CG movie adaptation and compilation of the story from the three .hack G.U. video games.

Impressions:

Wow…That was incredible. I’ll say now that I’m a huge .hack fan and I’m not going to try and convert you, so if you didn’t like it that’s fine but for a .hack fan like me that was just stunning. .hack G.U. was interesting and unique in the .hack franchise because of how dark it was but this movie took that and multiplied it like a hundred times. It was incredible seeing the story like this. Part of the flaw of G.U. was that it was in a game so the story was spread out and drawn out. However when it was just focused like a laser as in this movie its intensity really showed and it was just pure and absolute win.

Now, putting aside rabid fan ravings of this show, because I’m such a big .hack fan I have to say that it is great. This isn’t an absolute substitution for the games. While it is a great one, there are some HUGE differences. However this really was one of the best game to movie adaptations I’ve ever seen. To take not just one game, but three which are amazingly heavy on the story and put it into an hour and a half was incredible. While things got cut from the story and things change the story itself that the movie presented was great. I was always going to like this when it came out because of being a .hack fan but I honestly didn’t expect it to be this good. However it has surpassed my expectations. Again, while it isn’t the absolute ultimate substation for the story the games have, it did one hell of a job and there really is a lot they can’t portray with the amount of time they are given. This was great in the sense of being an adaptation like that. But I will state that the movies huge major flaw was still that it tried to get all that in. This isn’t a movie for someone who hasn’t played G.U. and really wants to know about the story. Perhaps for someone who’s played .hack but can’t play G.U. or like me and are a big fan and want to see what you already know adapted to a movie, but I did think that compressing it this much still hurt a lot of the story. And even though there were HUGE changes, in the end it didn’t affect the overall story involving what Ovan was doing so I did find them to be quite acceptable.

I do of course have to mention the absence of Sakubo and Endrance. I was a bit disappointed in that. As I said above it’s absolutely full understandable that they wouldn’t have everything the games have, so focusing on the individual stories each of them have such as Endrance’s past with Mia and Sakubo’s multiple personality disorder were left out. While I loved that kind of character arc and background focus in the games, it was fine that they were left out but I wish they were at least included a little bit. Some of my favorite moments in the game was when all of the epitaph users minus Ovan walked together away from the screen and things like that. While they couldn’t have fit in their stories, they could have at least fit them in since they are in the position of being effectively part of the top 8 most important characters. But…for god sakes….THEY LEFT THEM OUT OF THE BIG CAMEO SCENE. The scene where all the people fly by when Ovan is falling, they show Nala, Silabus, Gaspard, Zelkova, Kaede, all the other ones not featured in the damn movie BUT NOT ENDRANCE AND SAKUBO! WHAT THE HELL!?!

I was very impressed with the romance focus. I was scared they’d leave that out, as they have to cut some stuff and that may be considered by some as unnecessary. However I loved it. I’m a huge romance fan and I loved that G.U. had romance in it where the first games didn’t. Even though in the games it kind of could be said you can end up with anyone due to the extra wedding quest, purely story line wise he does end up with Atoli and them actually portraying that in the movie was great.

And a bit more superficially speaking, some of those fight scenes where AWESOME. My god they looked cool. Haseo NEVER had that kind of power in the games. This was shown in the trailer but he had way WAY more bloodthirsty power in this movie. He had a whole Fate/Stay Night Gate of Babylon thing going there where a horde of weapons showed up form nowhere and launched like that. Just the big fight scenes involving Haseo and Ovan were some of the coolest things I’ve seen. The way he went from sword to sword like that. I’m smiling just remembering it. They really did have some cool fight scenes.