Hunter x Hunter: Nen Impact Game Review – Game Review

Hunter X Hunter: Nen Impact is a frenetic and often fun fighting game experience, but the mix of modern and classical fighting game sensibilities makes it such an acquired taste that it is likely too unique a brew for most people to enjoy. While this review experienced a slight delay, I’m ultimately glad for that because some key hangups have been ironed out between launch and the time of this writing.

The basics are simple enough. This is a fighting game, specifically a 3v3 fighter in the tag genre in the vein of Marvel Versus CAPCOM and Dragon Ball Fighterz. You select a team of three, then face off against your opponent to try and reduce their health to zero on all three characters before time runs out. Your lead character is out in front, and you can call the others as assists or actively tag to them during super moves and other combos. You do this across story mode, versus mode, and in the lab training. Nothing too outrageous so far.

The tools of the trade are not too shocking either if you’ve been near a fighting game before. Characters have four buttons’ worth of attacks and specials, a super meter to spend for various effects, an install state, long air combos, movement options, etc. Again, if you’ve played a tag team fighting game in the 21st century, you won’t be shocked by any of what’s on offer here.

This familiarity holds part of Hunter X Hunter: Nen Impact‘s charm. It feels a lot like other tag fighters, so it’s very easy to hop in and start doing long combos even with minimal practice. The combo routing can be optimized because there’s plenty of expression in terms of making things happen in new and different ways. The game is at its best when you hit someone and get to start doing… well, basically whatever you want as they get juggled around. The combo system is very forgiving, and once a character is hit, they tend to be quite floaty, allowing for all kinds of satisfying combos. Perhaps my favorite aspect of Nen Impact is just how good it feels to goof around trying out combos and different routes on characters, and in a tag fighter, that’s a big deal because that’s most of what these games are.

In these ways, the game appeals to traditional tag fighting players. The appeal is visceral and immediate: every choice can be your last. Classical “footsies” and neutral that might exist in other fighting games (or at least are imagined to exist, but that’s a discussion for another time) are not present here. Notions of balance are harder to come by due to high individual character power, and there is less of a sense of chipping away at a formidable foe. Tag fighting games like Nen Impact operate under an “any moment can be your last” mentality. This is not a game of rhythmic back and forth or gradual tempo shifting; it is a knife fight in a back alley, except the knives are bazookas and the alley is electrified. Tag fighting gamers gravitate to these titles in part because of that constant adrenaline rush and explosive payoffs at any given moment.

Nen Impact isn’t a completely traditional tag fighter either. While novelty is always important in any space, the game makes a lot of other key deviations that appeal to a more modern crowd that might not traditionally enjoy tag fighters. Fighting games already have a reputation for high execution and grueling learning periods – tag team fighters even more so. It does make a certain kind of sense to try and appeal beyond the usual crowd with novel approaches.

For starters, Nen Impact has no special move motion inputs. The game does away with quarter/half circles, 360’s, dragon punches, and the like for a one-button special setup using what’s called the Arts button. While this is certainly not the first game to do this – Smash Brothers popularized the notion, and other modern fighters like Granblue Fantasy Versus and Street Fighter 6 have similar setups – the difference here is that it is mandatory. There is no option to switch to traditional inputs, meaning that all special moves are done via a 1-button input modified with a single direction.

Additionally, the four-button setup doesn’t even match other four-button games. It has become en vogue to have light, medium, and heavy attacks across the top three face buttons while the bottom button is a unique or gimmick style button specific to each character (shout out to BlazBlue for pioneering in that space). However, Nen Impact options for light, medium, then “heavy” is another one-button special move button unique to each character. This heavy/special also changes the effect based on direction. The fourth button is instead the Nen button, which has a whole host of special effects, including knocking opponents back during attacks ala Fauntless Defense, and more.

There is an auto-combo system, which is not uncommon these days. This is activated by holding down one trigger and mashing one of the face buttons, allowing your character to go into a solidly effective combo route with zero fuss at any time. There’s also the Quick Gear system, Overgear system…

All of this starts to paint a messy picture. And there’s the rub.

The systems and control scheme break so many conventions with no real alternative if you don’t enjoy the base setup. Modern fighting games often fall into this trap. The game is simplified by removing motion inputs, but to maintain a complex game experience, they shove all that complexity into other buttons. Each button is simple enough on its own, but it performs so many different functions with specific directional inputs that it can feel incredibly awkward to play. The sheer number of bespoke buttons having a necessary function means that remapping and macros are not much of an option. This game was designed to be played on a modern video game controller and uses nearly every single button in the process. The game’s feel of doing combos is odd in a way that strikes me as counterintuitive.

If nothing else, it is certainly not a simple game to play, despite all the efforts at simplifying the game by removing special move motion inputs.

