Hunter × Hunter: Nen × Impact review — Thriving in the food chain

The story of Hunter x Hunter makes it clear that you should know where you stand in the food chain. Being realistic about your chances can make the difference between life and death. If we’re being realistic, Hunter x Hunter: Nen Impact was never going to be a major competitor in the fighting game or even anime game world. I like Hunter x Hunter, but Dragon Ball it is not, and that is reflected in the production values allotted to the game. Similarly, in terms of competitive viability or popularity, Street Fighter 6 this game is definitely not. Fortunately, Nen Impact doesn’t need to be the most competitive fighter or have the biggest budget to succeed with me. Nen Impact needs to be fun to play and celebrate its source material faithfully. It understands its place in the food chain and thrives within it. 

Nen Impact passes the most important test for a fighting game there is by ensuring that it’s fun to hit buttons. So many fighting games lately have a stiffness to the hits and the combos that makes them feel off – either they’re too automated in the name of simplicity or unintuitive to a fault. Nen Impact bucks a lot of standard fighting game conventions by instead leaning into a freeflowing combo system where nearly every button combos into another one. This looser combat system makes combos simple enough for anyone to perform while also opening doors to a wider, deeper layer of experimentation for more experienced players.

The fun of experimentation especially shines through in Nen Impact’s choice to give you three characters to fight with in a big tag team. Your combo potential multiplies with the ability to call your teammates in with assist attacks or swap between characters mid-combo. Between a crazy combo system and the even crazier options that having a full team provides, this is a game where just playing around in the training mode can provide hours of entertainment. 

Seasoned gamers will recognize both the 3v3 format and the loose combo system as being similar to the Marvel Vs. Capcom games, the third entry in particular. Nen Impact seems similar because it essentially is Marvel vs. Capcom 3 –or at least the bones of it.  Developer Eighting worked on both games, and Nen Impact picks up where MVC3 left off mechanically. MVC3 is my favorite fighting game of all time, so that’s fine with me. MVC3’s (and now Nen Impact’s) approach to fighting games felt fresh at the time and has been woefully underexplored in the decade+ since its release. 

Nen Impact’s fighting system differentiates itself from its predecessor in two main areas. Every character can press a button to enter a “Nen Stance,” which will absorb attacks without getting you locked into a combo. If you tap the button twice, you can then exit the stance for a quick counterattack. The Nen Stance gives you a solid defensive option in a game full of deadly offensive combinations. I feel like a lot of contemporary fighting games fear giving the player defensive options because they risk slowing the pace of the game down, but the Nen Stance is a nice compromise.

Whereas characters in MVC3 had a standardized layout in terms of what you could expect from each button, Nen Impact dedicates one extra button to moves with traits specific to each character. Someone like Gon will do his signature “Jan Ken Pon” blasts, while Hisoka can dash forward and swipe enemies with his Bungee Gum nen to quickly close the distance and slap them around. The extra move variety gives each character both a little more personality and an essential part of their toolkit. I like the extra nuance the extra attacks bring, and it’s especially compelling in a game like this where mastering each of these special traits can turn virtually the entire cast into brokenly powerful monsters. 

Beyond these key differences, Nen Impact pushes the MVC3 fighting system forward in a bunch of smaller ways as well. Whereas MVC3 introduced an “X-Factor” mechanic that you could activate at any time to dramatically increase your power, Nen Impact gives you two X-Factors for good measure. The partner tagging system can now be activated whenever an assist is on the battlefield, making it much more dynamic and free-flowing. Special move inputs have been simplified and standardized, making for easy execution no matter your skill level.  

All of this is to say that Nen Impact ends up being a pretty crazy game to play. The average match flies by at super speed. Every character can easily tear through another. If you were to put any of them in another fighting game, they’d be considered the overpowered boss fighter. Here, everyone is the overpowered boss. While some may turn their noses up at the proposition of an intentionally unbalanced game, it does make for a fun time that rides the line between casual and hardcore in a satisfying way. 

