.hack

In the last few weeks I have paid tribute to Mary McGlynn and Steve Blum, and now I will cover one of my favorite projects that they both worked on, .hack. In this series, Mary McGlynn plays hacker/goddess Helba and Steve got the role of Sanjuro, a character who was only optional during the games but was clearly a fan favorite and got promoted to regular in the anime .hack//Legend of Twilight. The .hack project was very ambitious and I appreciate their effort in managing to cross several media formats to tell a continuing story that actually required all parts to get the whole story. Sadly it's one weak point was the kingpin of the project; the game itself. The .hack series went through a series of four games released over the course of a few months that allowed you to actually play the game "The World" that the story is based around. It is a fun game, but there has been criticism, mainly that it was a four part game that should have been released as one game instead of making people actually pay for four games. Personally, I found a way around that and my real complaint is that the game within the game is incomplete. I will have to break down my review into two parts, one regarding the story of .hack, the other regarding the game within the game, "The World" and unlike the series, I will post both parts in separate paragraphs instead of making you wait for part two.

I will start with the game within the game, "The World" since you need to understand it to understand .hack as almost everything happens within the game. "The World" is an online game, much like World of Warcraft, EverQuest, FFXI & FFXIV and when playing it it feels like a solid foundation was set up. There are six character classes, Wavemaster, Twin Blade, Long Arm, Heavy Blade, Heavy Axeman, and Blademaster. Like many RPGs, the classes have different equipment and skills, what makes this system different is that you get your skills from your equipment, meaning that every time you upgrade equipment you change skills, and if you want to keep certain skills you may have to keep equipment with inferior stats. It doesn't make that much difference actually, I beat .hack//Quarantine with Goblin A Gear from.hack//Mutation. Wavemasters are the magic users who ca use staves that have powerful magic but no attack skills and can only use light armor. Twin Blades and Long Arms can use medium armor and light armor, but no staves, so very limited magic. Long Arms use spears, halberds and the occasional lance and rely on long range physical attacks while Twin Blades use knives, daggers and claws, always paired, and tend to rely more on rapidfire speed attacks. Heavy Blades and Blademasters both use swords, but Heavy Blades use bigger swords that they wield with two hands and drag around behind them whereas Blademasters use one handed swords. Heavy Axemen obviously use axes. All three of these last classes can use all types of armor, though the fighting style their weapons allow tend to make them best suited for wearing heavy armor and tanking. The game is played on five servers each represented by a town with the standard NPC shops, magic, items, weapons & armor. There's also a Grunty farm where you can raise up to three grunties per server that you can ride in battlefields to avoid combat and skip to the dungeon or race in town for HP and MP boosts and they'll even set up shop and sell you other cool stuff when you'r enot riding them. There is also a chaos gate which allows you to access other town/servers when your character reaches the right level, and most importantly allows you to access battlefields and dungeons. This is sort of where the game breaks down, the chaos gates allow access to battlefields based on three word key phrases that usually lead to randomly generated areas that all follow the pattern of having a dungeon and sometimes a well. The dungeons are also built from a pattern, though the interesting thing is that given the number of words that can be used to unlock an area you can in fact reach virtually infinite areas which each rearrange the pattern in an unpredictable way. There is one notable exception, one area is a church where many events occur, but you only fight there once or twice and otherwise it's just for meetings. There are also other hidden areas that you find after navigating a dungeon. The problem is that while this works within the larger framework of .hack by inserting extra areas due to a malfunction of "The World" if you remove all of the malfunction storyline, the properly functioning game doesn't seem to provide a lot to do. The grunty farm provides the most obvious sidequest, and there ae about two other sidequests that may exist in a normally functioning version of "The World" Goblin Tag and arguably Mia's Aromatic Grass sidequest. Aside from these, the sidequests are all provided by other players with no sign of how one would actually initiate any specific sidequest without the other players, and in fact, many of their sidequests are simply doing favors that have nothing to do with an actual game provided quest. As for the main story, there are two quests that are alluded to, "The One Sin" and "The Key of Twilight" however the former was apparently a one-time thing and was already cleared and the latter is so vague nobody seems to even have a clue what it actually is. When I get to the bigger story in the next paragrapjh I'll explain how this is compensated for, but I am disappointed to say that when they attempted to make an actual online game .hack//Fragment, it simply allowed you to play the offline game with a custom character and join with friends, which only reinforces that "The World" doesn't stand on it's own.

