※ Contains spoilers for the Hunter Exam, Heavens Arena, and Chimera Ant arcs.
Rewatching the Hunter Exam in HUNTER×HUNTER, the first phase already looks completely absurd.
On the surface, the task is simple: just follow the examiner, Satotz. But Nippon TV’s official synopsis for Episode 4 explains that the first phase consists of following Satotz to the second exam site, and that after passing the 80-kilometer mark, the applicants encounter stairs while Satotz increases his pace.[^ntv-ep4]
So this is not just a marathon.
- More than 80 km through an underground passage
- Stairs after that
- Then a fog-covered wetland
- Poor visibility
- Monsters
- And Nen users like Hisoka mixed into the field
By normal standards, this is less a recruitment exam than a disaster drill or special-forces selection course.
And even after the 80-kilometer point, plenty of applicants are still left. What that really tells us is that the applicant pool is already abnormal before the Hunter Exam has even begun in earnest.
Conclusion: the Hunter Exam is not “training”; it is a survival filter
Here is the conclusion up front: the Hunter Exam is not a system designed to develop talented people.
Its philosophy is probably closer to this:
Even if you are talented, if you would die here, we are not making you a Hunter.
From a talent-development perspective, that is an incredible waste. Anyone who can already run 80 km is well above average in the real world. Add judgment, mental toughness, obsession, combat ability, and luck, and most organizations would rather protect and develop that person.
But from the Hunter Association’s perspective, a Hunter License grants far too much power to be handed out casually. Hunters can enter unknown regions, deal with dangerous creatures and criminals, hunt treasures, and become involved in matters that can reach the level of national crises. Giving a license to someone likely to die in the field can itself become dangerous.
So the Hunter Exam does not function as “a test for recruiting promising young people.”
It functions more like:
A test for eliminating people who would break themselves—or the world around them—if they became Hunters.
If lots of people are still standing after 80 km, these are not ordinary applicants
First, the 80 km itself is ridiculous.
Nippon TV’s official Episode 4 synopsis says the first phase is to follow Satotz, and that after the group passes the 80-kilometer point, they face stairs and an increased pace.[^ntv-ep4] Hunterpedia’s overview of the 287th Hunter Exam likewise describes the first phase as a two-part challenge involving more than 80 km of underground tunnel followed by the Milsy Wetlands, also known as the Swindlers’ Swamp.[^hunterpedia-287]
In real-world terms, 80 km is close to running two full marathons. And this is not a city race with aid stations or pacers. They keep moving through an underground passage, climb stairs, and then enter a dangerous area without a break.
If a large group is still left at that point, this was never a collection of ordinary people.
Before reaching the actual exam site, the applicants have already passed preliminary filters involving the ship captain, quizzes, and the Kiriko guides. Hunterpedia’s Hunter Association overview also explains that simply reaching the exam site is difficult, and that preliminary judges and navigators are used to reduce the enormous number of would-be applicants.[^hunter-association]
So by the time they line up for Phase One, almost everyone already has some unusual strength.
And then the swamp wipes out a huge chunk of them anyway
This is where it gets worse.
Nippon TV’s official synopsis for Episode 5 says that after escaping the long underground tunnel, the applicants enter a thickly fogged wetland where poor visibility and various monsters threaten them.[^ntv-ep5]
Hunterpedia describes the latter half of Phase One as a dangerous wetland where man-eating creatures lure people into traps, and says roughly 150 applicants reach the second phase.[^hunterpedia-287] Another fan reference site lists 148 people as passing Phase One of the 287th exam and summarizes that fighting among applicants in the Numere Wetlands leaves dozens dead.[^wonderhunter]
Of course, we cannot assume every person who disappears from the group has died.
The breakdown is probably some mix of:
- Eaten by monsters
- Killed by Hisoka
- Killed in clashes with other applicants
- Lost in the fog
- Too late and disqualified
- Voluntary withdrawal
Still, given the tone of the story, the death toll is clearly not zero.
That is the frightening part of the Hunter Exam: even people who can run 80 km are treated as expendable once they reach the swamp.
As talent management, it is an unbelievable waste.
