.Hack//Roots Review - 74/100
.Hack//Roots is an incredibly difficult anime to review, as this anime is a combination of an interesting view with a trainwreck. It’s got so many good points but at the same time, it’s got just as many, if not even more, bad points. It uses the same setting we’ve known from series as .Hack//Sign and .Hack//Dusk: everything in the series happens in an MMORPG, or Massive Multiplayer Online RPG. It doesn’t belong to any specific genre. If I had to put it in a category, it would be around the mystery-dramas, though that isn’t the most accurate description. This anime is closely related to a game, .Hack//GU.
First of all, let me warn you. If you plan to watch the series, without playing the game, don’t. That’s what I did, and you can’t imagine how many unexplainable events happened. Characters aren’t fleshed out enough, things just happen without any reason for this being given, you miss out on a LOT of character background and the ending leaves SO many questions unanswered that it would make even Narutaru jealous.
Another big problem with this series is that at times, it doesn’t seem to realize that it’s in an MMORPG. .Hack//Sign solved this well, by occasionally showing a mysterious scene about the person behind the computer, but don’t expect to see any of these in .Hack//Roots. The characters move way too much like normal people, instead of computer-graphics. Some even go emo, and instead of relieving their stress on some unfortunate object in the real world, they do this in the virtual world.
The third point actually is a nasty side-effect of the first bad point: some of the character are just so incredibly unlikable. Because their background has been left out, some characters now are a bunch of paper bags. Others, who did have a bit of fleshing out also were incredibly annoying to watch at times. Our main character, Haseo, for example. He just roams around The World like a big gorilla for ten episodes until something changes. Another very cool guy also changes into an incredibly plain one.
Okay, enough bad points. Now the good ones. While some characters are horrible, other ones work out greatly. Haseo, for example, when he’s not in gorilla-mode. And there are a few more of these gems which are very interesting to watch. Around the halfway-mark of the anime, people actually start quitting the game, giving extra depth to the characters who remained. The final three episodes, also, manage to actually recover from the trainwreck that the previous episodes set, and actually deliver some very strong final episodes. If you ignore the frighteningly huge amount of open ends it left.
This show also excels in the visual and sound department. It probably contained, along with Good Witch of the West and The Third the best graphics of all the shows who aired in the spring-season, and the soundtrack is nothing short from memorable. The background music is also one of the things that managed to bring .Hack//Roots back on track when the final episodes started.
Yes, dear god yes, if you’re going to watch the anime without playing the game afterwards, it’s just a ginormous waste of time, because you WILL NOT get anywhere in the end. Also, I get your point that it does forget the fact that it is only a game, though like they say throughout the series, “Can you call it ‘only’?” In doind what you said, it’s proving a point. The point being that even though it’s a game, it could be just as important as life, or even intertwine with it, which Sign didn’t nessesarily do as much as this series. Also another comment to you, if you have a PS2 and some spare money, and are even the slightest bit of a gamer, you really should buy the games and play them. All your loose ends wil be tied up and you’ll experience some great gameplay :D
Comment by Kaitsu — November 26, 2006 @ 0:27
Yeah, that’s my major problem. I don’t have a ps2. :P
Comment by psgels — November 26, 2006 @ 1:27
hack
Comment by maivanthat — June 4, 2007 @ 7:56
Well, I just have finished watching this and I ended liking it a lot, except for some events in the final episodes that are a bit different from the games (I have played to the half of Vol 1 of GU and I dind`t had problem with loose ties) but I ended liking how it ended (specially with the “dwindled bible“ melody playing in the background, man why I thought that that BGM would be the perfect closing for this anime and the perfect start for the .hack//GU games?)
Comment by aquagon — September 26, 2007 @ 7:20
man..have you played .hack //GU before watch the serie ??
difficult to understand…c´mon!
ITS A PRECUEL !! IF YOU DONT PLAY GU ,YOU CANT UNDERSTAND WELL ROOTS !!!
well…thats all ,but dont say its a hard-to-understand anime because,if you play at least GU vol 2 you can undertand EVERYTHING
no more…
Comment by BigBoss — January 17, 2008 @ 23:22
I never played any .//hack games, so this anime sucked big time for me. It was very boring, I kept watching it in hope it would get better, but then it ended without really revealing anything.
The main characters only talk all the time, you’d think MMORPG games were like that…
Comment by Anime fan — January 18, 2008 @ 0:18
well I would say that Hack Gu Trilogy Movie turned out to be a decent ending for the roots
Comment by herbata — April 19, 2008 @ 19:28