Of all the anime properties that could get a fighting game adaptation, Hunter x Hunter never really seemed like the most logical choice to me. While the iconic manga & anime series is technically full of fights and has a pretty prominent tournament arc, the characters, their abilities and behaviours in that series rarely play out in a traditional hot-blooded action atmosphere. It’s a series focused a bit more on heart and mind-games than pure battles. Hunter x Hunter: Nen x Impact doesn’t just fail to feel like a fitting extension of the original franchise because of this, but it fails to feel like a properly satisfying fighting game all together.
In Hunter x Hunter: Nen x Impact, you engage in 3v3 team battles that a reminiscent of the team’s previous work on Marvel VS Capcom 3. Unfortunately, the combo depth and the team variety that helped make that game so iconic isn’t present here at all. Hunter x Hunter has just 16 playable characters, which wouldn’t be a small roster for a mechanically rich 1 on 1 fighting game, but limits your team options in a 3v3 fighter. Each of these characters is pretty varied, as they each have access to unique methods of attack and special abilities that tap into their iconic toolkits from the original series. Unfortunately, the oversimplified control scheme for the game ends up eschewing a lot of this variety entirely.
Traditional motion inputs are gone entirely in Hunter x Hunter: Nen x Impact. Instead, you have single-button inputs that are either paired with a held shoulder button for auto-combos or with single directional buttons for specific attack variants. It’s a unique system for fighting game inputs to be sure, but I don’t really think it’s unique for any sake besides being different. The simplified directionals don’t fully solve any particular issue – they might not be as complicated as a quarter-circle mechanically, but they feel equally strange to string together in quick succession.
Alongside those quirks, your active time to string together a combo in this game feels so much longer than most other fighting games. Hit a character, and they stay in a stunned and floaty state long enough for you to chain together some exceedingly broken combos and infinites. In theory, I imagine these choices in design were intended to make the game approachable for casual players and newcomers to the genre. In practice, they lead to a low skill-ceiling, limited character variety, and pretty mindless matches.
Mindless fun isn’t necessarily a bad thing, as long as there are satisfying avenues to have that fun in. But there’s sadly a lack of modes in Hunter x Hunter: Nen x Impact, making a bad situation even worse. Story mode is nothing but blurry anime screenshots strung together by unvoiced textbox dialogue. All these scenes lead to bespoke battles that are, maddeningly, 1-on-1 encounters instead of the 3v3 setup of the rest of the game. The mode does a really great job of teaching you the mechanics of the game, but once you’re done with it, there’s nowhere else to take that knowledge besides an Arcade mode or online play. Good luck finding anyone to battle in that online arena, though. This game practically launched with a dead playerbase, and there hasn’t been any swing in word-of-mouth or community activity that’s changed that for the better. If you pick this game up, expect it to be for local play entirely.
