.hack//Sign

I started watching .hack//Sign back in 2005, and it was very nearly one of the very first anime I abandoned. I didn’t write out my impressions of it back then, but I finished it months later in 2006, and the few mentions I gave it in my journal were unimpressed: ‘It just doesn’t interest me.’ ‘Maybe it’ll get better towards the end.’ ‘Just not cutting it’.

But finish it I did, and the OVA episodes – eventually. Always hoping that the series would become one I loved at the end. Sadly, it never did. There were some superb ideas here, some very memorable concepts and strong images, but ultimately it’s undermined by weak storytelling and horribly slow pacing.

I genuinely expected to love .hack//Sign. It really seemed like my sort of thing, visually, conceptually and in terms of its ambition. In an online MMORPG called The World, a young ‘wavemaster’ called Tsukasa cannot log out of the game. Despite his extreme shyness and unwillingness to form any sort of human connection, other players gravitate towards him, both those seeking to help find out why the player cannot log out and those who feel he is linked with a mysterious game-changing ‘Key of the Twilight’, which for whatever reason Tsukasa’s friends decide will allow him to log out. It soon transpires that Tsukasa’s player in the real world is comatose, and is very possibly forced into unconsciousness by the game itself – but just possibly, it is Tsukasa’s own frame of mind and not an outside influence that keeps him there.

There is much to like here. The MMORPG setting may be very familiar now, and ideas from .hack recur in, for example, ½ Prince and the comedy Master of Epic, but with its 2002 release, .hack//Sign was doing it much earlier and with admirable seriousness. The look of the piece is very nice, with character designs by Sadamoto Yoshiyuki, who had also produced the iconic designs for Evangelion, and went on to create the characters for Hosoda Mamoru’s films. There was a lot to like about Tsukasa, with Saiga Mitsuki doing her definitive softly-spoken boy voice (see also: Junior in R.O.D. the TV, Souji in Peacemaker Kurogane) and a great outfit, so that even if it seems that having a protagonist whose character is defined by negativity and an unwillingness to trust others is a bad idea, he’s both sympathetic and relatable. Those who surround him, from the cheerful but vulnerable leader Subaru to the strong and dependable Bear, have their own interesting stories, and the relationship between real person and online persona is very interesting. It’s nice seeing characters with ambiguous motives, like BT and Crim, and while frankly, we all know that if this game were real, there would be a whole lot of ‘pwnd lol’ and ‘buy gold from VVVVVV.skamz.C0M!!!!!!!!!’, the appeal of an MMORPG setting is really that you can play it as a straight fantasy with a twist.

The trouble is that the attempt to make the series high-minded and deep made it extremely dully. Only when the series lowered itself to conventional episodic plots, like when Tsukasa has to look after a baby cow, can it be called entertaining. There are good concepts here, but let’s face it, they’re not exactly revelatory: it’s no surprise to learn Tsukasa’s real-life identity, or the reasons for her negativity. It’s predictable and certainly doesn’t fill up the minutes with compelling dialogue. Too much time is devoted to character debating morality and existentialism using their Heavy Axe Warriors in an online game, and while the scenes with Tsukasa, a strange bed and a flying clown-cat are supposed to be intriguing and symbolic, they far outstay their welcome and the result is boredom.

.hack//Sign had great ideas and a memorable concept. It just needed to be written less like it was patting its own back for being oh-so-smart and more like it had something interesting to show its audience. There is a middle-ground.

吟遊黙示録マイネリーベ ヴィーダー/Ginyuu Mokushiroku Maine Riibe Vuiidaa /Wandering Revelations Meine Liebe ~Wieder~ (‘My Love ~Again~’)

As I said in my review of Ouran, it was very amusing to watch that silly series in harmony with Meine Liebe, since the archetypes sent up in the Host Club are almost exactly like the ones presented seriously here. Meine Leibe is about an elite school for the super-rich teens who are destined to become the future leaders of their county. The honoured elite of the students, the ‘Strahl Candidates’, bear more than a few similarities to Ouran’s characters. There is the attractive blonde leader, his loyal sidekick, the cute boy who looks like a small child despite being the same age as all the rest (here fragile rather than hyper) and is friends with a tall silent type, and then in place of the twins, a token Japanese guy who kind of gets ignored when the writers get bored of him.

The school is in chaos in this second series. The headmaster has disappeared, and his replacement is shaking the boat, allowing Strahl candidates to be chosen by merit rather than purely by birthright. None of the existing candidates get demoted, conveniently enough, but several new rivals appear. The conflict barely gets resolved, though, since the last few episodes are devoted to the plucky young heroes foiling an attempted national coup d’etat. This climax is ironically really the series’ nadir. Let me explain: Meine Liebe works, and is fun, because it takes itself VERY seriously, and refuses to ever accept that any of its concepts or scenarios are at all ridiculous – it’s about big, important speeches, angst being overcome and occasional bursts of small-scale action. However, when it gets TOO self-indulgent, and these teenagers make melodramatic speeches that save whole countries and prompt the people with guns to curse that their plans have been foiled, it’s just TOO much. It’s a fragile balance that gets pushed too far. Psychic powers are similarly iffy.

