ZOMG, the forum's 500th topic!!!11 Do I win anything?
I finished the games a few months ago and have been meaning to do some kind of review. The games I speak of are ".hack//Infection", "Mutation", "Outbreak", and "Quarantine.” Those are the four games released after ".hack//SIGN", not the current batch of "GU" games being released. Each subsequent game picks up right where the last one left off and there is no real change in gameplay or graphics, the story is merely continued and some new features are unlocked. Which is fine with me, but means there wouldn't be much of a point to reviewing them individually. So this'll be a broad review of all four games with virtually no spoilers, unless you’ve never seen “.hack//SIGN” that is.
Premise:
Kite joins the immensely popular MMORPG (massively multiplayer online role-playing game) “The World” under the guidance of his offline friend who plays as the legendary Orca of the Azure Sea. While Orca is showing Kite the ropes they encounter an out of the ordinary monster chasing a girl. A little while later Orca’s data drained by the monster and his player in a coma while the girl, Aura, has given Kite a bracelet with incredible power; the same kind of power responsible for his friend’s condition. With the help of friends he meets in “The World” he must unravel the mystery of Orca’s coma, the strange girl Aura, and the connection between the two and a growing instability within “The World.”
Now, aside from "SIGN" being one of my favorite animes if not
the favorite, I was especially interested in these because they're offline games that simulate being in an MMORPG. I have some experience with MMORPGs and by the very nature of the games they're repetitive and boring. The levels, stories, and situations are cookie-cutterish and there's no attachment to any of the characters, so once the newness wears off there's not much left to it. (Well, okay, so millions and millions of people addicted to them suggest maybe there is something to it, but it's
my review so who cares about them.)
So offline games that simulate being in an MMORPG, giving you an actual story and real characters? Plus based on a great anime and continuing its intriguing plot?
Yes please! Comparisons between the anime and these games are impossible to avoid, least of all because I'm a "SIGN" fanboy, and the games don't come out favorably. In some cases this is to be expected because of the limitations of the games and the PlayStation 2. For example, ".hack//SIGN" was gorgeously animated. I never expected the in game graphics to match the series and they don't. Despite not being as good the graphics aren’t too shabby and hold up pretty well without any comparisons, my only gripe with the way things looked being with a few designs I didn’t care for.
One area where I can’t be so forgiving though is the characters. For the most part they have nifty designs and distinct enough personalities so they aren’t interchangeable, but I found little depth to them and wasn’t all that interested in them or their budding friendships with one another. This is a stark contrast to “.hack//SIGN” and is a pretty big problem even if I don’t compare the games to the beloved characters from the anime. The two main characters, Kite and BlackRose, had some nice moments but overall it’s a problem that never went away. The only consistently interesting character was the hacker Helba who helped you out from time to time. She had an enjoyable mysterious, playful air about her that left you wondering whether she was a good guy or just helping you for her own gains. But she wasn’t a regular character, so her appearances were effective but infrequent.
The last bit that needs comparing is the music. I knew Yuki Kajiura had done music for video games in the past and so after finishing “SIGN” I was ecstatic about the possibility of more from her in the games. But turns out she didn't do the music, so nope. So the music pales in comparison, but it’s actually good on its own. A number of the songs are entertaining and lovely without falling into the trap of being too backgroundy or repetitive. Unfortunately I’ve only been able to find a “Best Of” torrent for the soundtrack but it’s definitely worth a download as long as you keep in mind - Yuki Kajiura it ain’t.
The makers of the game did a wonderful job simulating an online experience and giving you a game within a game feel. When you start the game you’re at a computer desktop and from there can access a news site, an e-mail account, and The World’s message board. All are fairly regularly updated with stories, new e-mails, and new postings as you progress through the story. Most of the e-mails you receive are from friends you make online and usually offer some basic information about the player behind the characters. This is a good idea with poor execution as the conversations that result are rarely interesting or insightful. Still, good idea.
When you’re logged into The World you take control of the main character of the game - Kite. Since this is an offline MMORPG in the game you control your character from a third person perspective and interact with the world around him. I noticed the biggest gripe with the game while I was reading reviews was the camera system. In the games you can control the camera and have a 360° view of everything around you. But for all the bellyaching about its problems I never actually had
any difficulty with it even when quick monsters were zipping all around me. Anyway, you start out at root towns where you can buy and sell various items and weapons and the like. To further the simulated MMORPG feel there are a number of characters running around you can interact with, either trading items or talking with them. They have several responses and while it’s rather limited it does help make it feel like there’s someone on the other end of the character (some characters even talk in 1337 speak for good measure. Little
too realistic…
)
You access a chaos gate in the towns to reach fields that have golden portals scattered across them. Instead of randomly encountering monsters they’ll appear from the portals if you get too close and set them off. There are entrances to underground dungeons on the fields, also filled with golden portals as well as treasures. At the lowest levels of the dungeons is a Gott Statue where you can find truly valuable treasure. Both the fields and the dungeons have several different types. The fields can be forest, magma, sand, etc. and the dungeons can be fleshy walls, castle, etc. For a while at least this variety of environments helps keep things from getting too monotonous as the fields and dungeons are a little bit on the generic side.
