.hack//Roots

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Alternate Titles:  None

 

Original Japanese Release Date: April 5th, 2006

Episode Length/Run-time: 26

Summary:

.hack//Roots is the prequel to the .hack//G.U. videogames. It follows the story of Haseo, a Multi-Weapon and member of the Twilight Brigade guild. In the year 2015, CC Corp. Building burnt down, and with it, most of its data for The World. By splicing data from what would have potentially been another game, CC Corp. created The World R:2 and released it in 2016.

Review:

Set six months before .hack//G.U., Haseo logs into The World R:2 for the first time and falls victim to the PKs that reside within The World R:2. Pking has apparently become a big problem.  He is saved by Ovan and Shino, which prompts him to join the Twilight Brigade.  The Twilight Brigade members are on a mission to find the Key of the Twilight, however, the TAN guild opposes this because they want Ovan’s character data due to the device in his left arm and will stop at nothing to keep the Twilight Brigade from their goal.  The twist is when Tri-Edge shows up. Things briefly pick up in the series when he turns up, making for a short run of episodes that were actually fun to watch.  Makes for some good drama and some action scenes.

If you plan to watch the series, without playing the game, don’t.  You need to play the games to finish the story and let me tell you, the game suck.  Badly.  You may go insane playing them.  But without playing the games:

      • Many unexplainable events
      • Characters aren’t fleshed out enough  you miss out on a LOT of character background.  things just happen without any reason for this being given
      • The ending leaves SO many questions unanswered

This anime has extremely large periods of nothing happening.  What the hell is the director thinking?  Everything happens very slowly.  Long periods of characters just starring off into space at the sky or at something in particular.  Really weird.  It’s a bit how you’ll notice in an anime how sometimes they will just be like a really long still image. Also it takes characters a long time to decide to do something and then an even longer time to execute.  It makes things ever so boring.

The anime totally abandons the “MMO inside an anime” theme.  .hack//Sign had scenes that would show the person using the computer or would have very video game like character traits for the in-game avatars. .hack//Roots totally dumps this trait.  You never see the out of game players and the characters in the series are just way too emotion filled and “real” to be ingame avatars.  As a result, it doesn’t really feel like you’re watching an MMO. Many of the characters are pretty unlikeable in the end as well.  They don’t get background and they really don’t feel that vibrant.  Even the main character Haseo is just a shitty emo character.

The visuals and music are very nice the animation and the overall art is very nice.  The character designs for .hack are always very interesting, and the artwork in general is of an excellent standard. This is a good thing, because you are forced     to stare at pretty visuals in which very little happens for a long, long time.   The music is fantastic as well.  The theme song and was played at the start of tonights podcast, “Silly Go Round” Is quite awesome and even the BGM features famous melodies such as the “Queen of the Knight” Aria from Mozart’s “Magic Flute”.

[starrater]