Story
The story is a bit different from the rest of the .hack series, instead of focusing on the mysterious comas that's been happening to the players dying in "The World" this mainly focuses on an item that is supposedly to be in the game but not obtainable, the mysterious item is called the Key of the Twilight. The main character is a new player named Haseo and everything pretty much revolves around him, he gets recruited to this guild which is dedicated on finding this secret item by their guild master "Ovan". I do like this kind of story compared to the rest, maybe because I can relate somewhat to their situation, whenever I start to play a video game there's always rumors about a certain item or something that not all players can obtain, and that itself already gives me the drive to try and look for it, and I'm sure many of you experienced the same. The story gets a bit complicated as new characters are introduced as well as familiar ones. Overall the story is quite interesting but still not enough for me to be totally "hooked on"
Art
The art was really good, I'm not surprised though because it was made in 2006, so there was bound to be some 3D graphics placed in it. But they did a good job in placed them though, there are some animes out there that totally fail at combining 2D artwork to 3D artwork and it just makes them look awkward, the fact that the setting is in a video game it's understandable as to why there would be 3D stuff once in a while.
Character
The characters were really great, I personally liked Haseo because he had the most growth out of everyone and that's what the main role is for the protagonist. You can truly see from Episode one to twenty six the experience and situations that he's gone through, and final result at the last episode. Ovan was a character that emitted mystery and myth, and that already gave him that cool suave kind of aura around him, which I'm not surprised since his character design was pretty cool, I mean come on a giant lock on some kind of mechanism as a left arm? How awesome is that.
Overall, the whole anime wasn't as bad as I thought it would be, it was the first .hack series that I watched out of all of them and thinking back now it's definitely my favourite. From what I heard from friends, Haseo is a really badass character in the games and when I have the chance to play, I can't wait to see what all the hype was about.
cheers.