Another area where the game shines is the combat, it just knocks it out of the ballpark. It’s really quite a lot of fun and not overly complicated. The fighting is in real time so there is no turn based combat and characters do not just stand around. The enemy move around as they fight and cast spells and so will your comrades. You have to get close enough to your enemies to actually attack them, having a choice of basic slashing attacks or using skills you have available from equipment although those take up SP which takes time to regenerate. For a more long ranged approach there are a variety of magical spells that can be cast to either cause damage or status ailments on your enemies. A simple but well-done feature is the ability to give your teammates orders, ranging from having them target specific enemies to giving them strategies of attack. You can even tell them which spells and attacks to use. This certainly helped keep the combat fresh and enjoyable. Another nice thing about the combat is the game will pause while you select an item, spell, skill, or order for your teammates. Some reviews I read complained it broke up the real-time feel, but I for one was happy with the game allowing you to take your time and not have to worry about getting murdered by enemies in the meantime.
Speaking of my teammates, whenever I got in way over my head, which was more than once, my good pals diligently followed orders to sacrifice themselves to keep the monsters busy so I could make a... shall we say...
dignified retreat. That was actually really fun and was a big change from the couple of other J-RPGs I’d played like the Final Fantasy games. Running for my life with monsters in pursuit, unsure of whether I could escape while my dead teammates impatiently demanded I revive them was good for quite a few laughs.
During combat is when Aura’s gift to Kite, the Twilight Bracelet, comes into play. If you damage monsters enough you can Data Drain them and receive virus cores. If you encounter data bugged monsters you just happen to have the only thing that can stop them – Data Drain. You then use the virus cores to access sealed fields that system administrators and the Big Bad of the games have blocked off from the regular players of The World. To keep you from going Data Drain crazy, overuse of it can cause status ailments to be cast on you, a loss of XP, and possibly even death if you use the skill too much. To lower the risk your character Kite has to land the killing blow on monsters with normal attacks. It’s a good balancing dynamic.
The only fault I found with the combat system is whenever you perform a spell or a spell is cast on you your character stops and can’t move until it’s completed. This becomes a bit of a problem when you go up against multiple monsters that basically spam you with spells and in effect paralyze you for an extended period of time. If the monsters are much faster than you it’s especially fun trying to catch them. It was rather dangerous for my character’s health and incredibly aggravating, very quickly crossing the line from difficult to downright annoying.
I also need to mention I got a bit of a kick out of simple things from the game, like using the fairy orbs that Crim mentioned to find everything in a field, or using a sprite ocarina to slip out of a dungeon. In that vein running around root towns like Mac Anu and Dun Loireag and fields from the series was just cool.
That kind of connection added to the gaming experience.
But the fun could grow thin over the course of four games. I wanted to strangle someone for all the times I was directed to fight my way to the end of a dungeon only to find, whoops, nothing was actually there: false alarm or the enemy messed with it (why would you even do this to the players of your games more than once?!) The games are perhaps a little too much like an MMORPG. I mentioned the fields and dungeons are a little generic and the longer you play the more apparent the cookie-cutterishness of it becomes. Compare to that with say Final Fantasy VII which had a number of unique, well-crafted areas and it starts to become a very glaring weakness.
I can play ball and say that splitting the overall .hack tale into different media - anime, manga, video games, etc. - is an interesting way of telling a story as each contains a different part of the puzzle (instead of being more cynical and calling it a ploy to squeeze out as much money as possible), but when some feature on a DVD tells me more about the key parts of the overall plot than the games, the games fail. Especially when there are
four games! The story is stretched over those four games and it gradually became apparent you could take out a game or two to tighten things up and not much would’ve been lost. For the amount of time one puts in you don’t feel like you accomplished enough to warrant it. To again compare to Final Fantasy VII, in half the time spent beating the first two games you do a number of incredibly epic things and feel like you’ve come a long way from when you first started. In the .hack games… not so much, even by game four.
Each game comes with a Liminality DVD, and while on paper a Bee Train OVA with music by Yuki Kajiura with each game gets my seal of approval, I don’t think they quite worked. The animation was beautiful as expected and the music was wonderful, but the stories and characters left something to be desired and in many ways the Liminality OVAs felt like a mess of exposition that no one could figure out how to stick in the games.
But my single biggest gripe is probably the role of Morganna in the games. If you recall she’s the omnipotent AI who put Tsukasa in his coma and was trying to keep Aura from awakening and she’s nominally still the villain in the games. I very much enjoyed what we saw of her in “SIGN” and for all intents and purposes she is the goddess of “The World” and as was asked in the anime how do you fight an entity like that? Wanting to learn the answer is one of the major reasons I wanted to play the games. Keeping this relatively spoiler free, I will say the answer is wholly underwhelming and disappointing. And I rambled a little off the point of this paragraph, but basically Morganna has no role. You never encounter her and the closest you ever come to it is facing the Phases, which are technically part of her. The Phases have well-done designs and are distinct, but they aren’t actually characters and have no personality. They appear, you kick their ass, and they’re done. So… you go through four games without any actual villains. It’s all just so incredibly unsatisfying!
Unfortunately calling these games bitter disappointments would not be unfair. I definitely had fun playing the games and actually being in "The World" was a treat, but lacking much in the way of characterization and having a story that didn't deliver
at all, I'd have to call the first four .hack games a waste of time, money, and worst of all potential.
Unless you can get them dirt cheap or play them without having to pay - skip 'em. You won’t be missing out on much.