But from the Hunter Association’s point of view, the logic is probably the exact opposite:
If you can run 80 km but die in the Swindlers’ Swamp, the actual job would kill you even faster.
Leorio looking like the “normal guy” is the strangest part
Leorio often plays the comic-relief role. He wears a suit, wants to become a doctor, and somehow comes across as the normal person in the group.
But Nippon TV’s official character page explicitly describes Leorio as being in his teens despite looking older.[^ntv-leorio]
A teenager, in a suit, follows the group for more than 80 km through an underground passage, climbs the stairs, and makes it through the wetland.
That is not normal.
Gon is a wilderness-raised kid and Killua comes from a family of assassins, so their physical ability at least has an obvious explanation. Kurapika is also trained and driven by revenge. But Leorio walks into the same exam looking like “a guy who wants to become a doctor” and still keeps up.
In real-world terms, imagine a roughly college-age medical-school hopeful completing an ultramarathon-level distance in a suit and then crossing an area full of man-eating monsters.
Leorio is quietly a physical elite.
Tonpa is also weirdly impressive
Tonpa deserves attention too.
He is presented as a joke character who enjoys crushing rookies, but the fact that he shows up for the Hunter Exam year after year is already absurd.
The exam is not identical every year. Hunterpedia’s Hunter Association overview says that both the number of phases and their contents change from year to year, as do the examiners.[^hunter-association]
So Tonpa repeatedly enters an exam that might be a marathon this year, combat next year, cooking after that, or some elaborate trap.
That takes an unusual amount of nerve.
Even if he has no serious intention of passing, simply being able to return to that environment every year makes him abnormal in his own way.
I cannot imagine Milluki passing Phase One
Milluki, by contrast, does not look like someone who would survive this first phase.
As a member of the Zoldyck family, he presumably has the family’s basic assassin training and resistance to things like poison. But his actual role in the story leans toward hacking, invention, intelligence gathering, money, and remote control.
Hunterpedia notes that in the Greed Island storyline, Milluki tries to hack a website restricted to Hunters, and when he heads to Yorknew he recalls that the last time he had left the family estate was when he was ten.[^milluki]
His abilities are overwhelmingly indoors-oriented.
If Milluki were going to pass the Hunter Exam, it is hard to picture him simply running 80 km behind Satotz. He would be more likely to:
- Extract information about the venue
- Hack the route
- Arrange transportation
- Use other people
- Exploit loopholes in the examiners’ rules
And that exposes another weakness of the Hunter Exam: it handles different kinds of ability very crudely. Someone like Milluki could be extremely useful in real Hunter work as an information or technology specialist. But if Phase One happens to be overwhelmingly physical, he could be eliminated before any of that matters.
As a talent-selection system, that is pretty rough.
Hisoka is basically a Nen smurf in a beginner lobby
Hisoka makes Phase One even more unfair.
On a first viewing, he can look like an extremely strong, bizarre killer clown. But once you know the later Nen system, Hisoka in the first Hunter Exam is almost certainly already a Nen user.
Nippon TV’s official character page labels Hisoka as a Transmuter and notes that he was disqualified from the previous Hunter Exam for breaking the rules.[^ntv-hisoka] Hunterpedia likewise lists him as a Transmuter and identifies Bungee Gum and Texture Surprise as his abilities.[^hisoka]
The playing cards matter too.
Ordinary cards do not slice people apart. Hunterpedia describes Hisoka’s weapons as ordinary French-suited playing cards that he turns into lethal weapons with Shu, the Nen technique that extends aura into an object.[^hisoka-cards]
So in Phase One, Hisoka is effectively a Nen user mixed in with applicants who do not even know Nen exists.
In game terms, it is like a high-ranked player entering a beginner server.
And Hisoka is not merely trying to pass. He is hunting for strong opponents, evaluating people while killing them.
For the other applicants, he is basically a random disaster event.
Nen is effectively mandatory for professional Hunters
So why are dangerous people like that allowed into the same exam at all?
Because the actual work of a Hunter assumes Nen.
