天下制覇

Why does this show have so much running?

Impressions:

The latest in the neverending saga of .hack//, but I figured that since it was an OVA and not being handled by Bee Train, maybe it’d be worth at least a cursory look. Also, there was a… Brazilian… on IRC to watch it with, and you know what they say about Brazilians and anime based on bad games based on MMOs.

Anyway, it wasn’t that bad. The brief spurts of action did look pretty decent, especially at the start, although it did lose a lot of production credibility with its stubborn insistence at cramming in CG everywhere. The people are bad enough, but the scrolling backgrounds and floors give the odd visual sensation that the characters are skating across stone whenever they walk anywhere. Kinema Citrus (who?) did a good job with the visual for the most part beyond that though. Things did tail off quite a bit after the opening sequence of Sakuya’s party ruining some guild’s raid on a dragon though. Music was also nice, although the best song was the ED, played while just a blank screen of credits ran.

The plot’s almost exactly what I expected too, and this is without knowing a damn thing about any previous .hack// entries. The unexpected part is that it took trying to PK the moderator cat to send them to the world full of corpses with some random person whose attacks reach outside of the game. The characters are also pretty lame. Hermit’s about the only one not cut from the cloth of a thousand previous characters (and I’m told most of the visual designs are recycled as well), and he’s mostly interesting because he’s an exploding moderator death cat. Aside from him, there’s just the loli with an old woman’s voice yelling at people to stop getting incinerated. I don’t play MMOs, but I’m pretty sure that if most of your group went down in the dragon’s opening attack, that indicates a breakdown in the planning somewhere.

Preview:

CG virus invasion.