.Hack//Roots – 11 – Finally Some Awesomeness Again :)

I think that people already know that I despise poorly executed romances. Especially between main characters. It’s so easy to just make two characters love each other. Though at the same time, it looks horribly fake. Nevertheless, I have to admit that I absolutely love the better executed romances. Firiel and Roux, for example. Yuu and Haruka. And starting from this episode: Haseo and Shino.

I finally realized .Hack//Roots brilliance: at certain points, it realize that characters don’t need to talk in order to make clear what they want to say. It finally realizes the importance of body language. Unfortunately, this does not happen often. Only the third episode managed so far. And the eleventh one! Haha!

Finally .Hack//Roots understands what an MMORPG is about: interacting with other people and fighting monsters. And that’s exactly what it does. The entire episode is an intermezzo, though I just loved it. Especially the fact that characters are actually disappearing, and quitting the game! Goad and the entire TaN-guild will be history! Talk about development!

At the same time, we get more and more hints about what is going to happen at the second half of the show, and thank god it’ll involve some supernatural stuff, instead of conflicts against players who somehow managed to buff themselves to admin-level. I have no idea what exactly it’ll be, but it will involve the Signs and the weird dude who looks like .Hack//Dusk’s main character.

And I haven’t even started talking about Sakisaka and Tabby! I mean, before, I always thought Tabby was a stupid, obnoxious little brat whose only purpose was to create some conflicts between other characters. But now it seems that she actually has a reason to be acting the way she does! I couldn’t imagine it when I first saw the last part of this episode but still, the creators suddenly removed one of the major flaws of the anime.

Still, the other major flaw remains. Even though it’s great to see TaN disbanded, why the heck did it get disbanded? And what happened to Ovan? I mean, the admins must’ve been the ones to disband TaN. Or did Naobi hide Ovan somewhere? And why did Naobi go through the trouble of contacting Phyllo. It’s probably because he knew how fast rumours would travel, which means that he wanted the Twillight Brigade to know about Ovan. And why did Phyllo get so shocked when he heard it?

I’m also having some problems with Ovan disappearing. Of course, it’s great that he’s gone, and I’m hoping for him not to return for a while, but at least show some subtle shots of him in the real world, collapsing. He has, of course, been data-drained. His mind is now trapped in the game, just like Tsukasa, otherwise he’d just log out. In fact, I just wish for any shots from the outside world to be shown right now. I’m curious about the real lives of all of the characters. I’m hoping that these’ll come later in the series, as they were one of the many things that made //Sign so great.

Tawaraya was also great once more. He also used the power of rumours to give the strange markings the name “Sign” (just like how “pwn” managed to get in existance). He managed to leave a nice signature before his departure. I wonder if any of the guys who left will ever get back.

Overall, .Hack//Roots is a strange series. Last week it had me ranting about the lack of quality on the show, but this week totally made up for it with a brilliant episode. I think that .Hack//Roots kindof loses itself in the large climaxes, which makes me a bit worried. Still, I feel that this episode made some very nice moves in order to prevent this.