Well, I haven’t seen any others that do, except for SAO, and really love it. You might give it a try for a couple of episodes. I think dismissing it outright would be a shame.
Apart from SAO and .hack, what else are you thinking of?
Thankfully there’s Space Brothers (Uchuu Kyoudai), which has been consistently brilliant for 37 episodes now and is not even remotely like an MMO anime.
There aren’t that many anime that take place in a MMO.
The only other one i can think of is Accel World which is surprisingly good, but nowhere near as good as Sword Art Online.
I hesitate to call the .Hack series Anime. They are more extended tv ads for the games. I watched a few of these and thought they were great… until they reached the climax at which point you’re basically met with a message telling you to play the video game to know what happens. They are pure advertisements and i can’t think of any series that made me more angry, even the infamously bad School Rumble.
Various korean mmorpgs did fun anime versions loosely related to the mmorpg, but they don’t take place in an mmorpg, they are simply fantasy anime.
Obviously I was exaggerating, but when I booted up the Crunchyroll app recently on PS3 and perused the sample shows it felt like half of them had some sort of MMO or video game world element: Sword Arts, BTOOOOM!, Ixion Saga DT, The World God Only Knows…
.hack//SIGN has basically nothing to do with the plot of the games that were available around the same time. If you were frustrated by its lack of resolution, it’s not because they were trying to sell you the conclusion in the form of four $50 PS2 games (that are terrible).
.hack//SIGN also has really great soundtrack by Yuki Kajiura. The soundtrack is so great that the anime practically pauses when the music comes on, which is almost all the time. Characters just walks around or looks around…if they are talking, they get drowned out by the awesome music. It’s for the better anyways, 'cos they don’t say anything. Did we already bitched that there’s no plot?
Miramon
3408
I rather liked the games myself. Not so much for the core gameplay which was admittedly kind of weak, but partly for the conceit of playing a MMO within a single-player game which was original at the time. I also found the pretentious fake-philosophical context of the supposed MMO design amusing, as well as the terrible seriousness some of the characters had about the game, which is very similar to what I was perceiving as a dev reading player forums at the time I was playing. Reading through the fake forum threads and so on was fun for me, anyway. Also the lightweight but psychedelic and pretty shmups that replaced the tedious boss fights in the second game series weren’t bad.
malkav11
3409
I liked that stuff too, but the fake MMO being played was absolutely, utterly godawful. Super grindy, no variety or interesting mechanics or cool worldbuilding. Just rote hack and slash. For hours and hours and hours. And while few would normally complain about this, the story to gameplay ratio in the (first series) .hack games was skewed way in favor of gameplay. Which is bad when your story’s vaguely intriguing and your gameplay awful.
Miramon
3410
For sure, the MMO portrayed in the game is rather dumb. Like Anarchy Online at launch, the only thing to do was the same random dungeons over and over again. But people did actually play AO, after all…
I found though that if you were careful, you could power through the grindy MMO stuff pretty quickly so long as you didn’t get snared by the in-game bonus extra things like collection quests. If you chose the right tough-but-doable random dungeons to do voluntarily, you could rather quickly powerlevel way past the levels of all the bosses in the actual story, so the rest of the game would be fast and easy. Of course this too is a design flaw, but some of it may have been intentional to allow you to skip the hundreds of hours that the characters are presumably investing in the stupid MMO.
malkav11
3411
I played Anarchy Online and it had waaaay better game systems. I would have had difficulty suspending my disbelief that anyone would pay for that kind of grind but…well, people bought four games worth.
There’s certainly a lot of cross-pollination between anime and videogames these days, but it’s a bit more varied than “trapped in an MMO!” [Though I had forgotten about Accel World.]
BTOOOM! is more like “Battle Royale” or “Hunger Games” (i.e., bunch of people marooned on an island and forced to kill each other to escape) with the twist being the situation is based on a Bomberman-esque video game within the story. Haven’t really watched Ixion, but AFAICT the premise is our game-playing “hero” is pulled (a la El Hazard) into the fantasy realm from the MMORPG Ixion Saga (but not pulled into the MMO itself - think “Last Starfighter” not “Tron” IIUC). WGOK’s protagonist is a dating-sim expert who is forced to apply his “skills” to real girls (at least I think that was the idea - first episode didn’t grab me at all). Then there are the innumerable adaptations of video games; dating sims are definitely the most prevalent, but we also get RPGs (the Tales series has had a couple of shows), Devil May Cry, etc.
Now I’m gonna go sit in a corner and cry over the brain cells I’m wasting on pointless trivia about crappy anime shows.
That stayed as the premise for the whole show. Its first filler episode is funnier then the main story, 'cos it’s a critique of the whole pc game/dating sim tropes.
That’s not true! You can now apply your “skills” to real girls! (They might be fujoshis, but they are girls, too!)
I should report that Muv-Luv Alternative: Total Eclipse continues to be quality. The 2nd half of SAO, however, regressed a lot, and resorted to typical ecchi tropes. I had to stop watching it on a plane trip because of an impending bath scene.
If the sixth episode hadn’t happened, I might have gotten to experience that.
there are definitely a few scenes that stand out as being weird in that regard. The first arc is stronger in a number of ways, as previously mentioned.
HRose
3416
Just saw the 1st of Psycho-pass and didn’t work really well for me. As written elsewhere:
Hm, usual flawed premises.
The show starts when the police system has been already in place for quite a while, and now blatant moral issues that would be obvious to just everyone start cropping up all at the sudden?
It’s obvious that even without tackling more complex themes the big problem is that automatic judgement done by the gun isn’t “final” in any way and can move back and forth. So why should someone be sentenced to death when a moment later he could easily recover? So everyone should be shot as soon he has a momentary moment of anger? Not that many people would stay alive.
It could work if these types of recover were unprecedented and triggered by some rare compassion, but it’s just too unlikely that this starts to happen all at once, and only because a MOE heroine appears in the wrong show.
Many Japanese shows have this problem about undercooked ideas put in too convenient settings. I just can’t accept it as plausible and so it doesn’t work so well to me.
What happened in that episode? Oh. Uh yeah, stupid galget plot trope rear its head. This happens several times throughout Muv Luv, and you’ll have to bear with it to get at the political-ish story.
The funny part about that episode is the many scenes where the anime wants to show off the main male lead as a real hunk/stud, but there is just no anime artist that can accomplish this. The result is hilarious, and makes me feel sorry for the entire production team for trying to pull this off. I don’t know if they aren’t trying hard enough, or they just don’t want to draw naked male body.
I don’t agree, although i didn’t watch this past the first episode either.
This is a not unheard of idea, similar to in minority report.
The problems in the society have likely always existed but they are accepted as judging people who appear likely to be unable to be saved is deemed a net society gain.
The only people killed are those that undergo SERIOUS emotional trauma, the rest are (from what i can tell by implications) brain washed to be less emotional. Doing this would lead to people suffering less and less traumatic events as anyone who looks likely to maybe cause one would be brain washed.
This is somewhat similar to the justice system of the USA where sometimes it is immensely unfair to an individual, but overall it is just, only to a much greater degree.
Star Crossed posted a review of SOA. Reading that makes me want to watch the first half of it, at least.
Since we don’t have an official Bargain thread in the TV forum, figured I’d just pop this here: Amazon has Soul Eater on Bluray for $20.99. It appears to be the entire TV series (51 episodes), so it’s a pretty good deal…if you like Soul Eater, natch.
