Unfortunately there's not much more to it. This is an anime with a weak story line that contain more holes than Swiss cheese, and tries to make up for it by pretending to be deep. What they don't seem to realise is that there's more to being deep than having the characters do little more than stand around looking thoughtful and utter the occasional grunt whilst elegant music drifts past in the background. You need GOOD dialogue and storyline to be deep, and as hard as this anime tries, it doesn't have either. "Hack Sign" is a prime example of how to make a dialogue heavy anime that is dull (for an example of a good dialogue heavy anime, look no further than "Crest of the Stars").
One of the main problems is that nothing ever happens in "Hack Sign". They would have had difficulty making this into a decent 13 episode anime, let alone a 26 episode one. What kept me watching was mainly the aesthetic pleasure that's derived from the gorgeous animation and music. Also, at the end of several episodes along the way, it does show flashes of brilliance with some chilling scenes that promised much... but ultimately delivered very little, if at all.
Characters aren't much to be remembered by. I found myself spending a lot of time wondering why they were all so serious... they're playing a game ffs. People like to joke and play about in games. These guys on the other hand, prefer to stand around talking about their real life issues... in total, they must have spent a whole five minutes or so on playing the actual game! No wonder most of them seem really low level! And what's the big deal about about player killing? Having played these kind of games myself, I know it's an integral part of the gameplay, but this anime makes it out to be some sort of bad practice, and kicks up a huge fuss over it, even though people can just respawn afterwards. The accumulative result of all of this is that it didn't feel at any point that they were playing an MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online RPG).
Throughout the anime, especially in the beginning, I often found it hard to understand the motivation behind a lot of the character's actions, which made the story and characters of "Hack Sign" feel very artificially driven. For example, if something serious happened like a player could not log out and is stuck in the game, wouldn't that make the game potentially very dangerous? You would think that it would get shut down at this point, but apparently no one cares about such a trivial matter, and players carry on playing the game as usual, as though it's no big deal. At least not all the characters are devoid of charm though, and after a while (a long while, admittedly), I did start to warm up to a couple of them like Crim (who is quite cool, and actually seem to be interested in playing the game).
The ending... what the hell was all that about? They dragged the anime through 20+ episode just to reach THAT kind of conclusion? It was almost getting exciting towards the end, but the extremely anti-climatic "climax" just brought my ratings for this anime crashing back down again. I think that must have been the worst conclusion ever. After spending the majority of the series hyping up the "mystery", it barely explained anything. Throughout the anime I kept waiting for things to become clearer, and they never did. And also, "Evidence" must be the sh*ttest recap episode I've ever seen. All it did was sum up all the the parts you don't understand and make you realise that there were even more of them than you remembered. It pretty much encapsulates contents of this anime - a royal mess.
