Meteor City's Most Wanted
A Crime Syndicate That Runs on Loyalty, Not Money
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 Phantom Troupe
Thirteen Members, One Tattoo
The Numbered Spider
SPOILER!Every member of the Troupe carries a spider tattoo marking their number in the group, Chrollo leads twelve members total. The numbers aren't just identification, they're a kind of institutional memory: when a member dies, the number goes quiet, and the Troupe treats that loss as seriously as any outside enemy could ever threaten them.
Why Meteor City Matters
SPOILER!Nearly every Troupe member comes out of Meteor City, a lawless dumping-ground settlement the rest of the world treats as unofficially outside its own laws entirely. Chrollo's nihilism about human life, including his own, makes a grim kind of sense once you understand where he and most of his members actually started. This isn't a group of criminals who fell in with a bad crowd, it's a group of people the world already treated as disposable long before they started acting like it.
Uvogin, No. 11
The Troupe's physical apex, an Enhancer who treats artillery fire like weather and settles disagreements with his fists first. His rampage against the Mafia's enforcers during the early Yorknew conflict is the clearest on-screen demonstration of what happens when the Troupe decides a fight isn't worth being subtle about.
Pakunoda, the Quiet Threat
SPOILER!Where Uvogin is the Troupe's hammer, Pakunoda is closer to its intelligence division, extracting memories from a target with a touch and a question, then physically transferring what she's learned to her comrades. She's dangerous specifically because nothing about her reads as dangerous until it's already too late.
Kurapika's War Against Them
SPOILER!Every scene the Troupe appears in during Yorknew exists in tension with the fact that Kurapika, the last surviving member of the clan they slaughtered for its Scarlet Eyes, is somewhere in the city hunting them specifically. The show treats this less as a subplot than as the actual engine of the entire arc, everything else is happening around a collision that's clearly still building when episode 62 ends.
Where This Page Stops
SPOILER!The Troupe's full internal power dynamics, several members' Nen abilities, and the direct confrontation between the Zoldyck elders and Chrollo all play out in the OVA continuation, past this archive's scope. What's documented here is who they are and why Kurapika is chasing them, not how that chase ends.
