What Are Hatsu In Hunter X Hunter?

If you find yourself in the world of Hunter x Hunter, you’ll need a weapon personalized to your taste. Where other shows give you abilities by birth or an inherited gift from your parents, no such thing exists in Hunter x Hunter. Instead, you’ll have to find your own path and create your own personalized ability, and that’s what a Hatsu is.

A Hatsu in Hunter x Hunter is the culmination of Nen mastery, an ability that can do pretty much anything you can think of. It isn’t as simple as wanting a certain ability, though, and a lot more nuance goes into what a Hatsu is. Here’s everything we know about Hatsu and its intricacies!

What Is Nen?

Nen is the process of controlling and using your Aura (life energy) to gain specific effects. These can be anything from simple reinforcement to things like heightened senses.

Mastering Nen comes with getting used to four techniques. Ten (keeping your Aura Nodes open), Zetsu (closing your Aura Nodes), Ren (bursting Aura out of your Aura Nodes), and finally, Hatsu (manipulating Aura to gain specific effects).

What Is A Hatsu?

Every special ability that you see in the Hunter x Hunter world is a Hatsu. By definition, a Hatsu is a personalized ability created by a user through Nen that uses their Aura in specific ways to derive desired results.

A Hatsu can be anything from simply reinforcing your body to highly complicated skills that take into account numerous variables to achieve specific results. So long as there’s a logical route to follow, you can create any kind of Hatsu.

Enhancement Type Hatsu

Enhancement type Hatsu are the simplest of the Nen types, letting you enhance certain things using Aura. This includes reinforcing your body for higher speed, power, and dexterity, but it has many more uses as well, like with Bill using enhancement for healing.

Gon’s Nen Ability

Gon is Hunter x Hunter’s poster child and also the prime example of what an enhancer is like. He’s straightforward, honest, and a bit dumb at times. Like his nature, his Nen ability, Jajanken, is also a perfect representation of an enhancer ability.

Gon’s ability makes him punch harder from choosing between the three options given in rock, paper, and scissors. The Hatsu adds the condition that Gon has to chant something and make a specific gesture. In exchange, his punch, specifically Rock, outputs a level of Aura far greater than what other Nen types are capable of expressing.

Bill’s Nen Ability

Bill is currently a manga-exclusive character who’s part of Beyond Netero’s expedition team and is on board the Black Whale.

We don’t know what Bill is fully capable of yet, but he’s a character integral to Beyond Netero’s plan.

Bill’s ability is a very rare application of enhancement where he enhances the living force of an organism to hasten its growth. This lets Bill grow plants from seeds, but it can also be used to buff another person.

Dogman’s Nen Ability

Dogman is part of the Heil-Ly family, currently working under Morena Prudo. He’s a player of the Contagion game and is one of the highest-level members of said game, making him an extremely potent Nen user.

Dogman showcases another application of enhancement that we haven’t seen much of. Instead of directly buffing his strength, Dogman uses enhancement to buff his sense of smell to the point that he can sniff out someone’s Aura Type by scent.

Emission Type Hatsu

Emission, in its simplest form, is fundamentally about separating your Aura and letting it function as its own thing. It differs from conjuration in that you’re not actually creating things from your Aura but rather just severing it from your own body without turning it into anything.

The main application of emission then becomes using projectiles. This is what most characters do, which makes emission the artillery or archer Aura type, best for characters who want to fight from longer ranges.

However, emission also has some other, more niche uses. These include teleportation, Nen beasts, and some even weirder Nen techniques.

Franklin’s Nen Ability

Franklin is one of the devious criminals who make up the Phantom Troupe. He looks like an absolute giant, making others around him seem like insects. However, instead of having an ability that fits a brute like him, Franklin embraces emission fully and chooses to stay away from threats.

Franklin’s Double Machine Gun is the perfect Nen ability to describe what emission is capable of. There aren’t any complicated conditions or complex effects, it’s just an ability that lets Franklin shoot out Nen bullets from his fingertips.

Leorio’s Nen Ability

Leorio is part of the squad that we’ve grown to hold dear in early Hunter x Hunter. He may have left the spotlight fairly early on, but his eventual return gave us the perfect example of a teleportation-based emission ability.

While the ability can be used to punch people through walls or from a distance, the main purpose of this ability is to help in medical applications.

Leorio’s Nen ability lets him dig his hand into a space and then have it emerge from somewhere else. He used it to hit Ging Freecs in the Chairman Election arc. It’s a simple ability and shows that emission can be used to create teleportation-based abilities.

Lynch’s Nen Ability

Moving on to manga-exclusive characters, we see another odd application of emission. Lynch Fullbokko uses her Nen ability to interrogate people.

This ability allows Lynch to punch the answer out of someone, both literally and figuratively, as the answer appears in an emitted speech bubble.

Transmutation Type Hatsu

Transmutation is all about having your Aura mimic the properties of other things. This can be as simple as manipulating the shape of your Aura into additional limbs or as complex as creating a copy of an artificial substance.

Killua’s Nen Ability

Killua is one of the simplest examples of a transmuter. Having gone through severe electrical torture as a child, he’s very used to how electrocution feels. This lets Killua create a Hatsu that gives his Aura the same properties as lightning.

Killua can use this in a number of ways, but all of them have the same basis: if you collide with his Aura, you get electrocuted. This is the route that most transmuters go with, finding a substance and then copying its effects.

