It was quite a shock, jumping from .hack//SIGN to this one. SIGN was a compelling series with a variety of debilitating flaws; it was creative and impassioned, but held down by serious failings of structure and storytelling. The show seemed reflective of creators whose reach ended up exceeding their grasp; a unique and compelling show, but not an easily recommendable one.

Legend of the Twilight doesn't have such complicated issues. Legend of the Twilight is just BAD.

The story here once again involves characters wrapped up in The World, a persistent MMO universe that forms the setting for all the various .hack properties. Our protagonists are Shugo, a nondescript boy who likes boobs, his sister, and his sister's boobs, and Rena, who likes adventure and her big brother. Rena enters both of them in a contest to win special avatars in The World, which result in the pair of them taking on the form of the first .hack videogame protagonists, Kite and BlackRose. Though Shugo is initially hesitant, he quickly comes to embrace The World, as he and his sister make friends and slowly get wrapped up a mystery affecting all of the players in the digital world.

Various other character and narrative devices connect Twilight back to SIGN and .hack overall, including the mysterious Aura, who gives Shugo a special data-draining bracelet, and characters like the Silver Knight, but the feeling of continuity here is inconsistent at best. At one point, for example, the characters all start shivering when enter a snowy server. This seemed surprising to me, because I remembered that in SIGN, the main character being the only one who felt heat and cold in The World was a relevant plot point. Had the creators of this show never watched SIGN? Then I realized the creators probably just didn't care, as the shivering was actually just a setup to excuse a hot springs scene. Which is pretty much this show in a nutshell.

The plot in the first half follows a simple formula - the characters go on a basic quest, an unexpected monster appears, Rena ends up in terrible danger, and her brave brother jumps in and shouts “data drain!”, defeating the monster in one shot. This formula isn't disrupted even when Rena gets mysteriously vanished by a particularly wily monster - in fact, that's when the characters decide to go to that hot spring. The supporting characters do not do much to vary this formula - they mainly just stand in the background and repeat their one Character Attribute ad nauseum. “Rena, where are you?!” shouts Shugo, to a chorus of “I want to fight strong monsters!” from the character whose personality is “wants to fight strong monsters” and “I like rare items!” from the character whose personality is “likes rare items.” The second half introduces a plot involving some nefarious grade-school hackers and a rogue AI, but the storytelling never rises above cliche, slight, and emotionally sterile. The only thing that's consistent here is the humor, which, well, let's talk about that.

Twilight's humor is simplistic and repetitive. It's a combination of pratfalls, scooby doo runs (that trick where characters run away from a monster across the screen, and then run away in the opposite direction, etc), and… well, more pratfalls. There's a recurring gay panic gag where an effeminate man in a belly shirt hits on Shugo, and another gag where a different effeminate man pines after Rena and then falls over. Twilight feels like a show for children, but there are good shows for children, shows that actually respect childrens' time and intelligence, and this is not one of them. And the whole “show for children” thing is somewhat complicated by the constant appearance of near-incest implications, with the show possessing an even mix of “isn't family great” and “I want to have sex with my sister.” The camera readily supports this - most of the fanservice is composed of long, leering shots of the fourteen-year-old Rena, which come off as more ridiculous than anything, due to her tiny and bobble-headed character design.

The show's art design is generally passable with some glaring weaknesses, chief among these being the character designs. The characters are, as I mentioned, bobbleheads, existing halfway between Clannad's eye-monsters and shrimpy Digimon characters. Their heads are massive in proportion to their bodies, and features too broad and inhuman to be particularly expressive - they're frequently off-model, too, but the main problem here is that the model is off. There's actually one more normally-proportioned woman who handles the boob quota for the show, but it's Rena, with her child body and huge head, that gets all the lingering fanservice shots.

The backgrounds are reasonable, though a tremendous step down from SIGN, and animation just short of that. Episodes generally have one or two passable cuts of animation accompanied by a whole bunch of slides and talking heads, and at times the cost-cutting methods of sliding unanimated characters really draw attention to themselves. By the end, the show falls pretty consistently into speed-lines action frame territory. The music largely just gets the job done, fully of wacky sax for the slapstick and ominous strings for the drama; the highlight is probably the opening song, a perky 90s-sounding alt rock number. And the voice acting does the best it can with this tepid material, with Rena and Mireille (the rare item girl) sometimes coming off as unnaturally shrill, but no more so than the lines they're reciting. The side characters are a bit less consistent, with the young hackers in particular sounding stilted and overacted; but honestly, I can't blame them for not bringing their A game to lines like “once we defeat the Cerulean Knights, we'll rule this world, mwa ha ha ha.”

Legend of the Twilight comes in a standard plastic DVD case with a cardboard slip cover. As with SIGN, there are no physical extras, and on-disc extras are limited to a character art reel and trailers. Overall, I can only recommend this one if you're some kind of die-hard .hack completionist - there's nothing here that other stories don't do tremendously better.