Forum - View topicREVIEW: .hack//SIGN DVD
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TsukasaElkKite
 Posts: 3946 |
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I already have the 26 episode complete collection from Bandai but I'll gladly double dip for Intermezzo and Unison.
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DaisakuKusama
 Posts: 85 |
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Agreed with this great review and most commenters here on all points. Kind of got sick of hearing about finding The Key to the Twilight and waiting for the gang to go looking for it. I thought "Reason" was a really beautiful episode.
I have the Anime Legends release from Bandai, and it contains an isolated score audio track. I'm surprised there was no mention of such an extra on this new dvd release. It's one of the best reasons to own the Anime Legends set. One of the best things to come out of .hack//sign was Yuki Kajiura's concert at Anime Expo 2003. You can find the whole thing on Youtube. Vendors were selling her Fiction cd at the concert like hot dogs. That cd didn't leave my player for months.
I wonder if any of the tracks are from that AX03 concert? YK's next concert at AX 2012 was also wonderful! |
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Kyjin
 Posts: 126 Location: Los Angeles |
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Oh man this takes me back. .hack was the second anime I started to collect on DVD (the first being CCS), and my friends and I were obsessed with it. I still have the original release (including the Limited Edition of the sixth DVD so I could get the extra OVA), as well as the four PS games, Legend of the Twilight Bracelet, and the manga. I still think it's crazy how expansive the universe was over the properties, and a good marketing strategy too considering how much I spent on the franchise when I was 16... When .hack//Roots and the GU games came out, I ended up quitting the series since I couldn't afford investing in the "next generation" as it was.
Out of curiosity, does the rerelease have the "soundtrack only" track? I thought this was one of the coolest things in the original release; I'd stick it on in the background while I did homework to just listen to the music. |
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Chiibi
 Posts: 4828 |
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I still think Tsukasa looks creepy as f*** on the cover of this new release. D:
Kinda like a zombie in drag......or like he's stoned....lol I don't know. He's so pale and his expression is really weird. As for the show, I have mixed feelings. Sora was highly amusing in the Japanese version. The music was amazing and I bought the soundtrack. But the pacing was indeed molasses. I remember it getting pretty good at the halfway point. Not a big fan of the two main characters but everyone's design is still lovely and full of creativity. Oh does anyone remember what that animal thing was Tsukasa rode on and it slammed into the wall? I thought that was funny as hell as a kid. 
Legend of the Twilight was one of the worst anime I'd ever seen. I didn't want to go past the first episode. |
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Fronzel
Posts: 1906 |
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Maybe it would have been better at 13 episodes...
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Kyjin
Posts: 126 Location: Los Angeles |
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Grunty! Bandai sold plushies of those for a while in the mid 2000s. The ones in the video game were hilarious; one was French! |
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belvadeer
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When I first saw SIGN on Cartoon Network, I was really impatient with it at first. I was even one of those awful folks who asked, "So when are they going to get into actual battles in the game?" I can't believe I did that. It took time, but the show grew on me and after a couple of episodes, I realized the emphasis was not on playing the game but on the characters. I guess my RPG-loving side just appreciated seeing fantasy game battles (even though I don't have any actual love for MMOs). The music emphasizing feelings and atmosphere at certain times in the show, even when there was very little going on, was captivating.
As for the cast, I really did like what was learned about some of them, BT in particular, with the clincher being spoiler[when she threw away the invitation to her class reunion]; that scene really spoke to me more than any other. Tsukasa's life in the real world was quite awful though. spoiler[I hated her father every time he showed up onscreen and did or said something.]
I know, right? I got both the soundtracks for the show. I have the Infection tetralogy soundtrack as well, even though the games' music was composed by other folks, but I got them because the field, battle and Phase boss themes are particularly catching to the ears, almost on Kajiura's level of immersion. |
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Gina Szanboti
Posts: 11330 |
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Sometimes not even that. I remember one scene, with I think Bear and Crim talking in a cathedral, that was wide-framed so that they were tiny figures on the other side of the room. They held that shot for the entire several-minute conversation, just so they wouldn't have to animate anything. 
