Which Came First? - My review of .hack//XXXX. Volume 1

The last of my library books from last week was .hack//XXXX, Volume 1 by Megane Kikuya and Hiroshi Matsuyama and I have to say I was really looking forward to reading this after reading the synopsis on the back (front) of the book.

At the start of the story, there are a couple of pages dedicated to introducing the characters with a little picture of them so that you know who everyone is before it starts and you know a little bit about them. I really liked this touch as I've found in manga a lot of characters can be brought in very quickly and it can become overwhelming figuring out who everyone is and what their role is in the story.

The action certainly gets started with a bang and right from page one you are in the thick of a battle. It was certainly an exciting way to begin a story and it also made me extra glad of the introductions at the beginning.

The more I read of the story, the more I started to wonder which came first, this or Sword Art Online as the story lines are incredibly similar. They're in a video game that has affected people in their real lives due to some hidden code in the programming. There's a young male protagonist who teams up with girl(s). The main protagonist has extra "skills" that other people don't. This isn't a bad thing as I really enjoyed the first season of Sword Art Online (I haven't got around to watching the second season yet) I just wonder who had the idea first.

The story progresses rapidly as it seems to in some mangas and by the end of this volume, they had already defeated half of the bosses necessary to help their friends, I'm guessing that means that this story has only two volumes as I can't see why it would need to be any longer. I did have a quick search on Goodreads and I do only seem to be able to find one more volume. I actually feel that this story would have benefited from being more drawn out and spread across more volumes so that you could become more attached to the characters and care about what happens to them, as it is, it's a nice story but I'm not invested in any of their lives.

Overall this is an nice book with good art (and I like that they used logs instead of chapters as it is computer related) and if I see the second volume, I will definitely pick it up to see how the story is concluded but I will not go out of my way to find it.

I started reading this book on the 15th of January 2015 and finished it on the same day
I gave this book 3 stars on Goodreads