天下制覇

The least memetic cat on the internet.

Impressions:

This was a little weird. After the big cliffhanger at the end of the previous episode, they basically just ignored the invasion, went inside, and told Sakuya to leave the World since she was the target. I feel like I missed something. The infection on her hand also progressed massively to the point where she was affecting the World just by touching it somewhere in the interim. Hermit’s big raison d’etre for what he was doing and how it was resolved was also fairly weak. He had experienced death, but not died, and now wanted to make everybody else know the pain of dying within the world. The music was good in that scene, I’ll admit that, but I feel like it could have used a lot more than a few pithy lines about how they were happy to meet each other and how The World was real to them already, without him corrupting and ‘killing’ people in it. Then again, there wasn’t really any decent character development leading up to it either, so I really don’t think that the tragic antagonist was the way to go. There would have been nothing wrong with a berserk AI, you know, especially if the ending is blowing it up with a giant mana gun.

So… *shrug*. It’s an OVA. Its first and third episodes were decently made and the second kind of blew. I imagine it’s a lot more interesting if you already have an attachment to the .hack// world, which I don’t. It’s eminently skippable if not.