Tag: .hack

Posted on in anime, Reviews

(Review) .hack//ROOTS Needs to Touch Grass

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

This review was commissioned. That means I was paid to watch and review the series in question and give my honest thoughts on it. You can learn about my commission policies and how to buy commissions of your own here. This review was commissioned by Rakhshi. Thank you for your support.

Magic Planet Anime posts will be extremely irregular for the foreseeable future. See this post for details.

Maybe I just don’t quite get it.

.hack//Roots, the second entry of the storied .hack franchise, is a kind of anime that doesn’t really get made anymore, on several fronts. It’s an adaption of (and sort of a prequel to) the video game .hack//G.U. It’s also a fairly low-key and unflashy speculative fiction series. There used to be a lot of these; stuffed to the brim with a lot of place-names, people-names, and thing-names, where the central plot is the main fixture but is, at least in theory, supported by a whole lot of worldbuilding and Lore™. The slow pace is a key part of it too, enough so that my pet neologism “Proper Noun Machine Gun” doesn’t quite feel appropriate. (Proper Noun Composite Bow, maybe?) Usually, the plot is about finding a McGuffin of some kind. Or several McGuffins. Often, there are competing factions who want the McGuffin(s). At a glance, you’d usually guess they were mid-budget productions. You were usually correct. All of this is true in Roots, to at least some extent, and I have to admit that it made getting invested in the series hard for me. That in mind, I did not really care for it at all, we’ll circle back around to why.

In the past decade, anime like this have had their niche crowded out by light novel adaptions and the like, which have a more uptempo pace and are generally a lot campier. So, I must admit that for the second .hack franchise entry in a row, I went into Roots with the mentality of a pop cultural archeologist. .hack//SIGN was so of-its-era that the very net culture it was loosely based on is basically a foreign country nowadays. Roots is much the same, despite being a bit more recent (it hails from 2006) as signposted by its tangle of now-ancient MMO slang, some of which was never common in the anglosphere to begin with.

But enough about that, what’s it actually about?

Hint: not this.

For the first half of its show, there’s a straightforward answer to that question. Our main character is Haseo (Takahiro Sakurai), a surly noob who finds himself getting ganked on his very first day playing hit MMO The World. As the series’ plot revs up, he gets caught between the machinations of two guilds; the Twilight Brigade, led by the mysterious Ovan (Hiroki Touchi) searching for the Key of the Twilight—you may remember it from SIGN—and the enigmatic TaN Guild, who oppose the former for initially nebulous reasons. Haseo joins the Brigade at about the show’s quarter mark, and consequently they form the bulk of our remaining main cast. The main other members of note are Shino (Kaori Nazuka), who Haseo quickly forms a close bond with, and Tabby (Megumi Toyoguchi), who is another new player in search of friends in the digital fields and cities of The World.

Our McGuffins this time around are glowing crystals called Virus Cores, things of obscure provenance found in glitched-out locations within The World called Lost Grounds. The show opens before these things start to actually turn up, but they’re the main plot-drivers for the earlier parts of the series.

But detailing the plot from this point on becomes, or at least I feel it becomes, rote. Eventually the Brigade dissolves and things crumble into a syrupy morass, and the show never really recovers.

Before we discuss why, though, let’s consider the overall positives.

What I will give the series is that its soundtrack and background visuals are consistently excellent. As a production, and keeping in mind its origins, it is generally just a solid affair all-around. (There are some rough spots toward the end, but they’re relatively few in number.) The fight choreography is engaging on the occasion that fights actually pop up. In general, the show looks and sounds good. Unfortunately, that is about the sum of my unambiguously positive thoughts on .hack//ROOTS.

After the opening third or so of the series, these strengths clash with an increasingly sluggish central plot, and the series slows to a crawl. There is a lot of utterly leaden exposition—some of it handed out by decent characters, in spite of that, like the wise cat-man sage Phyllo (Junpei Takiguchi)—that is probably interesting if you have much more prior investment in this franchise than I do, but without that existing experience it mostly just comes across as boring.

There are, though, writing-side positives, too. Haseo’s character arc is terrible, as we’ll get to, but some of the other character writing is fairly strong.

For instance, a bit under halfway through, there’s an excellent bit of character work where Shino professes that she likes being in the Brigade because she feels that she can truly be herself there. There is something to this idea of Ovan (or really, Shino herself, given that she does just as much to make the Twilight Brigade what it is, while it exists) as a great creator-of-spaces. Areas where people can just be without having to worry about the pressures of the outside world. In the modern, mundane internet, there are plenty of such spaces, although not as many as there used to be, many of them on services like Discord. And there is also something to Roots’ depiction of one of these spaces falling apart; about halfway through the series, most especially in episodes 12 and 13, where the Twilight Brigade all quit after Ovan’s sudden disappearance, and Shino dies outright at the hands of the mysterious digital executioner Tri-Edge (Sayaka Aida). The collapse of a place like this is genuinely a sad thing and trying to convey that through the story is one of .hack//Roots‘ better ideas. Unfortunately, having good ideas and telling good stories are different things, and just because Roots can do the former does not imply it can necessarily do the latter.

