Nut Ink. Mini reviews of texts old and new. No fuss. No plot spoilers. No adverts. Occasional competency.

Sunday, June 1, 2014

.hack//4Koma (2010)

Author: Koichi Sumimaru | Illustrator: Various |  Page Count: 192

Your morals as a protagonist are being challenged, aren't they?

A yonkoma, often shortened to 4koma, is a four-panel manga similar to the kind of thing you’d see in a Sunday newspaper, except that most yonkoma are read from top to bottom, not left to right horizontal.

The .hack yonkoma parodies Project .hack and .hack Conglomerate.  The comedy is derived mostly from non-canon meetings, rivalries, awkward social situations and typically friendly people being dicks to other characters.  As such, in-jokes are definitely the order of the day, so if you're not very familiar with each person's usual demeanour, or the .hack world, you'll miss most of the situational humour.

There are a lot of familiar faces, such as BlackRose, Balmung, Mistral, Shino and Atoli (even Lios the system admin gets some page time!), but it’s mostly about Kite and moody Haseo—both of whom are perfect targets for the kind of piss-takes and rebuttals that the format is best used for.  But Haseo’s troubles don’t stop with Kite's frequent slights.  He also has women to deal with, and that gives rise to an entirely different kind of anguish for the G.U hero.

2½ brands of crazy out of 5

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