But Meine Lieber wins out by strength of self-belief, a fittingly over-pretty art style with some beautiful backdrops, an amusing lack of prominent female characters (all the better for yaoi fanart and doujins to be made by the target audience) and its wonderful camp excess. It’s with the tongue in the cheek that one has to enjoy Meine Leibe, and the second series is really more of the same. For all its enjoyable qualities, however, the fact remains that silly storylines, a slow pace and some totally impossible plot contrivances keep the anime being nothing more than mediocre.

(originally written 8.10.06)

マイネリーベ / Meine Liebe - season 1

Admittedly, it’s hard not to find Meine Liebe just a little bit...risible at times, given that it’s exactly the sort of shoujo drama series that Ouran High School Host Club sends up so well, but it takes itself very seriously, and that alone is enough to endear it to me at least a little. I don’t mind when things are cheesy, formulaic or obvious, as long as they do what they’re trying to do well, and don’t try to be hip and postmodern by poking fun at themselves.

Meine Liebe is designed to get girls hot under the collar, and that’s what it sets out to do in a way so blatant it’s almost like an animated homage to the Bronte sisters. Okay, so the story is as follows: on a fictional but very much Teutonic island with the fairytale appearance of a very Japanese concept of Europe between the two great wars of the last century (all its cities, bizarrely, seem to be named after foodstuffs in German), aristocrats attend a school called the Rozenstoltz Academy. The show focuses on the five elite pupils of the school, the ‘Strahl candidates’ being primed to be the future leaders of society. Fortunately, these five young men are all conniption-inducingly pretty and fit neatly into shoujo pigeonholes: there’s the dark, mysterious, severe Ludwig, the optimist with strong ideals and lovely blonde hair whose name is Orpheus, the fragile little boy Camus who gets the maternal instincts racing, the rougher, slightly rebellious Eduard and the token spiritual, confidence-deficient Japanese boy Neiji. All boxes ticked.

Interestingly, for a game based on a dating sim, there is no female protagonist. This show is about the boys, and nothing but the boys, because…well, we all know that it’s more fun to imagine the bishounen getting TOGETHER than with some annoying girl, don’t we? Like I said, the show is designed to get ladies’ pulses racing. Of course, nothing more than strong fraternal feelings are ever made explicit in the series, but a bunch of rich, powerful young men, who when they interact with girls show no interest in them beyond basic courtesy (after all, all the girls ever do is tell them how wonderful they are), but are either bitter rivals of or utterly devoted to one another, all of whom have dark and angsty pasts to be slowly uncovered, and all of whom will receive large sums of money and huge, erm…gigawatts of power once they come of age – what could be better for the curious young girl who wants to admire someone formidable but harmless from a distance?

This could all be very cheesy, especially since you consider that the boys spend far more time than one would expect riding horses, fencing, saving the day and hanging around with flowers. The last two get combined in one breathtaking moment where a neer-do-well is disarmed when one of the boys throws a flower at him. Yes, really. Along with some very dubious psychic powers, that’s as ridiculous as it gets, though, and for the most part, the show is very serious. This is where it works: the art is stylised, but mostly realistic and consistent – no silly anime reactions here, but instead some superbly realised locations and costumes, beautiful music and a general adherence to the laws of physics, which let’s be honest is quite rare even in shoujo anime. One gets the impression that if only boys could possibly be beautiful enough, they would film the show rather than animate it. Aesthetically, a big success.

The trouble is there’s nothing to latch on to. The story is thin and episodic: the boys clash with one another, foil plans to harm the reputations of the school or one of their peers, dramatically debate politics with jaded men who used to be just like them…but there’s no real sense of purpose or drive. A show like Maria-sama ga Miteru, with a similar premise about chaste relationships in a girl’s school, one step closer to realism without the horses and empires, is also episodic and lacking drive, but it works because there is a sense of continuity to the question of whether Yumi and Sachiko (as well as the other pairs) can be happy together, and it’s much easier to feel empathy for characters who make mistakes and can be overawed and don’t have to be constantly noble, flawless and grave, as do the Meine Liebe cast.

There was much to like, artistically and conceptually, but in execution, the series was just too slow, too concerned with the grand picture without enough attention to character, and ultimately rather slow and dull in its attempt to create an elevated and beautiful atmosphere. Nonetheless, there is potential for something better, and I shall watch the second 13-episode series to see if it can repair some of these flaws.

(originally written 23.06.06)