.hack//SIGN-Volume 1: Login (2002)

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General		Extras
Category	Anime	Menu Audio Music Video-Textless opening and ending Theatrical Trailer-1:40 Gallery-Character artwork Biographies-Character-Tsukasa, Mimiru, Bear, Subaru Trailer-Madman Propaganda (7)
Rating
Year Of Production	2002
Running Time	120:07 (Case: 125)
RSDL / Flipper	RSDL (71:05)	Cast & Crew
Start Up	Menu
Region Coding	4	Directed By	Kouichi Mashimo
Studio Distributor	Madman Entertainment	Starring	Mitsuki Saiga Brianne Siddal Megumi Toyoguchi Amanda Winn Lee Kazuhiro Nakata Paul Mercier Akiko Hiramatsu Donna Rawlins Kaori Nazuka Kim Mai Guest Hiroshi Yanaka Dave Wittenberg
Case	Amaray-Transparent-Secure Clip
RPI	$29.95	Music	Yuki Kajiura

Video		Audio
Pan & Scan/Full Frame	None	English Dolby Digital 2.0 (224Kb/s) Japanese Dolby Digital 2.0 (224Kb/s)
Widescreen Aspect Ratio	1.78:1
16x9 Enhancement
Video Format	576i (PAL)
Original Aspect Ratio	1.78:1	Miscellaneous
Jacket Pictures	No
Subtitles	English Titling English	Smoking	No
		Annoying Product Placement	No
		Action In or After Credits	No

    This is the first volume of a new anime series that is only part of a complex multi-media release. .hack is being released as anime, as a computer/video game (or series of games), as manga, and possibly other pieces, but I don't know what they are. I'm not going to attempt to address the other formats — I doubt I could do them justice. This anime series is supposed to be able to stand alone, and I'm going to test that premise.

    As usual, the opening volume introduces the characters, and does its best to get us hooked, but without giving away too much. Always a difficult task, and not always successfully achieved. This one does a better job than many, although there are a number of things that it leaves unsaid. In a way that seems to be becoming common, they have included five episodes on this first disc to give us a good taste of the series. That's fine, because it isn't until the fifth episode that certain things start to come together, but I strongly doubt we'll see five episodes on any of the other discs...

    The five episodes on this disc are:

1. Role Play — Tsukasa awakens, unsure where he is, or why; he begins to cause a stir in The World
2. Guardian — Tsukasa begins to learn about his Guardian, and some of what is going on
3. Folklore — There's no truth behind the rumours of The Key of Twilight!
4. Wanted — Tsukasa is being sought by all of the Crimson Knights, and many others
5. Captured — a trap is crafted for Tsukasa, involving a chain of messages

    The show opens with a player character waking up in front of a treasure chest. A player character? A treasure chest? Yep! We're in The World — a massively multi-player role-playing game, where people from all over Earth can login to the game. Each person appears in the game as a player character (who probably doesn't look anything like their real-world persona). Each player character is in a particular class, with particular talents — if you haven't played a role-playing game, then a lot of this won't make sense; if you have, then you would already understand. The World is divided into Fields, each with different scenery and different challenges for the players. (Many Fields offer dungeons — "dungeon" is a familiar term in role-playing games, dating back to the original Dungeons and Dragons.) A group of Fields will be hosted on a Server. Players get from one Server to another by passing through Chaos Gates. The Crimson Knights are players who work kind of like a police force for The World — although they are still players, they aren't out for themselves. Most other players are playing for themselves, gaining treasures and battling to improve their character. The objective of the game is not stated.

    There are some interesting players in The World, even though we only get to meet a few. Many of the characters are decorated in some form or another. Tsukasa has dark pink/orange marks on both cheeks. Mimiru wears yellow markings. Bear is painted half blue with white stripes. Lady Subaru has a small character in dark pink on her forehead and small wings sprouting between her shoulder blades. There are some interesting features in The World, too — the strangest so far is the creature they ride sometimes, which looks like a furry hippo.

