Ranked #1520

.hack//G.U. Trilogy

First of all, I´m a german and this is my first english written preview, so please bear with me if I made some spelling-/grammar-mistakes^^

Just to have said it in advance, I finished all three .hack//G.U. games, so it´s not like I´m not familiar with the story itself. I had high expectations, but I sadly got dissappointed.

Story:
They tried to put the story of each game in 30 minute-parts. Since the games itself had a play-volume of 12-18 hours per game (don´t remember exactly and can´t check it because my PS2 is broken), you can guess how extremly it got cutted...

The arena battles that were essential in the games are only shown as flashbacks for around a minute. The story itself strays from the game after the last scene that belongs to "G.U. Rebirth". From here on, everything focuses at Atolis and Ovans story-parts; other characters that were involved with the story (like Sakaki) won´t appear.

Art:
They used the ingame-movie grafic for this movie. It looks cool and awesome in the action-scenes '(especially phase-battles), but terrible at the "chatting-scenes". And in the end, as a GC movie, it´s measured at Final Fantasy anyway, and here, .hack//G.U. trilogy can´t compare at all.


Sound:
After hearing the "Gentle Hands" remix of the trailer, I thought we get more cool remixes, but I hoped too much. Still, the music fits very well, esspecialy the fights.

Character:
My biggest part to complain about.
Most of the main-characters aren´t even shown, and the story focuses totally at Haseo, Atoli and Ovan.

Instead of the cool PKK style that Haseo had in the game, he only has that mad side shown in ".hack//roots", and seems like a little kid very often in the first half, Atoli isn´t even half as fun to watch since she has not much air-time in the first quarter, and Ovan´s calm attitude is nowhere to be found.

Enjoyment and Overall:
If you played through the games, even with that changes you´ll do nothing wrong with watching the movie at least once. If you never even played the game you may do better to ignore it, since they left so much out and made a speedrun through the story, so that it´s hardly understandable at times.

I only recommend this to fans of the ".hack//G.U." - Universe, the others will just ask "what the hell was that about?" read more

The .hack animated series is certainly something that is difficult to understand if you haven't played the games. Even after watching all the .hack anime series, I still sit there, and go:

what.


.hack//G.U. Trilogy is one of the more confusing ones. Watching this reminded me of watching Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children; never in my life have I played a Final Fantasy game, and I can say that actually with some shame.

STORY: The typical story line of the .hack series; something within The World is causing players to go into a coma. I can't really remember much from Roots, since I watched that in 2008, but I'm thinking Trilogy goes into further detail about this 'AIDA' infection that's spreading in The World. This is something that probably shouldn't be watched if you haven't watching Roots, or played the games, since the movie actually goes straight into where Shino is 'PK'd'. Regardless of lack of .hack information while watching this, I felt that the story was still deep.

ART: I didn't actually read the description of MAL on Trilogy until I was just about to watch it. The CG was a biiiiiiiig turn off, well, that is when you compare it to something like the Final Fantasy merchandise. I realize that the CG style was probably supposed to be similar to the .hack game graphics but either way, the lack of detail made me want to cry. Haseo's face just did not look right compared to the design in Roots, but for some silly reason, all the other characters looked fine. Some parts of the movie were well animated, but overall, it just seemed like average CG animation. I did however liked some of Haseo's psycho facial expressions, along with Tri-Edge's.

SOUND: Congratulations to myself! I've finally realized where most of the sound effects and sound clips in DJ Sharpnel's 'Terror Of Death' are from now. Even though it was pretty obvious by the song's title, and I never picked it up while watching Roots. ANYWAY. Sound as always in the .hack titles is lovely, actually I've already forgotten what they sound like since this review has been written two days after watching Trilogy.

CHARACTERS: Main complaint with the .hack series is the ridiculous seriousness of a characters, obsessed over a game. If you find out it's going to harm your actual physical self, then stop playing it immediately and not try to live up to the saying 'curiosity killed the cat'. I honestly have no idea who the crap is Atoli, and what kind of relation she has to Shino and the other characters.

The reason why I gave this a 7, rather than a 6 (would actually be 6.5) was because of one particular scene. This would be the scene with Haseo and AIDA Atoli in the classroom. Oh. My. God. Animation, design and emotion looked like it had been carefully thought out well for this scene, I'd have to say it was mind-blowing. I even had a want-to-cosplay moment when I saw AIDA Atoli, despite the complexity.

Moving on, this is definitely something for the .hack fan, especially someone who is a fan of the games. I must stress again once more, not to watch this, along with the other .hack series, without having a robust knowledge about the .hack world and/or already having played the games.
read more