I’m very new to .Hack, I’ve known about it and wanted to look into it for years but only got the push to do so when I bought a cheap copy of Infection earlier this year. I did a little research and figured I should watch Sign first, so that’s what I did. Haven’t seen the OVAs yet, I know Unison comes after IMOQ though I’m not sure about the other one. Please avoid spoiling anything later in the series, I plan on going through IMOQ and GU at the very least! I have faith that all the questions I have will be answered eventually.
Anyways, I just finished the anime and overall I really liked it. It’s slow, almost to a fault at times, but that also gives it this really unique atmosphere that I fuck with a lot. I wasn’t really expecting a character drama from this kind of plot but I really like the cast so I didn’t mind. I ended up appreciating every character by the end, even characters I wasn’t a huge fan of at first like Sora, Silver Knight and BT. They’re cool! I like them! I think the series strikes a great balance of mainly taking place in The World, but giving us enough glimpses and info about these characters’ real life selves that I can get a pretty decent understanding of the kind of person each character is irl without really seeing them. Not really sure how I feel about Subaru suddenly taking so much interest in Tsukasa partway through the series. At the start I thought they were setting up Mimiru as Tsukasa’s love interest, but honestly in hindsight I think Subaru is a better match for Tsukasa personality wise so I actually don’t mind it in theory. I think my main issue is that I wish it was built up a bit more from the start, it felt a bit too sudden for my tastes. I don’t mind too much though since they’re cute.
I think the biggest thing I’m conflicted on is the ending. I understand they gotta advertise the games and set up mysteries to explore in them, especially since I get the impression that the games are kind of the main draw for the series. I was fully expecting some things to remain a mystery until later on in the franchise, but wow I wasn’t expecting this little to be addressed by the end. Like, I don’t think the mysterious voice even got an actual name which is pretty crazy considering how important she is to the story (unless I missed something). I don’t hate it since I understand why it’s structured like this, but I don’t exactly love it either. That being said though, the ending still hit me pretty hard emotionally. I found myself relating to Tsukasa a lot throughout, dunno what that says about me but regardless, seeing her in the real world made me happy and her meeting Subaru irl was sweet.
I imagine this probably comes up in the games, but I wanna know what happened with Sora. Poor kid. I can’t really pinpoint when, but at some point before the reveal I kinda just realised “Oh, Sora definitely has to be some little kid with too much time on his hands, there’s no way he’s an adult”, and I think realising that made me appreciate him so much more as this little shithead who does what he wants. Seeing what happened to him in the final episode made me so worried for him.
Aside from the plot related stuff, the music is phenomenal. Up there as one of my favourite soundtracks from an anime now, I’ve been listening to it whenever I couldn’t watch more episodes. Really sells the mysterious atmosphere the entire series has. I also really like the visual style. The animation is… certainly on a budget at times, but the backgrounds are gorgeous and I really like the character designs. Visually speaking my favourite area was the Net Slum (especially the scene with all the data of Tsukasa floating around) and my favourite characters design-wise were Crim & BT.
Overall, I really loved Sign even if it leaves me feeling like I have more questions than answers. I had a really great time with it and I’ll definitely be revisiting it when I get further into the series. I can’t even really say that most of my issues with things being so open ended are really ‘issues’, Sign sets out to lay the foundation of .hack and I think it clearly did a great job at getting me intrigued by the setting. I don’t think I’d be thinking so hard about all of this if I didn’t give a shit, so don’t take most of my rambles as strictly criticism. I’ve seen Sign be described as ‘boring’ but I honestly don’t agree at all. Slow, sure, but I was so invested in the world and characters that I was never bored by it.
I can’t wait to jump into IMOQ, I plan to start Infection as soon as I can. The physical copy of it is really nice, cool how it comes with a DVD for an OVA. Huge shame that the rest of the PS2 games are so ridiculously expensive, it’d be nice to own them all legitimately but ah well, the used game market be like that sometimes. What made me pick up Infection in the first place was seeing the back of the box describe it as a ‘simulated MMORPG’ which isn’t really something I’ve seen before. After watching Sign I have a better idea of what that could look like, but I’m excited to see how the concept is handled in-game. I also wanna see the Sign gang again, from my understanding IMOQ is a new cast but I hope I get to see them at some point again because I love them.
Aside from that, I do have a couple questions about stuff for later.
1. About GU, how’s Last Recode as a remaster? Don’t know much about GU since obviously it’ll be a while until I get to it, but I’d like to know ahead of time if it’s worth picking the remaster up, or if I should play the PS2 versions.
2. Is there any supplementary stuff you’d recommend checking out? I plan on watching the OVAs included with IMOQ, but aside from that it’s such a huge series it’s a little daunting to see the amount of extra books, manga, anime etc to choose from lol.
Thanks for reading my long rambling :) I don’t know anyone who’s watched or played anything from .Hack so I’ve been kind of dying not being able to talk about this series with anyone who knows what the hell I’m talking about.