Like Kyjin, this was the second anime I bought (I have the six Bandai volumes that spell LOGOUT on the spines). At the time my gaming consisted of online freeform text rpgs, so the dialog-heavy material didn't bother me in the least, and it was sort of a special treat to have moving pictures to go along with the words! Whenever Bee Train decided to have them move, that is... I never played any of the .hack games, so none of the sequels ever made a lick of sense to me.  But despite the lack of action and coherence and resolution, it's chock-full of nostalgia, and I still love the music and the character designs.
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Top Gun
 Posts: 4570 |
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Oddly enough, I think I can credit .hack//SIGN as the show that made me an anime fan, even though I saw very little of it at the time. All I'd really seen up to that point was the original Pokemon, which looking back fits every single cliche one has about those "weird Japanese cartoons," and the few bits of DBZ I saw were a massive turn-off. But then I was flipping through the channels and saw this show on Toonami's afternoon block about some sort of online game...and it didn't have people with giant sweat drops falling over sideways! In fact, most of it was just people talking! Having (reasonably) intelligent conversations! At that tender age I had no idea that an animated show could even do something like that, and I was instantly intrigued. (The jaw-droppingly gorgeous soundtrack certainly didn't hurt either.) I didn't wind up watching the show until years later, after I had several full series under my belt, and while it's definitely slow as molasses and has its share of narrative flaws, I still love it all the same. I'm not sure if it's worth double-dipping on this set just to get a legal copy of Unison, but maybe I will for nostalgia's sake.
(I just wish the second half of the original quartet of games wasn't going for such absurd secondhand prices. I have the first one and played some of it, and while it wasn't totally my cup of tea gameplay-wise, I loved the whole conceit of a fake MMO, out-of-game e-mails and all.) |
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jr240483
 Posts: 4374 Location: New York City,New York,USA |
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well i liked it a lot back when it showed on toonami. though it was definitely slow and as a result not as popular than key of the twilight since that series was more about mild fanservice and the brother-sister relationship of shugo and reina. in retrospect, watching slow paced series like this back then kinda is what allowed me to keep pace with Seirei no Moribito back when it showed on Adult Swim though was definitely the worst idea ever for the block considering AS have been basically a shonen type since the days of DBZ ,Bleach and Yu Yu Hakusho. |
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Shenl742
Posts: 1524 |
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Looking back this was a pretty bizarre way to launch a franchise considering how non-indicative it felt compared to everything that would come after.
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Cyberminds
 Posts: 2 |
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A show from my teenage years that I've been thinking about revisiting recently. I was hooked by the premise from the moment CN started airing the adverts for the show. That was right around the time when I was getting big into online gaming, specially MMOs like Ragnarok Online and Final Fantasy XI. Even back as an easily impressed 12 year old I thought the show was slow and nothing much seemed to be happening, but I was still glued to the TV every time a new episode came on. This was simply due to the fact that it was an anime about a topic I never imagined would warrant its own show. Here we are over 12 years later and it's almost unbelievable that it has become its own terrible subgenre, heh.
This was the show that got me into the .hack// franchise, which is something I loved following as it developed over the years, and that is another reason I've always held a positive opinion of it after all these years. .hack is long dead now though and it is nice to read the opinions of people who judge this on its own strengths and weaknesses rather than the franchise as a whole as I did all those years ago. I'm still kind of hesitant to rewatch it, because I'm afraid it will ruin all the nice memories I have of it... as that is exactly what happened when I went back and tried to replay the first set of the .hack games. 
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MrBonk
Posts: 192 |
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The problem with people and this show, is that it's not meant to be viewed stand alone, it's not meant to stand alone. Everything is interconnected with the rest of the media. And at the time of release, this show is to the first four games as Roots is to GU.
