.hack//Legend of the Twilight Offline Meeting Special

(Check my profile for a link to my personal site containing more up-to-date reviews and bonus media!) Edited: 11/7/2025 (improved grammar and syntax) I would recommend reading my review for the main series before my review of this special. This is the first picture drama I've seen to completion. No expense isn't spared in this DVD bonus feature for .hack//Legend of the Twilight. If you thought regular anime had budget problems, seeing one of these will humble you. Characters are represented by floating heads in circles over still backgrounds, kind of like a skit in a "Tales of" game, which I would imagine has a big crossoverfanbase with .hack. Anyway... Hotaru visits Japan from America with Sanjuro and gets separated. Hotaru logs in to The World from an internet café 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, and Hotaru's floating head-in-a-circle flies and fumbles around a still, top-down, watercolor-filtered image of a Japanese crowd. It's so adorable that I screamed "k-kawaii!!!" in real life and made everyone in the internet café 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 The World avatar. 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 misleading and makes the ordeal pointless. 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 actually was revealed in the final volume of the manga but not paired to their avatars, 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 and following with a catchphrase. It's cute to hear how enthused they sound, but they don't say anything special. And thus, this "special" in its entirety is anything but. There really was almost no point to making it. Yet, I might've liked it more than the actual series just because it's a simple, 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 superior to 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. Personally, I'm going to pretend Ouka looks the same in real life.