For licensed games like this, how fun the game is to play ends up being the key factor for me. I get the sense these days that people are a little too obsessed with how competitively viable a fighting game must be to be worth playing. According to the fighting game masses, games constantly need balancing, nerfs, and other tweaks to be a worthwhile product in 2025. In truth, a game’s life as a “competitive” game will be fairly short-lived relative to the rest of its existence. How “balanced” or well supported a fighting game is only matters to a small number of players for an even smaller amount of time. 

Truly fun fighting games have and will continue to thrive based on how fun they are to play above all else. Balance means fairly little in the long run – just ask MVC3, classic Street Fighters, or the handful of anime fighters people continue to go back to long after their heyday. It’s okay for a fighting game to not receive constant play, care, or attention. It’s okay for a fighting game to be “broken” as long as enough mitigating factors keep people coming back. Nen Impact demonstrates how “broken” fighting games can be fun in their own way. 

I gotta be honest though, one thought remained stuck in my head while playing Nen Impact: I’m not sure a fighting game actually fits this series. Yes, Hunter x Hunter has fighting in it, but I hesitate to say it’s about fighting overall. At least not fights in the way that fighting games like Nen Impact portray. Many of the fights in the manga don’t fit a traditional mold – they’re more about psychology, tactics, and dialogue boxes stuffed full of rules. Some fights end up barely being “fights” at all.

You can see the game struggling to deal with this fact in its story mode, which serves as an extremely abbreviated cliffnotes of most of the story’s major arcs. Several of the fights the mode portrays don’t actually happen in the story at all, and the game will acknowledge this by immediately retconning the fight by saying the characters were just imagining it happened. Other fights, like the dodgeball match in the Greed Island arc, get converted into a normal fighting match, only for the story to not acknowledge the fight happened and proceed to portray it as the dodgeball match it originally was. It’s almost a little charming how hard the developers tried to get the game mechanics and the story to work with each other, but it doesn’t come together well. 

As is, it’s almost a little strange to see these characters moving and attacking each other so smoothly and without interruption in Nen Impact. If this were the manga, each button press would be separated by panel after panel of the characters considering their situation and explaining what they can or cannot do next. While a sick part of me would love to see what a “faithful” adaptation of the manga’s writing style would look like translated to a video game, that would require a level of thinking outside the box that would likely take the game out of the traditional fighting genre altogether. I’m okay with them just making another Marvel vs. Capcom with Hunter x Hunter characters.  

For what it’s worth, Nen Impact does a nice job of converting the characters and their moves into this more chaotic environment. The visual style looks nice, even if it isn’t high-end like Dragon Ball Fighterz, and the characters faithfully adapt their designs from the 2011 anime. Although a lot of the DNA comes from MVC, I love the sparks and hit effects that come from hitting characters in this game – they bring the characters’ fighting styles to life in an impactful way. Some of the special cinematic moves cheap out by obscuring parts that would be hard to animate, but they get the most important iconic moves down well. Nen Impact was clearly built on a budget, but it holds together without too much visible duct tape. 

On a fanservice level, Nen Impact offers a fanserviceable level of content. Beyond the story mode, Nen Impact features online battles(which in my testing is very much a your mileage may vary affair in connection quality), an arcade mode, combo trials, and two arena survival modes. These are pretty standard for any kind of fighting game, but the survival mode with its cheap AI kept me busy for a while. 

I did like the combo trial mode more than expected. Rather than prescribing a combo for you to perform, Nen Impact takes advantage of its freeform combo system by instead telling you to make your own combo that fits the criteria it describes, like needing to end on a certain kind of attack and reaching a certain amount of hits. This approach does what very few fighting games seem to want to do: it teaches you how to make combos and figure out how to build them yourself, rather than relying on static combos you looked up online. Combo trial modes often give people the impression that combos are about memorizing specific inputs, when what they should actually be focusing on is how moves interact with each other to begin with, to create combos. When you know how to use the building blocks, combos become less about strict memorization and more about intuition. 

My personal favorite fanservice addition is that you can obtain copies of the cards used in the Greed Island arc as rewards for winning fights. They don’t serve any real practical in-game purpose (other than being able to bet and trade them with other players online), but I enjoy reading their weird abilities. Unfortunately, you can get duplicate cards, so if you want to collect all the cards, they can be a major test of luck and fortitude to grind out.