From here, the plot again greatly slows down, and most of the remainder of the show is spent on Haseo’s deeply tedious quest for vengeance against Tri-Edge. On paper, you can see how this would work. Sacrificing almost every positive attribute you have in order to “get stronger” so you can avenge the death of a loved one is a tried-and-true narrative, one that’s been done many times in anime, and sometimes to great effect. But two things sink Roots’ attempt to tap into this bit of the collective human psyche. For one, the very fact that the series takes place within an MMO makes the whole thing feel slightly ridiculous, even with Shino being literally dead. For two, and much more importantly, Haseo is just not an interesting character. He begins the series as a whiny dweeb, and the series’ attempts to sell him as a genuine menace when he decides to go full raging avenger just don’t work.

Shino is gone, Haseo has given up a lot, so all of this, again, should work, but none of this changes the fact that what he’s mostly doing is mopily level grinding in an MMO. It’s silly, which would itself be excusable if there was any sense of drama to any of this, but there isn’t. Instead, Haseo mostly looks like a scrawny teenager cosplaying Cu Chulainn Alter for the back half of the show, something that really does not help its stabs at gravitas land.

….

Elsewhere, things are better. More grounded characters like Tabby, whose struggles still consist mostly of her wanting friends and not knowing how to deal with her first friend group breaking up, is the one who’s best and easiest to relate to, among the main cast. She carries that torch through the whole show, and she might be my favorite character over all. At show’s end, she quits The World, and plans to become a nurse, so she can help people in the real world.

Other minor characters like Pi (Sanae Kobayashi), who is effectively a combination minion of the obligate mysterious conspiracy / put-upon secretary, and Saburou (Shizuka Itou), a hacker with a talent for longwinded, clunky metaphors, brighten things up when they’re onscreen. But we here again return to the central problem of these characters just not being on-screen all that often.

And even when they are, they’re usually talking about Haseo. I’m reminded of that Simpsons episode about Poochie the Dog, except in this case Poochie is the show’s main character. We’re supposed to buy him as an avenging badass, but on a simple vibe level, it just doesn’t work.

This disconnect renders most of the show’s entire second cour tedious, but there are bright spots even here.

Episode 19, for example, treats the annoying but relatively mundane practice of Real Money Trading (RMT’ing, as the show frequently abbreviates it) with all the deadly seriousness of an episode of The Wire. Here, former TaN member Tawaraya reappears under a new account, using the name Tohta (Kenta Miyake), and busts up a ring of RMT’ers exploiting the playerbase for money. It’s a surprisingly interesting plot, with a fair amount of intrigue and actual mystery that is sorely lacking from much of the preceding material. It’s the one time the show’s self-seriousness actually works in its favor. Unfortunately, it doesn’t last, as the series returns to its ongoing main plot in the following episode and almost immediately loses that edge.

Finally, in the last few episodes, we learn that Phyllo has passed away, and has spent the last eight months of his life with a terminal cancer diagnosis, logging in to The World every day, just to chat up players. It’s a sincere, resonant ode to the quiet life, and the idea that some people find a deep joy in just communicating with others at all. It is maybe the single most affecting moment in the entire series….and then the entire rest of the last episode is just about Haseo again. Even when .hack//Roots has a good idea—and it has a fair few of them!—it can’t stay focused for long enough.

The problem with these sorts of anime is that they live and die by their central plot, which is usually driven by some kind of mystery. Here, at least in Roots‘ second half, the mystery is what precisely happened to Shino, why Tri-Edge attacked her in the first place, and where he is now. But there’s no compelling sense of discovery to it, everything just feels far too slow for something like this, and many of the plot points raised here do not actually get resolved by show’s end. (For actual conclusions you’d have to play G.U. itself, or perhaps watch one of its film adaptions.) So, the show drags and drags, all buildup and no payoff. Despite having only 26 episodes, it is mostly a series of intermittent highlights surrounded by doldrum. The bright spots make the experience more tolerable, but they don’t make it good. The disparate strengths never form a whole.

I don’t want to make it seem like I hate .hack//Roots. I certainly don’t. But I do find it frustrating, there are few things moreso than an anime with decent ideas that it just can’t figure out how to fit them together. Roots was actually fairly popular, once upon a time, but I think there’s a reason that the .hack series on the whole has largely faded from view. Its sprawling, inaccessible nature certainly has never helped, but if this is more indicative of the average tone and tempo of the franchise than Sign was, I can understand why people are not super interested anymore. Certainly, my personal journey with .hack ends here; I’m logging out.

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Posted on in anime, Reviews

(REVIEW) The Web That Was and .hack//SIGN

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.

“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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All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

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