Hunter x Hunter Nen Impact Has a Rough Launch Due To Broken Online Modes And Other Issues

By Elijah Gonzalez | July 18, 2025 | 12:30pm

Anime News Hunter x Hunter: Nen x Impact

Hunter x Hunter Nen Impact Has a Rough Launch Due To Broken Online Modes And Other Issues

While there were plenty of warning signs for Hunter x Hunter Nen Impact, a new fighting game based on the popular manga/anime series, its launch has been even rockier than many expected. To avoid burying the lede, the biggest issue right now is that the game’s online functionality is in a dismal state, and as numerous clips can attest, it’s fairly common to find yourself in unplayable matches where you and your opponents teleport across the screen as the netcode struggles to keep up.

The game was originally delayed for eight months to implement rollback netcode, the online standard for virtually all fighting games at this point, but it’s clear there are serious problems with its implementation here. On top of the flagrant issues where characters jitter around the screen, many players have also encountered significant input delay as well, making online gameplay feel unresponsive. And even if you find someone with a stable connection, many are also having desynchronization errors that cause matches to disconnect. The problems have been so severe that the game’s developers immediately put out a statement apologizing and promising eventual fixes. However, this update might not be available anytime soon: “We kindly ask for your patience as the resolution may require some time,” the statement reads.

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On top of alienating those who want to duke it out online, Nen Impact is also quite barebones for those playing offline. Its story mode only takes about an hour to complete and is largely just a series of still images from the anime, with occasional fights sprinkled throughout. The game’s visuals are also exceedingly lackluster, with flat, awkward animations that immediately had many fans concerned when the game was initially revealed.

Whether because of these issues or an absence of marketing, the game’s numbers on Steam look very poor so far. According to SteamDB, its all-time peak on the platform is 277 concurrent players. For comparison to other fighting games, Street Fighter 6 peaked at 70,573 users, Dragon Ball FighterZ peaked at 44,403, and even Fatal Fury City of the Wolves, a game that performed poorly enough that SNK’s company president stepped down, managed to hit 4,674 concurrents.

While the phrase “dead game” has become severely overused, Nen Impact’s low player count is a major cause for concern, especially for a game whose main draw is playing against other people. The situation certainly isn’t helped by the fact that if you try to type “Hunter x Hunter” into Steam’s search, it doesn’t come up because they used a special character for the “x.” From top to bottom, the game’s rollout has been a mess.

And it’s a shame, because based on accounts from those who’ve sunk significant time into the game already, its core gameplay apparently delivers the type of unhinged, blatantly unbalanced fun that certainly won’t be for everyone, but that can be quite rewarding as long as you’re the one abusing the unbalanced moves. Considering how polished and relatively “fair” almost all modern fighters are, there is space for throwbacks to a time when the genre was a wild west of weird design choices and overtuned moves (although this kind of throwback probably shouldn’t be priced at $60). Although I’m skeptical that the game will be able to recover from this, hopefully, its online will eventually become playable enough to justify diving into its wacky nonsense.