Creator: Yoshihiro Togashi
Publisher: Viz
Age Rating: Older Teen
Genre: Action
RRP: $7.99
Hunter x Hunter v14
Reviewed by Michael Aronson

“The multi-trillionaire Battera hires Gon and Killua to play the Greed Island video game for him, just as the two had hoped. But when they enter the game and head to a nearby town, they stumble onto the game’s dark secret. Greed Island isn’t just a game – it has real-life consequences that can spell life or death for the players involved. And it isn’t long before the Spiders enter the game themselves!”

Are you familiar with Death Note, one of Hunter x Hunter’s peers under the Shonen Jump Advanced line? One of Death Note’s defining characteristics is a lengthy set of rules that describe what can and cannot be done with the titular Death Note, and the story then integrates these rules into the flow of events.

Now, I’m not familiar with the usual status quo in Hunter x Hunter, but judging from how they enter the Greed Island video game for the first time in this volume, I’ll wager that the setting and stakes this time out are all new. As such, and to make the Death Note comparison relevant, Gon and Killua are introduced to the game via a tutorial by a resident gamer – except that it takes half the volume to explain all the rules, such that the real story begins far too late to recapture my drifted attention. Worse, the game in question is a card game, one in which cards are used to cast spells on other players as a tactic to capture other people’s cards. So it’s a manga about boys inside a card-capturing video game. It’s as painful as it sounds.

I feel bad that I’m not familiar with the usual goings on of this series, as the latter half of the volume hints at a typical youth-trains-via-fighting-to-realize-full-potential quest. That doesn’t fill me with much more enthusiasm, but it has to be better than what’s presented here. For god’s sake, there are four complete pages of rule description text. It’s more like reading a manual than a story. I have to admit, however, that despite the dry material, the dialogue keeps the flow of information in a steady progression and reads pretty well. If this is nothing but a saggy lull in the quality of the series, then it may be one regular readers can navigate through fairly painlessly. It certainly isn’t a good place for new readers to jump in, and I can’t say with much conviction that there’s any reason to start from the beginning either.

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6 October 2009
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