Eh you two are just telling me that you think HxH is different because it's better. Of course if I were to assign 'being terrible' as an attribute to every battle shonen that would be correct, but I don't wanna condemn that entire 'genre' when there may be solid stuff (I mean HxH overall is certainly enjoyable enough).
But the basics of a battle shonen are totally there:
- protagonists and many other characters are mostly traveling around to get stronger
- there are battles all the time
- MC is your typical overly talented, goodhearted fellow (no, him changing that up once fora couple episodes before returning to his usual self doesn't turn around 140+ episodes where he's normal)
- there's some special powers in the world (Nen)
- lots of weirdly specialized fighters
- power levels
All that, to me, would be pretty defining of a battle shonen.
That this one has better characterization or is just generally a bit better written doesn't make it atypical of the genre to me. And boy would I never recommend someone HxH who dislikes the concept of battle shonen, because that person wouldn't get happy here. Besides, the Chimera Arc features the
godawful pacing problems that battle shonen are well known for. Shit drags on forever and so do a bunch of the battles.
Also HxH's character design is worse than Hitler. The art direction for 2011 is responsible for that though it appears, as the 1999 version looks vastly less stupid.