Hunter x Hunter ran for 148 episodes across three seasons, from October 2011 to September 2014 on Nippon TV. It ends where it ends — that is the first thing to know about it, and the last.
Trailer, via vizmedia.
Gon Leaves Whale Island
The setup is simple. Gon is a boy on Whale Island. His father was a Hunter and left when Gon was small. Gon decides to become a Hunter too, not to find the man so much as to understand what was worth leaving for.
That is the whole engine. Hunter x Hunter does not need a war or a prophecy. It needs a kid with a question and a world organized around answering it.
Megumi Han and Mariya Ise Carry the Voices
Megumi Han voices Gon. Mariya Ise voices Killua. The pairing is the spine of the series, and the performances keep it from turning into a straight power climb.
Keiji Fujiwara voices Leorio. Issei Futamata narrates. The supporting cast fills in a world that keeps widening without losing the thread.
- Gon, voiced by Megumi Han — the boy chasing his father’s trail
- Killua, voiced by Mariya Ise — the friend who complicates it
- Leorio, voiced by Keiji Fujiwara — the adult in a cast of children
- The Narrator, voiced by Issei Futamata — the steady hand on a sprawling story
Three Seasons, One Long Arc
The series is Animation, Action & Adventure, and Sci-Fi & Fantasy at once. It moves between those modes without announcing the shift.
Three seasons is a lot of room. Hunter x Hunter uses it. The early stretch sets the rules of the Hunter world; the later stretch tests every one of them. Nothing here is filler in the way long-running animation usually pads itself.
What the Score Says
The published audience score is 8.7 out of 10 from 2200 votes on TMDB. That is a high number for a series this long, and it is earned.
Here is how the run stacks up:
- The Whale Island opening — the cleanest setup in the show
- The Hunter exam stretch — where the cast locks in
- The later arcs — where the rules get broken on purpose
The ranking matters because Hunter x Hunter is not a show that peaks early and coasts. It builds.
The Case Against a Perfect Score
At 8.7, the show sits just under the top tier, and that is right. The middle of the run sags. Three seasons of television cannot all be the Hunter exam.
The narration, steady as it is, sometimes explains what the animation already showed. That is a small complaint against 148 episodes, but it is a real one.
Why It Still Holds
Hunter x Hunter works because it respects its own logic. Gon wants to be a Hunter like his father. That is a small, human want, and the series never inflates it into something grander than it is.
The world is strange. The rules are strange. The kid at the center is not.
That combination is rarer than the score suggests. Most long-running animation eventually trades its premise for spectacle. This one keeps the premise and adds the spectacle around it.
What 2200 Voters Got Right
Hunter x Hunter is one of the better long-run animated series of its era, and the 8.7 from 2200 voters on TMDB is a fair read on it. Fifteen years after its 2011 debut, the show still holds up. It is not flawless — the pacing dips and the narration overexplains — but it does the hard thing: it stays about a boy and a question for 148 episodes without losing either.
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