Killua also develops a more complex ability with Godspeed, which shows how deep even the simplest of Hatsu can be. With Godspeed, Killua uses the electrical properties of his Aura to bypass the need to send signals to the brain. Instead, his muscles react instantly to any threat.

Biscuit Krueger (Bisky)’s Nen Ability

Bisky is an extremely talented Hunter and has a Hatsu that features a very unorthodox application of transmutation. Her ability lets her give her Aura the properties of an especially effective relaxant. She can then turn this Aura into a lotion.

In tandem with Bisky’s Nen Beast, a doll-like being named Cookie, she can use her Aura to activate Magical Esthetician. This gives any person of Biscuit’s choosing a highly effective massage.

This is different from any other kind of transmutation we’ve seen so far, and while it may seem weak at first, it’s an ability that’s let Biscuit Krueger become one of the top Hunters in the Hunter x Hunter universe.

Upon Bisky using her ability on someone for 30 minutes, their body would have replenished energy equivalent to eight hours of sleep. This also increases their Aura output.

Manipulation Type Hatsu

Manipulation type Hatsu are all about manipulating things and people, with most characters gravitating toward the latter. It includes adding conditions to then control things through your Aura, such as a weapon or a substance, or issuing commands to people that they’re forced to fulfil.

In terms of how dangerous a Hatsu can be, manipulators can be the hardest to deal with. If you somehow activate their condition, you can’t do much except pray that they pity you and let go. However, since most skilled Hunters are well-versed in Nen combat, they know how to not fall prey to typical manipulation-based abilities.

Illumi Zoldyk’s Nen Ability

Illumi Zoldyk is the strongest and most iconic manipulator we’ve gotten to see. He has a bunch of different Hatsu, all based on manipulation and making use of needles.

First, Illumi’s Hypnotic Spell is a Nen ability that lets Illumi plant a specific command directly into a person’s brain by sticking a needle through it. This is the strongest form of manipulation that we’ve seen. Instead of following a simple command, it’s almost as if the person is the source of these thoughts, instead of following set commands.

Manipulation is usually used on 1-2 people at most, but Illumi can control a horde of human beings using either Corpse Control to use dead bodies for his bidding or Needle People to force living, breathing humans to follow his commands until they die.

Kalluto Zoldyk’s Nen Ability

Kalluto is another Zoldyk, but unlike Illumi, his brand of manipulation is about manipulating things, not people. As a base ability, Kalluto can use his fan to control paper, using it mainly as an offensive tool.

Kalluto can also trigger his second ability once a piece of paper sticks to an enemy. Then, all the other pieces of paper in Kalluto’s control automatically target the enemy, slashing at them and covering them in paper cuts.

Specialist Hatsu

We’ve explained what each of the other five Nen Aura types can do. Instead of explaining what a speciality is capable of, it’s better to know what the other types can do. Specialists are capable of doing anything mentioned in the other Nen types, as well as things that aren’t mentioned.

Morena Prudo claims that specialism isn’t set directly on the Nen chart. If this is true, then that means specialists aren’t bound to the same Aura loss when accessing other types of Nen.

Chrollo Lucifer’s Nen Ability

Chrollo Lucifer is the premier specialist in Hunter x Hunter, but his ability is quite simple. So long as a set of conditions is met, Chrollo can steal another person’s Hatsu.

He can then use it at any time by opening his Nen ability, a book called Skill Hunter. This shows just how broken specialism can be since Chrollo can use any other Hatsu at full effectiveness.

Neon Nostrade’s Nen Ability

Neon Nostrade is a much more forgettable character, especially since she’s not a combatant. Her ability to write down future events through a poem was one of the main plot points of the Yorknew City arc, and it’s an ability that shows how specialism isn’t exactly bound to any rules.

Nen And Conditions

Like in any other Shonen, the main way for characters to get stronger is through training their Hatsu and Nen. However, this increase is additive, which means it’s equal to the amount of time and effort you spend.

This still means you get stronger; Isaac Netero, one of the strongest Hunters ever, got to where he is by practising the same punch for decades. However, not everyone has the same discipline as the greatest Hunter, and many would rather opt for shortcuts.

Hunter x Hunter provides more nuance than other battle shows, giving characters ways to bypass this. The two main ways of instantly making a stronger Hatsu are through conditions and sacrifice.

For example, you may have a simple Hatsu that summons a fireball. You can then add the condition that you can only use the fireball with your eyes closed. As a result, the fireball will be stronger.

This improvement, unlike through sheer hard work, is multiplicative. This means that each added condition scales your Aura output exponentially.

This is what lets things like the Greed Island, and entire area made of Nen and complete with tens of different cards with their own Nen ability, function.

Similarly, if you add an element of sacrifice to it, such as making each fireball deal damage to yourself as well, that’d also result in stronger firepower.

The more difficult the conditions and the more dangerous the sacrifice, the stronger a character can be.

The smartest Hunter x Hunter characters all make use of this. Kurapika’s special chains are so strong because he can only use them against the Phantom Troupe. He can also use all six Nen Types with full efficiency for a limited time, with the sacrificial condition that each second of him using them results in losing an hour of his lifespan.

The best example we get of this is through Gon sacrificing all of his remaining life to gain all the Nen he’d ever gain in order to beat Pitou. This let Gon temporarily become as strong as Isaac Netero, arguably the strongest Nen user in Hunter x Hunter.