Sometimes Trash Is Treasure: The Gospel of HUNTER×HUNTER NEN×IMPACT
There are games that define genres. There are games that push competitive standards, raise the bar for polish, and stand tall in the halls of esports glory. And then… there’s HUNTER×HUNTER NEN×IMPACT. A fan-made fighting game that looks like a love letter to classic sprite brawlers—but plays like a beautiful accident held together by duct tape, vibes, and pain.
To the untrained eye, NEN×IMPACT is a mess. Combos either don’t exist or go on for so long you start to question your life choices. Hitboxes feel like fever dreams. Half the roster has balance issues so severe, you’d think the devs rolled dice to assign power levels. Gon can erase you from existence just by leveling up at the wrong time. Killua feels like he’s powered by glitches. And let’s not even get started on Hisoka’s teleporting pressure, which may violate at least three laws of physics and one of morality.
And yet—you can’t stop playing it.
That’s the paradox of Kusoge: the worse it is, the better it gets. HUNTER×HUNTER NEN×IMPACT might be held together by hope and spaghetti code, but it’s compelling in a way that polished fighters rarely are. It’s a pure distillation of chaotic fun, and it keeps you coming back for reasons your brain might not fully understand—but your heart absolutely does.
Part of it is the novelty. Every match is a new story. You don’t know what will happen—and neither does the game. Maybe Kurapika pulls off a 100-hit air combo by accident. Maybe Gon’s adult transformation locks your controls. Maybe the background glitches out and you win because someone fell through the floor. The unpredictability isn’t a bug; it’s the entire entertainment package. Your brain lights up because it’s constantly surprised, and surprise is a dopamine delivery system.
Then there’s the satisfaction of mastering the unmasterable. In a traditional fighter, learning matchups and frame data gives you power. But in NEN×IMPACT, you’re learning to survive in a lawless wasteland. When you lab a character and discover some busted infinite or a setup that shouldn’t work but absolutely does, you feel like a mad scientist cracking forbidden knowledge. You’re not just good—you’re thriving in the wreckage. You are the jank.
And let’s be honest: it’s hilarious. This game is accidentally one of the funniest fighters ever made. Whether it’s someone getting combo’d into the moon or losing to an input bug that only triggers on Thursdays, you’ll laugh, they’ll laugh, the entire Discord will laugh. You’re not just playing a game—you’re creating memes in real time. It’s a comedy club disguised as a fighting game.
That shared absurdity becomes community glue. NEN×IMPACT players aren’t just lab monsters or casuals; they’re survivors. Veterans of hitbox war crimes. Scholars of jankology. You show each other clips of broken tech not to complain—but to celebrate. Because deep down, everyone playing knows: this game might be trash, but it’s our trash.
Fandom plays its part too. If you love Hunter x Hunter, this game is hard to resist. You want to see Killua pop off. You want to land Nen abilities. You want that fan service. So you cope. You excuse the bugs. You say, “Okay yeah, Gon’s broken, but look at this animation!” And you’re right. You’re here because you believe in what this game could be—or maybe just love it for what it is.
But the real reason you stick around? Because deep in the chaos, there’s magic. Nen×Impact doesn’t follow the rules. It doesn’t beg for legitimacy. It exists in defiance of polish, elegance, or meta-friendliness. And in that defiance, it’s free. You don’t play to be the best. You play to laugh. To experiment. To lose in stupid ways and win in even stupider ones.
So when someone inevitably asks, “Why are you still playing this busted, unbalanced game that probably crashes more than it runs?”—you just smile. You pick Hisoka. You teleport behind them.
And you say, with pride: “Because sometimes... trash is treasure.”