It's one thing it does immensely better than any other "MMO" Anime out there. And one of the reasons why .Hack is so amazing. |
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leafy sea dragon
 Posts: 7163 Location: Another Kingdom |
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I remember this anime being part of a trend of anime where everything is obscured--not just the central mystery and character motivations, but what their environments are like, why anyone behaves the way they do, the villains' actions, and sometimes even what goes on onscreen, often lacking logical progression. The Sci-Fi Channel's "Anime Unleashed" block was absolutely full of this sort of show. I remember it beginning with Banner of the Stars, Serial Experiments Lain, and Betterman, all of which were huge bores to me because I had zero investment in any of the characters, who spent all their time chatting with each other on topics without context. And I believe D.Gray-Man premiered as a manga around this time too--I read the beginning of that and felt much the same way: All of these series, .hack//SIGN included, try to draw in audiences not through compelling or sympathetic characters, but making everything ambiguous and hoping people would be curious enough to keep watching. It works for some people (it wouldn't have become a trend if it didn't), but not for me.
That, and I had a really old computer that struggled to run anything because spyware and adware were clogging everything up and they found their way into the computer faster than Ad-Aware and Spybot Search & Destroy could get rid of them. The computer was also slowly succumbing to a virus that I couldn't get rid of.
Well, those cliches DID mostly derive from Pokémon, Dragon Ball Z, and Sailor Moon (with a hint of Digimon and Godzilla), as they were the most visible, most talked about anime of the time and thus the ones most likely to reach the minds of the people working in American entertainment.
That's another major reason I dropped out early on. When I found out that you're getting an intentionally incomplete story, and you have to go through a lot of different media to understand it all, I decided not to watch any more of it. (And not simply because I didn't have a PS1 or PS2.) I did the same thing for When They Cry when I found out that went multimedia too. Extra material you don't need to experience to understand it, that's okay with me. But I think continuity lockout should be kept to a minimum. |
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ZJCitrusGraffiti
Posts: 3 |
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.hack//SIGN was my iconic anime growing up. I remember staying up late even after parents said that no-one was allowed to watch TV late at night (I'd sneak after I thought they were asleep) and to this day Subaru announcing the disbanding of the Crimson Knights FELT like such a major event that afterwards the world looked differently to me. Like, "woah!" And Tsukasa's "death" midway through the series have me chills and goose bumps.
I consider myself more "bookish" and quiet than not, so a series like this was a welcome change to what my mom knows anime for: lots and lots of screaming in Japanese OR English. By the way, .hack//SIGN was initially released in both regular individual DVDs (6 total) and Limited Edition versions(6 total) where L.E. #1-5 came with a DVD sleeve and a CD soundtrack(vol 5, I think, also came with a box to hold all CDs released), while vol 6 didn't come with an extra CD, but it did come with the Intermezzo & Unison episodes. Realizing Bandai was doing this early on, I purposely waited for and only bought the L.E.s. And I'm so glad I did, because I didn't know those episodes weren't going to be included in the complete collection. (But I soo wanted those special pins that came with it!) I say all this just to say that that this latest .hack//SIGN release isn't the first time these (rare?) episodes were domestically released. I didn't see any other post say anything similar. Sorry if I missed it. (Bandai did the same thing with releasing normal AND L.E. editions of Eureka 7(most came with shirts/manga/or OSTs; two came with art boxes) and Code Geass(which came with manga that was either not canon or an alternate re-telling of the anime; not worth it in my opinion).)
Actually, if the dothack.wikia is to be believed (and I do), then it's STILL GOING! (Just more so in Japan, looks like.) The latest series title is called Guilty Dragon. (Look at 2030) Also, before I forget, can somebody who has bought the Funimation re-release please tell me if it has been re-dubbed or it has stayed the same as Bandai's dub? |
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