Nen Impact‘s biggest issue is everything else. This title retails for US$60 at the time of writing, and while a full-price game often retails for US$70 or more these days, I wouldn’t exactly call sixty bucks a budget title. Sadly, it doesn’t look or sound like a full-price game. Character models are stiff, and textures are flat, often lacking in color despite the title going for a cel-shaded look. The stages are dull to look at and don’t do much to make you feel like you’re in the Hunter X Hunter setting (stadiums and forests, golly gee, it’s like I’m there). Music is practically non-existent, and the sound design leaves a lot to be desired in giving attacks weight and meaning.

Nen Impact is staunchly traditional in one sense: you are paying full price for a versus mode, and that’s it. The story mode is a short set of still images from the anime in a slideshow format with text boxes along the bottom. The actual story mode battles fit the matchups from the story, but the enemy AI puts up almost no challenge and – in a grimly hilarious observation about whether a tag fighter was the right call in the first place – most of these battles are one-on-one fights that due not utilize tag mechanics. The only real time investment you’ll get here comes from trying to achieve challenges on each level of the story mode (win the fight without taking damage, kill the enemy with a particular super, do a 20-hit combo, etc.). But to even call it a story mode feels like a bit of a stretch as it mostly serves as an extended tutorial rather than weaving a unique narrative on its own. If you’re looking for alternative single-player content like alternate endings, unique game modes, party modes, etc., then you will be sorely disappointed. You’re paying the sticker price to play versus mode and to go into the training lab – no more, no less.

Most egregious to my mind is the roster size. Hunter X Hunter: Nen Impact only has 16 characters at launch. While that might be fine for a one-on-one fighter – Guilty Gear Strive is one of the most popular fighting games out right now, and it only had 15 fighters when it launched – this is downright anemic for a versus game. There are simply not enough characters to make different, compelling, or original teams. While there will be future support in the form of season passes (which I must admit are going for US$19.99, less than the average rate), the first season only shows 4 new characters. While that’s a pretty standard release tempo for a modern fighting game, the low initial roster size means it will take that much longer for the game’s character selection to flesh out. Even by the time this season comes to an end next year, Nen Impact will still have fewer characters than Dragon Ball Fighterz did at launch. Oof.

Nen Impact‘s other features are even more rocky. The game has rollback netcode, but it was abysmal at launch. Part of my delay in writing this review was trying to get into matches where I was playing rather than watching a strange interdimensional slideshow of characters teleporting around the screen. Thankfully, the netcode has been updated in the past several days, and while it may not be the smoothest I’ve ever played, it is very good, allowing for consistently good quality matches regardless of my opponent’s ping. This is a good start, and hopefully, this will give the game a chance to grow.

Sadly, Nen Impact lacks crossplay and any major official competitive scene. The former is almost as much of a dealbreaker as bad rollback netcode, as it means the player base is smaller and fragmented from the start and will only shrink into ever smaller, more isolated islands over time (if not dry up completely). The latter is not so much an issue with game quality, but quite frankly, it impacts whether people will try the game. Nen Impact does not exist in a vacuum – people can play tons of great fighting games from the latest releases back to the greats of yesteryear – with both prestige and the potential for significant payouts too. While most players will never see any prize money from events, having crossplay and a thriving offline tournament scene creates a robust ecosystem where new people are encouraged to try the game out and veteran players are encouraged to keep playing and hone their skills. A healthy competitive ecosystem is make or break for a multiplayer game. It’s hard to say what the future holds, but without those crucial supports, it’s hard to see people flocking to this game when they could play so many others.

If I might offer two anecdotes that underscore my point. Firstly, whenever I do get online to play ranked matches in Nen Impact, the connection is fine, but I end up rematching against the same person over and over again because there are so few people online. And not even “Oh wait, I think I played this person three sets ago,” I mean literally, it’s just two of us online battling. Secondly, even in the fighting game discord I’m in that’s full of all my friends who love fighting games… no one has even requested that the mods set up a custom role to ping for games. Not one soul! In a server where Iron Saga VS and E’s Laf++ have custom pings, Nen Impact hasn’t gotten a single mention.

If you’re getting into Hunter X Hunter: Nen Impact, then you have to know you’re doing it purely for the love of the game. You are one of the few people giving it a shot. And that can be exciting, working to build up a game’s community from the ground floor. But you’re going to be doing it by hand, brick by brick, and for the long term. That’s not a negative per se, but any multiplayer title that has the asterisk of “Thriving Community Not Included, check your local listings” is a big ask when the price just to try the game out is US$60.

Hunter X Hunter: Nen Impact has a strong appeal in a few key areas. Combos feel terrific to pull off, and I’ve certainly played a lot of fighting games with worse-feeling gameplay – so that’s not nothing. And the rollback netcode is finally up to snuff, allowing for solid online match play. That said, the game suffers in every other regard: lack of single-player content, painfully small roster, obtuse bespoke controls, and simplistic presentation. I love fighting games and want every fighting game to succeed, Nen Impact included! Though with that comes the knowledge that some fighting games are easier to get people into than others, and new blood is a crucial factor to multiplayer experiences. There is a good game here that is worth learning, but you may be hard-pressed to find other like-minded souls to play it with.