I've already written a review for the main series, so I'd recommend reading that first. This is the first picture drama I've seen to completion. If you thought regular anime had budget problems, seeing one of these makes you realize it's no joke. Characters are represented by floating heads in circles over still backgrounds, kind of like a skit in a "Tales of" game which I imagine has a big crossover fanbase with .hack. Anyway...
In .hack//Legend of the Twilight: Offline Meeting Special, Hotaru visits Japan from America with Sanjuro and gets separated. Hotaru logs in to The World from an internet cafe where she asks Shugo, Rena, Mireille, and Ouka for help. They all work together to figure out Hotaru's location then eventually they go out to find her in real life.
There's a scene where Hotaru is explaining how she got lost in a big Tokyo crowd where Hotaru's floating head-in-a-circle flies and fumbles around a still watercolor image of a crowd of Japanese people viewed from the top down. It's so adorable that I screamed "k-kawaii!!!" in real life and made everyone in the internet cafe I was watching from leave in embarrassment. But I'm sure if they saw it they would understand.
To be blunt, this special is very disappointing. You literally do -not- see any single character's real life appearance. Even when they meet up in the story their portrait is of their game character. I've admired .hack's artistic choice to obscure any real world faces in their series, but making a special based around revealing that and just blue-balling the audience is a misleading and pointless thing to do. You get a detail or two about each side-character's personal life, but it amounts to so little and seeing what they really look like would've been a far better reward. Not to mention it was actually revealed in the final volume of the manga but not matched up to the specific characters so you kind of had to guess who was who.
The last quarter or so of the special is the voice actors saying something nice but frivolous about the character they voiced then saying some catchphrase. It's cute to hear how enthused they sound, but they don't say anything special.
And thus, this special in its entirety isn't. There really was almost no point to making it. Yet I might've liked it more than the actual series just because it's just this silly cute thing that never has any moments of stupid writing or slapstick. It feels more in line with the tone of the original manga, which was overall better than the anime adaptation. Anyway, I pretty much outlined the whole thing so you can decide on your own whether it sounds like it's worth watching. I'm just going to pretend Ouka looks the same in real life.