Hunterpedia’s Hunter Association overview explains that becoming a professional Hunter requires not only passing the public Hunter Exam but also completing what amounts to a secret exam by learning the basics of Nen. It describes Nen as a minimum martial skill required of Hunters.[^hunter-association]
From the outside, then, the Hunter Exam looks like a test of:
Stamina, intelligence, luck, and mental toughness.
But behind that is another question:
Do you have the aptitude to learn Nen?
That makes the system especially brutal because some applicants already know Nen from the start. Hisoka and Illumi are examples. Gon and Killua have enormous potential, but at the time they do not yet understand Nen as a formal system.
So the Hunter Exam looks fair, but it is not truly fair.
From the Association’s perspective, though, fairness may matter less than one question: can this person survive?
The Chimera Ant arc makes it obvious that being a Hunter is a brutally unfair job
Up to this point, you could still dismiss the problem as “the exam is too harsh.”
Then the Chimera Ant arc shows that the job itself is abnormal.
The Chimera Ant crisis is no longer ordinary adventure or exploration.
- They consume humans
- The traits of what they eat can appear in later generations
- Individuals rapidly develop intelligence
- They acquire Nen
- The King and Royal Guards are born
- They attempt to select humans on a national scale
At that point, this is not one Hunter’s personal assignment. It is a biological disaster, a national-security crisis, a military operation, and a superhuman war stacked on top of one another.
And the extermination team does not begin as a giant army. Hunterpedia’s overview of the Extermination Team describes the operation as initially centering on three high-level Hunters—Netero, Morel, and Knov—with their students and Gon and Killua later becoming involved under specific conditions.[^extermination-team]
The eventual objective also includes separating the Royal Guards from King Meruem so Netero can confront him.[^extermination-team]
Once the job can look like that, the swamp in Phase One starts to resemble a tutorial.
From the Hunter Association’s point of view:
You cannot send someone who dies in the swamp into a Chimera Ant operation.
The logic of Phase One makes sense.
It makes sense, but it is still a waste.
The Hunter Association is not a school; it is an issuer of dangerous licenses
This is the most important point.
If you think of the Hunter Association as a school or an ordinary corporate recruiting department, its exam is awful.
Losing people who can run 80 km in a swamp is an obvious waste. Information specialists, researchers, negotiators, medical experts, and technical specialists could all be valuable even if they are not physical monsters, yet the exam format can eliminate them anyway.
But the Hunter Association is probably not an educational institution.
It is an organization that issues a powerful license.
A Hunter License can open places ordinary people cannot enter. It can provide access to dangerous information. It can have financial value and social credibility. And Hunter work can involve criminals, unknown species, ruins, rare diseases, nations, and Nen users.
Seen that way, the Association’s philosophy becomes cold but coherent:
Rather than maximizing the number of talented people we admit, eliminate the people who would be dangerous if they held this license.
It is not maximizing talent. It is minimizing accidents.
Not talent development, but screening people before handing them a dangerous credential.
That is why the test can be life-threatening.
Letting Hisoka and Illumi pass shows that the Association is pretty dangerous too
That does not mean the Association is completely justified.
The fact that it allows people like Hisoka and Illumi to pass is dangerous in its own right.
The exam’s philosophy may be that a dangerous person can still qualify if they have the ability. Hunters, after all, are not a profession made up only of ethically good people.
But from a risk-management perspective, letting Hisoka and Illumi roam freely is an obvious problem.
That is also very HUNTER×HUNTER: the Hunter Association is not an organization of pure justice.
It looks as though it manages powerful people, yet in practice it gives dangerous individuals a great deal of freedom.
The result is an exam where weaker applicants can literally be hunted by stronger ones.
Phase One is actually a miniature version of the whole series
At first, the first phase of the Hunter Exam looks like a simple endurance test from the early part of the story.
Looking back, it is a miniature version of the entire world.
- 80 km underground: baseline stamina and mental endurance
- Stairs plus a faster pace: extra load when you are already running out of room
- The wetland: uncertainty, misinformation, and deception
- Monsters: the risk posed by unknown creatures
- Hisoka: Nen users, killers, and opponents far above your level mixed into the field
- Mass elimination: talent does not protect you from death
- Leorio survives: even the person who looks “normal” is secretly exceptional
- Tonpa keeps returning: someone who looks weak can be strong in a different way
- Milluki would struggle: a useful person can still fail because their strengths do not fit the exam format
So Phase One is not merely a marathon.
