Common Name: .Hack//Sign
Alternate Names: Hack Sign, dotHack Sign
Score: 6/10, 4/5
Length: 26 episodes
Genre: Adventure, Video Game, Magic, Mystery, Sci-fi
Summary: For most, The World is a full-immersion VR MMORPG full of ways to spend one's time due in no small part to the game's dedicated fan base. For the player, existing under the character name Tsukasa, this fantastical world full of wonder and magic is nothing short of a prison. Like a few rare cases before him, Tsukasa has found himself unable to leave The World. What's worse though is that Tsukasa has no memory of who he was before he was trapped in The World. Because of this glitch in the system and his known association with a hacked character, he is not only trapped but also on the run from The World's player-driven police force who threatens to utterly destroy him.
Review: Though the concept of being trapped in a video game was hardly a novel idea at the time the .Hack series came out, .Hack//Sign stands as the show that popularized the "trapped in a game" subgenre. In spite of it being the popular progenitor (as opposed to the literal first) of this now floored category of anime, Sign is a show that has not aged well. While novel and interesting for a large generation, it has been severely outclassed by the series that followed it, including titles from the same body of work. While they have fairly solid motivations, the characters and The World feel like they're lacking and two-dimensional. The show's biggest fault, however, is it's jarring and poorly executed cuts between the interaction's of the show's ensemble cast. This, on top of the fact that the show's mystery is built on the back of an antisocial character who is frequently perceived as being whiny (frustrating even the rest of the show's main cast at some points), utterly destroys the sense of wonder that the title and it's music try to create.