Anime Review Fractale

Virtual reality is becoming, well, a reality. Yesterday I watched along with a great many other people as Google demonstrated their new experimental "Project Glass" -- which is technically augmented reality, but either way, you're talking about a synthetic world that overlays the real world.

Fractale (compare prices on the show here) starts from that premise -- people in the real world are part of a universal network (dare I say "matrix"?) through which they communicate with each other seamlessly and live out their lives. For most of them, Fractale is their world -- which makes it all the more dangerous when Fractale begins to fail on them, inspiring a cadre of revolutionaries to urge mankind to throw off its digital chains.

Fractale is hardly the first show to touch on the idea that mankind is living more and more within a technological envelope of his own construction. Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex (and the first and second Ghost in the Shell films, too) revolved around this as well, mixing the complexities of real-world politics with the no-less-fluid realities created in the digital world. The .hack franchise (as in the recently-released .hack//Quantum) works the same way, using an online role-playing game as the arena for nefarious doings that leak out into the real world as well.

So how well does Fractale mix the virtual and the actual in its far-future story? Read our review to find out.

Image: Fractale, courtesy Pricegrabber.