It gives us the rules of the Hunter world right at the beginning:
Strength alone is not enough. Intelligence alone is not enough. Being a good person does not protect you. Talent does not stop you from dying. And if you do not know Nen exists, you cannot even see all the rules.
That declaration is what Phase One really is.
Summary: the Hunter Exam is wasteful—but the Chimera Ant arc also shows why it is so cold
As a talent-selection system, the Hunter Exam is unbelievably wasteful.
If you can run 80 km, you are already well above average. Throwing a large share of that population away in a swamp would be an unacceptable loss for a real organization.
But the more we see of actual Hunter work, the easier it becomes to understand the Association’s coldness.
In a world where Chimera Ant-level incidents can happen, Hunters are not simply adventurers. They can be pulled into unknown disasters, criminal threats, Nen conflicts, and crises that threaten entire nations.
That is why the Hunter Exam is not gentle recruitment. It is a survival filter used before granting a dangerous license.
So the conclusion is this:
As talent development, the Hunter Exam is terrible.
But in a world where Chimera Ant-level nightmare missions actually exist, there is a reason for that cruelty.
Even so, watching elite applicants who can run 80 km disappear into a swamp still feels like an unbelievable waste.
References (1)
[^ntv-ep4]: Nippon TV, HUNTER×HUNTER, Episode 4, “Hope × and × Ambition.” Official synopsis covering Phase One, the 80-kilometer point, the stairs, and Satotz increasing his pace. https://www.ntv.co.jp/hunterhunter/story/004.html [^ntv-ep5]: Nippon TV, HUNTER×HUNTER, Episode 5, “Hisoka × Is × Sneaky.” Official synopsis covering the foggy wetland, monsters, and the events around Hisoka. https://www.ntv.co.jp/hunterhunter/story/005.html [^ntv-leorio]: Nippon TV, HUNTER×HUNTER, Leorio character profile. Notes that Leorio is in his teens and explains his motivation to become a doctor. https://www.ntv.co.jp/hunterhunter/character/reorio.html [^ntv-hisoka]: Nippon TV, HUNTER×HUNTER, Hisoka character profile. Identifies him as a Transmuter and notes his disqualification from the previous Hunter Exam. https://www.ntv.co.jp/hunterhunter/character/hisoka.html [^hunterpedia-287]: Hunterpedia, “287th Hunter Exam.” Summary of the 80+ km underground tunnel, the wetland, and the number of applicants reaching the second phase. https://hunterxhunter.fandom.com/wiki/287th_Hunter_Exam [^hunter-association]: Hunterpedia, “Hunter Association.” Summary of preliminary filtering before the Hunter Exam, changing exam formats, and the secret test involving Nen training. https://hunterxhunter.fandom.com/wiki/Hunter_Association [^hisoka]: Hunterpedia, “Hisoka Morow.” Summary of Hisoka’s Nen category, abilities, and character information. https://hunterxhunter.fandom.com/wiki/Hisoka_Morow [^hisoka-cards]: Hunterpedia, “Hisoka Morow,” Equipment / Abilities. Summary of Hisoka’s playing cards and their use as weapons with Shu. https://hunterxhunter.fandom.com/wiki/Hisoka_Morow [^milluki]: Hunterpedia, “Milluki Zoldyck.” Summary of his Greed Island-related information gathering, the Hunter-only website, and his recollection that he had not left home since age ten. https://hunterxhunter.fandom.com/wiki/Milluki_Zoldyck [^extermination-team]: Hunterpedia, “Extermination Team.” Summary of the Chimera Ant extermination team, including Netero, Morel, and Knov, and the plan to separate the King from the Royal Guards. https://hunterxhunter.fandom.com/wiki/Extermination_Team [^wonderhunter]: WONDER×HUNTER, “Overview of the 287th, 288th, and 289th Hunter Exams.” Informal reference site summarizing 148 successful applicants in Phase One of the 287th exam and deaths in the wetland. https://wonderhunter.xsrv.jp/08-02.html