    Among the character classes we get to see in these episodes are: Heavy Sword, Heavy Spear, Heavy Axe, Wavemaster, and Blademaster, which may be a designation for a highly skilled Heavy Sword. There are other classes (I don't know which classes BT or Sora are playing yet) and there are non-player characters.

    It's all a game, right? Well, maybe not. Tsukasa has discovered that he can't logout. Everyone thinks that's impossible; after all, at worst, he should be able to reset his "terminal" (basically, reboot his PC) to get out. But Tsukasa isn't aware of being in front of a terminal... The Silver Knight's player was found unconscious in front of his PC after a confrontation with Tsukasa — that's one of the things that's really causing a stir in The World's system administrators.

    There are a few too many "meaningful silences", but I hope they'll become more comprehensible as the series continues.

    The next-episode previews are unusual, being a grid of small images from the next episode. They are placed just before the closing credits, rather than after the credits, where I'd prefer them to be.

    This holds up as an anime series, as much as any series does in the first five episodes. I'm interested more than enough to keep going.

Video

    This DVD transfer is presented in an aspect ratio of 1.78:1. It is 16x9 enhanced. That is the original aspect ratio. They've made good use of the wider screen.

    The image is sharp and clear, with no film grain, and no low-level noise. Shading on the characters is basic, with just one shade for light and one for shadow, but that's no surprise on this style of animation. Backgrounds are more delicately shaded.

    Colour is bright and intense, drawing from a diverse palette. There are no colour-related artefacts, save for an occasional faint white haze across the entire picture on a couple of shots — I can't tell if this is deliberate or an artefact. Either way, it doesn't bother me. There are a couple of scenes where the background is very bright, eliciting a glowing edge, but this is clearly deliberate and doesn't qualify as an artefact.

    There are no film artefacts, except on flash-backs, where they have been deliberately introduced (together with a heavy colour cast) to make the flash-back obvious.

    Aliasing is only visible on panning moves, and not on all of those, even. The level of aliasing will depend on whether you are using a progressive display. On a progressive system I saw almost no aliasing — there was a hint at 38:11, but it was only worthy of note because there was no other instance. On a non-progressive system, aliasing is more prevalent, but it is always at a low level. There are very occasional background shimmers on a non-progressive system. No other MPEG artefacts. There is no moirι, which is not surprising — this style of animation uses swathes of solid colour, making moirι pretty much impossible.

    There are two subtitle tracks. The first subtitles only signs and songs. The second provides full subtitles for the dialogue, plus the signs and songs. The dialogue subtitles seem to be accurate, well-timed to the dialogue, and easy to read in the traditional yellow, in an attractive rounded font, although they are a little larger than usual — that may be intended to compensate for letterboxing on 4x3 displays. The content of the subtitles is somewhat different from the English dub, which is not uncommon.

    The disc is single-sided, dual-layer formatted RSDL. The layer change is perfectly placed, at 71:05, between episodes 3 and 4.

Video Ratings Summary

Sharpness
Shadow Detail
Colour
Grain/Pixelization
Film-To-Video Artefacts
Film Artefacts
Overall

Audio

    The soundtrack is provided in both English and Japanese, the best choice for anime. Both soundtracks are Dolby Digital 2.0, not surround encoded. I listened to both soundtracks in full, and they sound quite similar. These are full-range soundtracks, with some serious bass and delicate high frequencies. The only artefact in the sound is some hiss, which is deliberately included on the flash-backs to make it obvious that they are flash-backs — I'm not taking off any points for that effect.

    The English dialogue is clear and comprehensible. The Japanese dialogue sounds clear enough. Neither dub is a perfect match for the animated mouth movements, but the discrepancies are small.

    The music is excellent, with some serious driving bass. Yuki Kajiura provides an excellent score, with superb opening and closing themes. I was surprised that the opening theme is sung in English by a Japanese group, See Saw. They also sing the closing theme, but in Japanese. Some of the singing during episodes is also in English, although it is accented in Japanese, which can make understanding the words difficult. The acoustic guitar used on some of the softer pieces is reproduced well. The opening theme is addictive — I found myself humming it.

