against one and a single person will not pass the Exam overall. One win along the way and you’re saved. It’s a fun way to go about it and puts the pressure on the losers repeatedly.
The rules are fairly basic overall though they do work things so that killing your opponent would disqualify you, so that helps to ratchet down the intensity a bit, especially considering Hisoka and the pinhead guy and their general level of danger. What makes this kind of tournament so much fun at this stage is that we do have a good variety of characters that have made it, including our four leads, and most of them are ones that you can generally root for on some level to survive and do well, wanting to see them pass. But knowing that one will be eliminated makes you wonder which of them will be taken out. And just how quickly those we really care about will win their matches and pass this phase of the Exam. You want to see it done quickly but you also know that such things don’t always happen as we want them.
The opening match is a pretty engaging one with Gon being involved, which is a bit of a surprise as you’d expect him to be held back a bit to let some of the others get things running. His opponent in Hanzo definitely gives him a challenge though and that’s a fairly consistent theme throughout the series so far in that while Gon has a natural talent, he’s not the master of everything and there are those stronger and more experienced than him. But he has plenty of instincts that helps to give him an advantage and it’s watching him use those skills to survive while still being pragmatic that makes it just a treat to watch. And when you consider that he’s gone up against Hisoka and managed to gain his respect and hope for the future in a fight, it says a lot about what he’s capable of. And then getting to see him deal with others with very different styles of fighting on serves to show why.
In Summary:
The series continues to move at a very good pace even with the whole tournament/exam aspect feeling like it might be going on too long for some. Compared to the previous series, it’s nothing though. This part moves us on to the next round of things and it’s pretty fun to watch as the reverse tournament is set up and we get an almost comical and dangerous match between Gon and Hanzo that doesn’t go quite as one would expect. The final phase of the Exam may not be quite the same as what we’ve seen before in the series with the various phases, but it’s one that definitely has a lot of appeal since we get to focus on a smaller pool of characters and understand them more. Very fun and good stuff.
Grade: B+
Readers Rating: [ratings]
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.
