A Glass of Water Tells You Who You Are
The Hexagon Chart
Hunter x Hunter
ハンター×ハンター
Action
Adventure
Martial Arts
Fantasy
Details & Synopsis
Gon Freecss is twelve years old and lives on Whale Island with his aunt, who tells him his parents are dead. They are not. His father, Ging Freecss, is one of the greatest Hunters alive, and he left Gon behind to be one. Gon decides to become a Hunter too. Not to confront him. Not out of anger. Out of curiosity. He wants to understand what was worth more than he was.
This is the emotional engine that drives everything. The show never loses it even when the scale inflates to something unrecognizable from that island and that question.
Based on Yoshihiro Togashi's manga and produced by Nippon Animation, Hunter x Hunter aired on Fuji Television from 1999 to 2001. Sixty-two television episodes. The Hunter Exam that opens the series is one of the great gauntlets in shonen anime, brutal, inventive, and built to introduce the cast through situation rather than exposition. Killua Zoldyck walks into it from an entirely different world than Gon and the contrast between them, the boy who was loved too freely and the boy who was never loved at all, is the real subject of the series.
The Nen system, aura categories, hatsu types, the specific logic of how will and personality shape power, is the most carefully engineered ability framework the genre had seen to that point. It rewards attention. It punishes shortcuts. Nippon Animation kept pace with Togashi's serialization as long as it could, but the manga's recurring hiatuses eventually caught up to the show. The Yorknew City arc, and the Phantom Troupe conflict at its center, is still unfolding when the series ends on episode 62. There is no finale. There is a cliffhanger, and then nothing, because that is genuinely where the anime stopped.
The 1999 version is darker and slower than the 2011 Madhouse remake. Both are legitimate. This one came first, and it is the version the fansub community built itself around before HxH became a property anyone outside of dedicated anime spaces had heard of.
This is the emotional engine that drives everything. The show never loses it even when the scale inflates to something unrecognizable from that island and that question.
Based on Yoshihiro Togashi's manga and produced by Nippon Animation, Hunter x Hunter aired on Fuji Television from 1999 to 2001. Sixty-two television episodes. The Hunter Exam that opens the series is one of the great gauntlets in shonen anime, brutal, inventive, and built to introduce the cast through situation rather than exposition. Killua Zoldyck walks into it from an entirely different world than Gon and the contrast between them, the boy who was loved too freely and the boy who was never loved at all, is the real subject of the series.
The Nen system, aura categories, hatsu types, the specific logic of how will and personality shape power, is the most carefully engineered ability framework the genre had seen to that point. It rewards attention. It punishes shortcuts. Nippon Animation kept pace with Togashi's serialization as long as it could, but the manga's recurring hiatuses eventually caught up to the show. The Yorknew City arc, and the Phantom Troupe conflict at its center, is still unfolding when the series ends on episode 62. There is no finale. There is a cliffhanger, and then nothing, because that is genuinely where the anime stopped.
The 1999 version is darker and slower than the 2011 Madhouse remake. Both are legitimate. This one came first, and it is the version the fansub community built itself around before HxH became a property anyone outside of dedicated anime spaces had heard of.
Alt Title
ハンター×ハンター
Studio
Nippon Animation
Network
Fuji Television
Aired
1999 - 2001
Episodes
62
Genre
Action, Adventure, Martial Arts, Fantasy
Status
Completed
The Six Nen Types
Water Divination
The Test Itself
Wing floats a leaf on a glass of water and has each student channel Ren into it with their hands nearby. What happens to the water tells you the category you were born into: the water level rises for an Enhancer, the taste changes for a Transmuter, the leaf moves for a Manipulator, the color shifts for an Emitter, impurities appear for a Conjurer, and something else entirely happens if you're the rarest type on the chart, a Specialist. Every Nen user on this site's Combat Ledger traces back to one of these six results.
Enhancement
Confirmed: Gon FreecssStrengthen what's already there instead of creating something new. The most balanced type on the chart, equally useful for offense and defense, which is exactly why it's the type a kid who grew up wrestling giant fish with his bare hands turns out to have. Enhancers make bad liars and great brawlers.
Transmutation
Confirmed: Killua ZoldyckChange the properties of your own aura to mimic something it isn't, electricity, rubber, anything with a distinct physical quality you can borrow. Killua's entire fighting style, all that speed and the shock damage that goes with it, comes out of this one water-taste result in Wing's hotel room.
Manipulation
Confirmed: ZushiControl objects or people directly with your aura rather than empowering yourself. Wing's other student gets this result in the same scene as Gon and Killua, and it's the type most defined by what you're willing to attach strings to, sometimes literally.
Emission
Project aura outward, away from your body, to strike or affect something at range instead of through direct contact. THE BREAKDOWN: this is the type most people picture when they imagine a "power blast," and the show is careful about not handing it to just anyone, since a bad Emitter is a Nen user who's given up the safety of close-range control for a hit that might miss.
Conjuration
SPOILER!Create objects out of pure aura, weapons, tools, anything with a fixed and repeatable form. THE BREAKDOWN: Conjured items follow strict self-imposed rules once a user sets them, which is the entire foundation the Nen system's more complex Yorknew City abilities are eventually built on. A specific, well-known example belongs on this page, but that character's type isn't stated outright within the first 62 episodes, so it's left generic here on purpose rather than asserted early.
Specialization
SPOILER!The outlier category. Specialist abilities don't follow the other five types' rules and can't be predicted from the hexagon chart at all, which is exactly why the show treats every confirmed Specialist as a plot event rather than a footnote. This entry stays deliberately sparse for now, more gets added once a confirmed on-screen Specialist actually shows up within this run.
Reading the Hexagon
Types sitting next to each other on the chart are easier to cross-train, types across from each other are nearly impossible to combine well. This is why Gon can throw a weak Emission attack (adjacent to Enhancement) but would struggle badly trying to learn Specialist techniques (directly opposite). The hexagon isn't flavor text, it's the actual math behind every fight on this site's Combat Ledger.
