However, this turned out to be the one time in my life my dick coerced me into making a good decision - the manga was actually pretty enjoyable in its entirety, and I read the whole thing several times, completely taken in by that magic I spend all of my time as an anime watcher trying to capture more of. Now, some months later I see a familiar looking DVD sitting on the new releases shelf of a store. They made an anime adaptation of my favorite manga at the time, and I couldn't have been more excited to see the story and characters I liked in full color, motion, and sound. That wasn't really meant to be. You see, as it so happens the .hack//Legend of the Twilight was one of those short mediocre budget series more concerned with advertising the manga than it was with doing it justice. Evident by the fact that the studios couldn't wait a measly ten months for the manga to finish.
This led to one of the most drastically changed anime adaptations I've ever seen. I'm not inherently opposed to this idea, since changes always bring the chance of some improvements (like parts of Fullmetal Alchemist), but the fact is that improvements are extremely unlikely and optimally shouldn't be prioritized over first doing a faithful adaption. In an ideal world we'd have our complete manga adaptations and then whatever extended universe/re-imagining series the studios wanted, but in the real world there are time, budgets, and profits to consider.
To make a long story short, if you're a .hack fan interested in the Legend of the Twilight world and were only going to do the anime or the manga, then do the manga because it's far, far better. Or at the very least do both, because they're entirely different stories. They begin seemingly the same way: Shugo and Rena are siblings living under different parents who reconnect in the online game "The World" after winning avatars that look like previous legendary The World players. When they're attacked by a mysteriously invincible monster, Shugo is killed and revived after being given a special bracelet item by a girl named Aura. This bracelet can rewrite data in the game to weaken it, allowing Shugo to combat these new invincible monsters. Shugo and Rena try to play the game normally but are continuously disrupted by strange circumstances and more invincible monsters. With the help of new friends Mireille, Ouka, Hotaru, as well as systems administrator Balmung and his friend Sanjuro, they'll have to confront whatever is threatening The World.
The anime's story majorly deviates from the manga early on when Rena disappears for half the series after being killed by one of the special monsters. It's around here we see that our main antagonists are a group of hacker children, which is very lame because aside from our villains being snobby brats their motives are also never fully explained, they basically never interact with our main characters directly, and in the end they're written out of the story like they never existed. Every once in a while they send an invincible monster after Shugo because his Twilight Bracelet threatens their plans, but they never seem to realize Shugo can just deus ex machina it with Data Drain and win every battle the same way. It's similarly annoying to see the other characters attack the self-regenerating monsters repeatedly even though they know from experience only Shugo can do anything.
If you remember Shugo and Rena's relationship in the manga being far too affectionate for a brother and sister, then you're really going to shake when the incest dial is turned up even further in the anime. Shugo is downright in love with his sister this time, ogling her (or at least her player avatar) twice in the first two episodes, and literally half of Rena's dialogue in the entire series is her yelling "onii-chaaaan!" often several times in a row. It's only made creepier when you remember this sibling love is bordering on both of them experiencing the beginning of puberty at around 14 years old or so. Gross.
When the "search for Rena" plot appears one of the anime's worst traits is made obvious: it likes to waste as much time as it can. It does most of this through a ton of long-takes (this is where the "camera" pans slowly across a scene, sometimes to get something across but in here for nothing usually) and redundant pointless scenes of Shugo and friends running around looking for Rena all over The World, which is a completely stupid idea because if she was in a normal area she would obviously be contactable or could just log out. This new plot also means the manga's cute minor one of reuniting Zefie with her mother is completely gone. All other characters return in mostly similar roles, but a new main character called Sanjuro replaces Zefie. He's some experienced samurai type who mentors and trains Shugo even though his bracelet is more unstoppable than any legitimate attack, and he's friends with Balmung and also realizes the danger coming to The World.
Nothing in the anime really has much personal stake to it. The main antagonist is only revealed when the anime is almost over and is never even hinted at or lead into before then, and neither they or the child hackers have absolutely anything to do with Shugo or Rena besides them just happening to win the special costumes (which they also had nothing to do with). Literally Shugo's only reason to be involved with any of this is because Rena just happens to get kidnapped. Naturally, the side characters Mireille, Ouka, and Hotaru, despite being far more likable than the two main characters have even less to do with anything that's happening and really don't help much at all when the story is all said and done.