    The straight stereo signal does not provide sound for the surrounds or subwoofer. Your bass management is likely to route some bass to the subwoofer, because this track has plenty of bass, and it reaches nice and low, especially in the themes. If you have Prologic enabled, most of the dialogue will be routed to the centre channel speaker, but the music will remain in the left and right channels. This is a nicely engineered soundtrack.

Audio Ratings Summary

Dialogue
Audio Sync
Clicks/Pops/Dropouts
Surround Channel Use
Subwoofer
Overall

Menu

    The menu has music and transitions. It is constructed on an isometric representation of a cube — quite effective.

Clean Opening

    The opening theme without credits. Quite attractive, and nice to have (once, though, rather than once per disc!).

Clean Ending

    The ending theme, also without credits. Attractive.

Trailer (1:40)

    The trailer for this series. Interesting, in that it shows some things we haven't seen yet...

Gallery: Character Artwork

    Eight pages of artwork for some of the main characters.

Character Profiles

    Five pages, giving some brief background to some of the characters:

• Tsukasa
• Mimiru
• Bear
• Subaru (who gets two pages)

Propaganda

    Trailers, in standard Madman Propaganda from:

• Argentosoma (1:36)
• Arjuna (1:20)
• Jubei Chan (1:05)
• Spirited Away (2:18)
• Steel Angel Kurumi (1:28)
• Read or Die (0:42)
• Geneshaft (1:16)

DVD Credits

    A credits panel showing the DVD authors.

    The Region 1 disc was released at the beginning of the year. Like the Region 4, it was released in single-disc and limited edition forms. I was curious, and got the limited edition version. This was quite interesting. It arrived in a box that was a hexagonal prism, split lengthwise — cute, but not the most practical packaging you've ever seen; it takes up more room than most. It contained the disc, a T-shirt (not my size, as usual), the soundtrack CD, a furry hippo, a demo of the PS2 game .hack//infection (I don't have a PS2), three postcards of anime artwork, and a sheet of stickers of the main characters. Quite a collection! The R4 special edition comes in a normal rectangular box with a T-shirt, and that's all, but it costs quite a bit less, too. I don't think the R1 limited edition of this disc is available any more — it seems to have sold out. R1 is getting limited editions of each disc in the series — I won't be bothering to get any more of them, though. So let's talk about the regular versions.

    The Region 1 and Region 4 versions are extremely similar. They contain the same episodes. They have mostly the same extras. Even the artwork is very similar, although I prefer the R4 presentation. The R1 version I received seems mis-cut: the spine of the slick can't line up with the spine of the case, and the front cover seems far too narrow. Moreover, their front cover seems too busy. I also prefer the R4 menus — they are more interesting, even though they aren't animated, and the R1 menus are. Oh, and the R1 is in a fairly cheap keep-case, while the R4 gets a top-notch transparent Amaray.

    The Region 4 disc is missing:

• isolated musical score
• .hack video game trailer (1:44) — interesting, because the game characters look more detailed than the anime (and 3D, too)
• trailers for Kikaider (0:49), Silent Mobius (1:11)
• booklet (all of the content, except the credits, is on the inside of the cover on the R4)

    The Region 1 disc is missing:

• character profiles
• .hack//SIGN trailer
• trailers for Argentosoma, Jubei Chan, Spirited Away, Read or Die, Geneshaft

    The transfers are equally good, although the R1 seems very slightly more intensely coloured, but slightly more prone to aliasing.

    If you already have the R1, then you don't need the R4. Otherwise, I think you could be happy with either version. I slightly prefer the R4, even though I'd have liked the isolated music score (nice to watch with the subtitles).

    A new anime series that can be viewed alone, or considered as part of a complex multi-media series. This series is presented well on DVD.

    The video quality is excellent.

    The audio quality is excellent — better than expected from a stereo soundtrack.

    The extras are fairly average, but it is possible that they didn't have room on the disc after putting on five episodes — perhaps we'll see more extras on following discs.

Video
Audio
Extras
Plot
Overall