天下制覇

It’s just like playing a terrible RPG! Only reminding you that you’re playing an RPG every 30 seconds!

Impressions:

After reading all the translated LNs and being hyped for months, I was worried that this wouldn’t be able to live up to my expectations for it. The first episode not only lived up to them, but crushed them. It’s just like the MMOs I played but is totally serious and totally realistic with fantastic art, which as you know is the most expensive and interesting part of a show. Give me a lush background to stare at and it’s perfectly fine to have characters standing around in a circle for most of the episode staring. And all that awesome CG too, which totally works here because it’s a GAME. Just look at those grass blades. And that animation when he attacked. It was so badass. He moved so quick that it was instanteous. Is that cool or what? Oh. Em. Gee. Let’s fight boars forever. And all that world building was just plain awesome. It was just like the MMORPGs I play so you know how much time and effort they put into learning about the setting. Then there was the big reveal that if you die in the game, YOU DIE FOR REAL, and they made sure you know how serious it is by explaining all the details and showing how shocked all the characters were for over half the episode. It’s such a mature show that shows real reactions. Let’s talk about the acting too. All the characters had so much acting. You don’t see that often. Not many shows take the time to pause at the start and give an entire tutorial to the world before then saying why you should care about it, all before the characters do anything but provide exposition. With that much exposition, you know they’re totally deep and emotional and acted.

*ahem* Originally, I was going to play a game with this post. "Spot the one true statement." I think I got a little distracted by the bile and general sarcasm. Real men just keep moving forward. In any case, the episode was boring, drawn out, inane ("You attack by attacking and then the game calculates your attack!"), and full of repeated unneeded exposition. "Hey guys! It’s been 30 seconds. Forgotten that you’re in an MMO? No? Okay." Good god, the whole thing from start to finish was just one bloody goddamned stringof exposition. Even the character intros were just spewed out as mcnuggets of information. Its only hook was that it’s a .hack show… that’s not .hack! Characters come first, you morons. Always. Especially when you have such a bland and uninspired setting. To top it all off, the animation was almost nonexistent. Yes, they can draw nice backgrounds. Good for them. How about animating something in your animated medium now? No? Content to just infodump for 23 straight minutes? Great. And since A1’s standard practice is to blow all the budget in episode 1, I look forward to it being even less animated in future episodes.

So yes, I am sure that everybody is going to be shocked that Aroduc does not like an episode that was 100% exposition.  Stop the presses, alert the mayor, sound the gong, and let slip the worgs. At least in today’s other (real) fantasy offerings, there’s breasts and/or penises. Two things that I’ll take over a goddamned 23 minute power point lecture any day.