Stardate 20040405.0215

(Captain's log): ".Hack / Sign" is the latest anime series I've been watching. I ordered all six DVDs, and five of them have been shipped to me. Frustratingly, it's disks 2-6, and I got fed up with waiting and started watching from the second disk.

So I've now watched disks 2-4, and felt like writing a preliminary report.

It starts with the basic concept of an online role playing game, more or less based on a swords-and-sorcery fantasy setting. There are six character classes, and five of the six would be classified as "fighters" in AD&D. They are distinguished by their weapons: long sword, ax, great sword, pole arm, two short swords. The sixth class is known as wavemaster and encompasses all spell casters. Virtually the entire series takes place within the RPG, which is known as "The World". It is filled with spectacular places and amazing things, and a huge number of people play it. But there are rumors of backdoors in the code, and rumors of a special item which may give someone the ability to transcend the rules of the game. And there is a character named Tsukasa who never seems to log out, and apparently doesn't even know how. It seems as if he is actually in that place, rather than just being a visitor like everyone else.

So, is it about hacking? Is it about computers? Is it about fantasy quests? Monsters and treasure?

Hell, no. The bloody thing is a soap opera. I swear I have never seen any anime where the characters talk so much and do so little. Most of each episode is taken up by meetings among characters where they talk about stuff. They meet in all kinds of spectacular locations, and for the first couple of episodes I was dazzled by the scenery, but it soon became apparent that no matter what the location looked like, it didn't really matter.

There are five primary characters in the series, and initially all we know about them is what we see of them in "The World". In the part I've watched, there have been at least a few revelations now about what their real lives are like, and it's a pretty sad bunch.

And things are not really being revealed very rapidly. I have a suspicion that this is going to be another of those series which I end up disliking because it has a lousy ending.

It isn't even based on a manga, as far as I can tell. In an example of art imitating life, there is a companion series of video games, which I'm pretty sure are not MMORPG's. (Ahem: Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games)

Every soap opera has to have its Susan Lucci, right? In this series her name is BT, a wavemaster who's a real bitch. You've also got Mimiru, a younger girl who uses a great sword; Bear, an older father-figure who uses a long sword; Subaru, a girl with an ax; and Tsukasa, the wavemaster who seems unable to leave the game. There are also several other characters who show up less often.

In three disks so far, there's only been one real quest. And I must say it was pretty spectacular. But mostly it's been talk, talk, talk. And angst; lots of angst. I swear, Subaru must have cornered the world market in angst. I don't think I've ever seen a character go so far out of her way to make herself miserable.

Buried beneath oceans of dialog, there's actually an intriguing concept at play here. It's about six episodes worth of story. Unfortunately, the series is actually 27 episodes long, and so there's a hell of a lot of filler. Talk talk talk talk...

Update 20040405: Jay writes:

Just a quick note with details on the .hack video game.

It is not a MMORPG but a single player game about a guy who plays a MMORPG. It's quite clever, really. When you sit down with the game, the first thing the game does is shows you "your e-mail" in which you read about The World from your buddy who is really trying to get you to play. Then you connect to The World and can read stuff from the various messageboards before really jacking into The World and running around and killing stuff.

In The World proper, you run around killing stuff but you also meet up with various friendly people who want to hook up with you and you can run around with them in the game. After you log out of the world, these friends send you e-mail and you can write back to them with various reply options. It's very clever, really. It's a "game within a game" and gives a pretty decent feel of a MMORPG for a single-player experience (including partymates asking for stuff every time the smallest monster gets killed).

It wears thin quickly, though. I got halfway through the first one (there is a series of 4) and realized that I've pretty much squeezed every drop of joy from the game I was likely to. But it was worth renting, if only to see the best "game within a game" representation I've ever seen.

Update: So I've finished watching the other two DVDs. So how was the ending? Hard to say.

It didn't actually end. The story is still hanging; they didn't resolve it. The main series runs 25 episodes, and the last DVD includes 2 additional episodes they call "bonus episodes" which are accessed from the "extras" menu. After the utterly unsatisfying ending of episode 25, I had hoped that the other two might wrap up the story. But in fact episode #26 was unrelated to the story line entirely, and could have been fit almost anywhere into the main series as a fill-