not really getting the hype for hunter x hunter

Depends. The current style of 12-13 episode seasons have more of the 3 ep format purely because they don't have enough episodes. 


Older anime with 24 or 52 ep format, or continous ep format like HxH were faithful to the pacing of manga chapters and paced according to the chapters, which meant some took more than 3 episodes.

Eh

Yes and no. If a writer has a lot of cache then they can be slow in their build up because they know the audience will trust them.

But usually there's some expectation of trying to front run content that you should expect to see throughout the remainder of the story to give people a glimpse at what they should expect

That is a stupid heuristic made up by the community and no show has to follow it.

That is true. It's a shame to see people downvoting your claim.

Of course, exceptions always exist.

I like HxH, but have other favorites, so I can talk with less bias than others and avoid getting my feelings hurt when someone criticizes HxH (feel free to downvote dear reader, in fact, I insist as a fellow HxH fan).

HxH follows a number of battle shounen formulas and has a generic start, but does significantly deviate later (the author of HxH is known for creating the genre's rules, and goes out of his way to break those rules in HxH).

1) It has more characters. It often abandons the PoV of the protagonist to give characters arcs to other factions. It adds drama to side characters (something that shows like MHA fails to do).

2) It is deliciously and purposely edgy and subversive. It has novelty, even if fairly immature (this is NOT a mature story, but it's not boring either). It features things such as an edgy anti-hero on the good-guys faction and asks the audience to feel sorry for the opponent factions at times.

3) It showcases a few clever combat comebacks, mostly centered around the perverted "clown". That character is popular for good reasons (not the pervert jokes, but his unexpected "rule of cool" moments).

Now, the subjective question. If you were to ask ME if HxH is a mandatory watch, I'd tell you to prioritize "World Trigger" first (HxH is a great battle shounen, but it falls short of WT's place). And no, do NOT watch World Trigger, because WT has an incoming reboot announced! Wait for the reboot, cuz the old season 1 is now deprecated (too cheaply animated).

If you're feeling tired, you can leave HxH in the backlog. It's not a deep story, but it does have more clever instances of subversion in the "midgame". Its drawbacks are its generic start, that it gets narrator heavy later on, and that it is informally known as Hiatus x Hiatus (making sequel anime seasons very unlikely).

Also, keep in mind, if an anime has more than 100+ episodes, it is not unreasonable to expect the first 10-20 episodes to be underwhelming. For faster pacing, stick to stories that release their content in bursts of 12-24 episodes instead (seasonal format anime).

Yeah, the first few episodes of HxH are pretty fucking boring, you are not mistaken about that at least XD.

The whole point of anime was to hook you at episode zero. In that, the anime for HunterxHunter had already captivated its base audience with years of manga and an entire previous anime. As a matter of fact, the original anime probably does a more active job engaging the audience for retention whereas the newer anime went for authenticity instead of.

In any case, the three episodes rule is a made up American anime community rule. In TV, if you didn’t catch the attention of the audience in the first episode, you failed, most TV not relying on an established franchise, anyway.