There's a terrible tendency for the show to introduce slapstick jokes at complete random and often totally inappropriate moments. The worst example is the series's running gag of having Shugo, who is seriously one of the dumbest, most helpless anime protagonists I've ever seen, constantly trip and run into things and break a tooth off (which is even kept in some subsequent scenes which looks ridiculous). In the climax of the anime when everything is doomed bla bla bla a total comic relief character barges in from the edge of this apocalyptic scene just to cry and scream and run into a wall like an idiot. I know Legend of the Twilight is obviously aimed at a younger audience, both anime and manga, but that doesn't mean kids are complete idiots who can't get engrossed into any drama.
If there is a single good thing about the anime's story changes, it's that the plot is now much more dependent on it taking place inside of a game. It wouldn't take much at all to rewrite the manga to fit inside a typical fantasy world with actual magic and such. The biggest problem would be Shugo's bracelet rewriting code to linearly make monsters weaker, but it still wouldn't be hard to imagine it as some kind of transformation spell. This is relevant because it's inherently harder to take a story seriously inside a world that has less consequences than a "real" one. In the anime the elements of hackers and such mean it has much more to do with .hack's unique setting, which is the whole point of .hack to begin with. Despite this, there's constant logic holes where the writers failed to equate the logic of the game world with what's going on in the story. In one scene a hacker has already been caught by the CC Corporation staff, but instead of them just banning him instantly because this is all data and they have the controls to do that, they literally chase the hacker around a virtual town until they catch them physically. Also, how are completely fluid human movements made with just a regular game controller? They could've just said the headset has some mind-reading power for all I care since obviously the fictional technology is already highly advanced compared to ours. In one scene the administrators talk about monitoring log-in info to see who accessed servers, but when they're searching for Shugo and friends none of them think to just stand by and wait until Shugo logs in for the first time of the day before he reaches Mireille's hideout and just capture him there? Also, why is a hideout hidden from administrators. They're administrators, they should have access to everything. There are hundreds of things in the anime to nitpick like this, and it counts because it makes both the world incoherent and the ability to buy into it as a gamer difficult. Everything I wrote above could have been written around, but the writers were either lazy or not very clever.
The series was made around the time when digital animation was starting to take over, and it shows the worst aspects of the format. The show is full of bright, solid colors that aren't shaded well at all and give it a very "flash cartoon" appearance, and there are frequent "moeblob" faces and other poor art flubs such as background characters having stick-thin or otherwise imbalanced limbs and screwed up faces. It's not an ugly anime, but it's not afraid to cut any corners. The backgrounds are painted though and look quite nice, with a lot of the fantasy architecture looking mystical with their odd color schemes yet friendly and inviting.
The music is, oddly enough, easily the best part of the anime. It's not really something I'd listen to outside of the show, but it's a somewhat post-modern mix of influences. It's typically light and breezy as the setting and characters are, and there's everything from synthesizers, xylophone-centered jazz, orchestration, and even (the best parts) picopop with bossa nova-esque vocals. I really like the opening even though the lyrics are completely impenetrable even by general anime standards, and the ending song and the short beautifully surreal visual sequence is literally my favorite part of the entire series. No joke.
As for the dub vs. sub thing, it's a weird situation. Normally it's cut and dry whether a dub is worth checking out because either the studio cares or it doesn't, but in this case the casting is acceptable to great (both Steve Blum and Crispin Freeman as main characters) yet the voice you hear the most is absolutely horrendous. Bryce Papenbrook as Shugo is unbelievably aggravating, with constant shrill shrieks of whining and screaming for Rena like a complete teenage baby. It's absolutely maddening, and I don't know how someone thought this was an acceptable performance. It makes his moronic, childish personality even more grating. I guess try the dub and see if you can last ten seconds of Shugo's ballistic babbling because if you can tolerate it the rest is solid.
But as a whole, I just don't want to recommend this to anyone. A serious .hack fan will watch it anyway and to them I only recommend to read the manga as well. Those on the fence should definitely just read the manga, where the main character personalities are far less annoying and every supporting character is used in the plot much more thoroughly. The story stays charming in its lack of severity which suits the more child-friendly tone of the art design and gentle characters, while the anime goes for broke on dramatic effect when it doesn't fit its surroundings and thus can't be taken very seriously. It also goes to mention its complete lack of depth, relevance to the series and its characters as a whole, and extremely vague explanations of events and character motivations, and almost every character is exactly the same at the end as they are at the beginning. It's a very uneven and loose story for something so short, while the manga stays within the modest confines the short length allows. Neither seem important to the overarching .hack story as a whole, so don't let thoughts of that sway your decisions. If Shugo went to my middle school I'd bully him.
