Just finished binge watching the show over the past month. Loved it for the most part. I liked how fast the pace was in the first ~70 episodes and the relatively minimal use of exposition and narration. The sense of adventure and lack of traditional shonen tropes (main character gets hyped up and beats the bad guy, then another stronger bad guy shows up for him to beat) was refreshing. Id say the hunter exam, phantom troupe, and greed island were my favorite arcs in that order.
Obviously, the chimera ant arc is the elephant in the room since it takes up almost half the show. I thought it had a lot of great stuff, like mereum's arc.I actually teared up at the end of that. Never cried watching an anime before. And most the characters introduced were great. Only problem I had was that the pacing was REALLY slow at times. I swear there were a few episodes where the narrator had more dialogue than all the other characters combined, and over half the animation was still images. I understand that there was like 6 things happening all at the same time in the span of 5 minutes but you didn't have to slow it down to the point where you're explaining about the nuances of everyones emotions and thoughts when its easy to figure that stuff out yourself. And before that there was too much buildup for the infiltration to the kings palace and too much focus on side fights and planning. I feel like chimera ant arc could have been shrunk down from 60 episodes to 40-30 and have been much better for it. Also gon going super saiyan was a little weird but I feel like the trade off of him almost dying because of it made it more acceptable for me. Interested in what exactly happened to him cause it didn't seem like normal aura.
Outside of that, the show was great. I loved the main group and wished they were together more. There's probably not going to be more anime episodes for a very long time if I understand the manga situation correctly but I feel like it had a satisfying ending so it doesn't bother me really.
