This review was commissioned. That means I was paid to watch and review the series in question. You can learn about my commission policies and how to buy commissions of your own here. This review was commissioned by Rahkshi. Many thanks, as always.

This review contains spoilers for the reviewed material. This is your only warning.

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“I am not in front of a terminal.”

.hack//SIGN is what one might call a bit of a difficult anime. It actively demands your patience, and it’s a slow-burner in a way that’s rare nowadays. Hazy and dreamlike, .hack//SIGN asks a lot of questions but is never too quick to provide answers. It engages in meaningful repetition and circuitous, questioning conversations, and is generally light on action. To compare it with most other anime that use the VRMMO plot device is nonsensical, it is more of a piece with Serial Experiments Lain than with Sword Art Online.

It is also very, very of its time. Not in a good way, not in a bad way, but down to its bones, .hack//SIGN would make no sense in the present moment. The Internet as it was in 2002 and the internet now, nearly twenty years later, are incomparable. .hack‘s very premise involves a group of friends in an MMO–itself not really much like any that’s currently popular, not even World of Warcraft, which postdates it by a few years–who know little to nothing about each other’s offline lives. A standard experience at the time, but unthinkable nowadays where ones gender, sexual orientation, race, abledness, mental health, political stances, and so on are generally shared with little illusion of privacy. .hack is, thus, a time capsule.

Asking whether .hack//SIGN is “good or not” then feels irrelevant, it’s like asking whether the ruins of Babylon are “good”. They have a lot to tell us, that’s the important part.

That sense of lost history bleeds into the feel of the anime itself. .hack is a jumble of cryptic conversations, hacker lore, GeoCities pseudo-mysticism, and genuine mystery. It gives the anime a distinct feel. The excellent soundtrack, a unique combination of early aughts dance and world music, helps a lot to sell all this. As does the fact that the rare occasion where “real world” information is revealed is always treated as a major moment, and with only one exception, the few scenes that take place there are bathed in a sepia-tone static filter. Indeed, in terms of reacting to the increasing impact the internet would have on our lives, .hack is as prescient as it is of its time.

Speaking literally, .hack//SIGN is about someone who is trapped in a video game. But this plot device alone is its sole link to the VRMMO genre that it largely predates. The existential wringer that protagonist Tsukasa is put through seems unlikely to prompt the kind of “wouldn’t it be cool if-” hypothesizing that later such stories would eventually inspire. Tsukasa’s exact situation is ambiguous for most of the series; it’s clear he’s stuck in the game but not how or what exactly the ramifications are. Nor is it clear how exactly the mysterious cat-like figure and equally mysterious woman floating above a bed that the series repeatedly returns to factor in.

It does give him one hell of a penchant for (quite justified) angst, but on the whole, the series’ actual plot is very cryptic. This applies even to the end-episode previews, which employ the unique tactic of playing multiple few-second clips simultaneously to an audio background of random noise.

If this all sounds like a little much, that’s because it kind of is. I stand by my statement that the question of whether .hack is “good or bad” is mostly irrelevant, but it’s certainly not a casual watch. I’d go so far as calling it hard to follow in spots, with the show-long quest for the artifact known as the Key of The Twilight being a particular source of head-scratchers. It is all eventually explained, but that it takes so long to get there means that it’s very easy to spend much of the show wondering where this is all going. Being part of a very large franchise, only some of which has ever been available in English, does not help.

Thankfully it’s easier to pick up on less fantastical plot threads. Mimiru and Bear, who make up the other two members of Tsukasa’s “party” of a sort, provide lifelines for those seeking more straightforward character arcs. Mimuru gets Tsukasa to open up (and opens up to him in turn) throughout the series’ first half, while Bear’s strained relationship with his real-world son provides interesting, implied motive for his attempts to mentor Tsukasa. Meanwhile, the semi-antagonistic characters of B.T. and Sora spend much of the show locked in a relationship of trying to intellectually one-up each other that is, at least for me personally, maybe a little too on-point as a reflection of online social dynamics.

And on that note, while .hack’s aesthetics and subject matter remain firmly rooted in its date of origin, it’s eerily prescient in one respect. Throughout much of the series a plot thread about in-game group The Crimson Knights bubbles under, only coming to a head in its final third. The Knights, especially their collective mouthpiece Silver Knight, are a spot-on reflection of the attitudes of online authoritarians, down to Silver Knight’s angry insistence that Tsukasa is a law-breaking “illegal” rather than a victim. Toward the end of the show he eventually mellows out, but the point remains.

Subaru, the Knights’ ostensible leader, is another character who benefits from a fairly grounded relationship with Tsukasa, and her sympathy for him puts her at odds with the rest of the Knights. The two eventually grow close, and a scene in the nineteenth episode where Tsukasa comforts a crying Subaru (who, as we see in a rare cut to the real world, is crying there too), sticks in my mind as one of the show’s most genuine and emotional moments.

There’s also a dash of Gender in here, something that wasn’t super common at the time and remains rarer than it ought to be today. It’s a nice touch.

Moments like this allow .hack//SIGN to bundle together a solid core by its end. If you’re the sort that likes found family stories, .hack‘s concludes with (among many other things) one character literally offering to adopt another. You can’t get much more literally “found family” than that.

So, while parts of it are confusing and while the series is overall slow, it’s really hard to dislike this show. .hack‘s aesthetic and story beats anchor it firmly in the year of its release, but tales about groups of misfits who help each other through hard times over the internet are arguably even more relevant now than they were in 2002. What is The World but a souped-up Discord server, after all?

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