.Hack//Roots – 19 – Sigh

I’m really getting worried about where .Hack//Roots is going to. The previous episode showed Haseo’s new form. Well, I guess that that’s gotta mean that this episode would have featued a lot of plot progression. What do we get? A friggin’ filler!

Don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing against fillers. But seriously, this was just horribly timed. Because of this, the creators had to find a way to keep Haseo busy for an entire episode. Their plan: don’t make him move for the entire episode. He just stands there, doing nothing. Well, if that isn’t anticlimactic, I don’t know anymore.

The episode basically features Tawaraya who’s come back, two newly introduced characters (a couple of merchants) and the two newbies from episode sixteen having some problems with the merchant-side of The World. It ends with them witnessing a couple of real-money traders being caught by the administrators. Why the heck are the creators only introducing these aspect now, at this stage of the anime? Such trivial aspects would have been better to be explained at the beginning of the anime. Including the fact that TaN was a guild that would buy every single item from other players, and sell them again. It’s nice to see these kinds of information this late in the show.

.Hack//Sign chose to handle subjects like these a bit more subtle. They had just one major crime, and they kept using this as an example. Subaru and her knights were fighting to counter PK-ers throughout the entire anime. .Hack//Roots starts with PK-ing as well, then it moved to hackers and now suddenly real money traders come out of nowhere. A bit more introduction abut this would have been better. The anime had lots of chances for this.

The interesting part of the anime mainly focused around Yata and Pai. Yata displays that he still has influence on the system administrators. Tawaraya also reveals that both Yata and Pai weren’t banned. They just chose to close their Ender and Naobi-accounts along with TaN. That’s why Yata still has his contacts with the administrators. But I wonder. Why do the administrators just let Yata do what he wants, even though he’s a hacker, he kidnapped Ovan, data-drained him and caused him to explode?

Speaking of the devil… what the heck happened to Ovan? There hasn’t been a shot of him for two whole episodes, despite the fact that he’s an important character. I think he also just stood motionless for an entire episode, just like Haseo.

In any case, I don’t think I like the new Tawaraya, or Touta. He’s just your overall, powerful nice-guy. Tawaraya was much more interesting.

Overall, .Hack//Roots is beginning to turn into a horrible mess. That isn’t good at this point of the show. At the next episode, we’ll probably get a bit more clues about what this show will do, in order to create a climax.