Even at its most tolerable, this show is so ugly and boring that my mind constantly wanders. At one point, I actually thought to myself, “why the hell am I still watching this?” before remembering, “duh, because I’m blogging it.” If nothing else, this confirms that, were I not running this blog and was simply rewatching .hack//SIGN (which I’d planned to do long beforehand), I would have dropped it by now.
There’s no excuse for this slowness. .hack//SIGN could be cut by half its length and lose nothing—hell, it’d probably work with just six episodes. The only reason I can think of for it to be so drawn out is because it’s a franchise tie-in. At the dawn of the franchise, it probably made sense to do at least two cours, even though there clearly wasn’t substantial material for it.
When I get too frustrated while watching, I soothe myself by staring at Lady Subaru. Her ever-present midriff and back, perfect breasts (not evident in the above shot), and ridiculously thin waistline are capable of calming my rage just enough to sneak some enjoyment into an episode. In the last post, I spilled some bullshit about why I like Lady Subaru, but this is the real truth: she’s hot.
Sora was also excellent in this episode with his constant vocalization of sound effects; but even he wasn’t the most entertaining character today, thanks to the introduction of Crim, who’s basically Kamina from Gurren Lagann, but with ridiculous hair.
Speaking of that crazy hair, Crim is weird looking. He barely resembles anyone else in the show, and indeed, looks like no other Sadamoto Yoshiyuki character that I can think of. It’s as though he was drawn by a different designer. Nevertheless, he’s a cool guy with an awesome voice, as performed by Miki Shinichiro (whom I best know for playing Roy Mustang in Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood and Kojirou in Pokemon).
This episode also contained one of the most flagrant affronts to logical sense in the show so far. While the concept of an in-game prison with an anti-summoning barrier makes plenty of sense, since we know that Tsukasa, who can’t log off, isn’t getting out of there, the method by which they capture Tsukasa is ridiculous. A gang of Crimson Knights tackles him to the ground, and then they all teleport, taking him along. I can think of no good reason that they had to tackle him. I can accept being able to teleport another player with some sort of mod powers, but this should be perfectly possible just with the character on-screen. It’s ridiculous enough that characters are even capable of tackling one-another to begin with, but at least that’s been previously established. This is just nonsense.
Alas, with or without the stupidity, this was among the most tolerable episodes of the show so far. That I spent most of it counting how many times they showed Subaru’s boots and imagining her potentially cute feet just speaks for how little that amounts to.
My Sword Is Unbelievably Dull 