Now for the story of .hack. A computer virus wipes out the internet except for parts operating on the Altimit system run by Cyber Connect and the virus is tracked back to an online game so all online games are outlawed and shut down until Cyber Connect creates a new game called "The World" which becomes wildy popular, obviously because it is literally the only game in town. In .hack//SIGN we follow a Wavemaster namd Tsukasa who is stuck in the game with no way to log out. The series takes place almost entirely within the game with only a few short moments revealing the real world outside the game where we see how different the characters are from what they present themseves to be online. Tsukasa makes a few friends who help him find a way to fix his situation and eventually do succeed by finding Aura a girl who only exists in "The World" and may in fact be the Key of Twilight. Shortly after awakening Aura, things start to get really wierd and everyone is saved by Sora, a Twin Blade who enjoys killing other player characters and has acted as an antagonist for most of the series, and then gets turned into Skeith the first wave. This dovetails into .hack//Infection, the first game where we switch to Kite, a new player who is being shown the ropes by his best friend and legendary champion, Orca of the Azure Sea. They encounter Aura who is being chased by Skeith, an undefeatable monster. Orca is killed, the player goes into a coma and Kite is given a gift by Aura which turns out to be the Twilight Bracelet, a unique item which allows him to hack the game. This mechanic makes the game interesting as long as you take it at face value and don't see through it asthe plot device it really is. Kite, the player character, is the chosen one who can hack the game by Data Draining monsters which can yield rare items while turning big baddies into little joke monsters and is also the only way to make the waves fightable. The eight waves and Cubia are the bosses, though as I said before, they only exist as part of the malfunction storyline and leave "The World" without any proper bosses. Because the waves are sympotms of a system malfunction, they can not be fought as normal enemies because they are not in fact normal enemies and they aren't even really part of the game within the game, they are part of a hidden program and since they were not created as part of the game, they are not subject to it's rules just because they are invading it to get to Aura. The true story, we find out, is that the game's creator, Harald Hoerwick, created Aura as his artificial daughter when he lost the true love of his life, and the game is really just supposed to be a way of helping to format her by gathering data from players. However, the proram that is responsible for Aura, Moraganna, doesn't like the idea that she exists only to make Aura happen so to suppress her existence has created the eight waves to stop her. In response, Aura created the Twilight Bracelet to reformat such beings to exist within the games parameters so that they can be fought. Morganna's malfunction leads to a viral infection of the system which first afffects monsters by turning them into invincible forms that must be Data Drained in order to be fought. Data Draining can also yield virus cores which are necessary for Gate Hacking. Some of the areas that can be accessed from the Chaos Gate are locked because they contain hidden areas created by Harald Hoerwick to contain Aura, Morganna, the eight waves, and ultimately himself when he transcended into a purely digital form. It seems really cool to be able to hack into these areas using virus cores, but the reality is that they are intentional roadblocks. As you play through the games, key phrases to unlock areas relevant to the story are provided through e-mails and message boards as the story requires them, and these areas are always the same despite the random mapping that occurs for other areas, but you can actually enter the key phrases manually, meaning that if you know the areas before you start you can unlock them well before the story tells you to go there, but they will be blocked by gates that you have to hack and to get the virus cores you will have to collect virus cores, and invariably at least one core is always unique to a monster that only appeared in the dungeon before, meaning that you can never actually enter any really important areas until you get through the one before and play through the story properly. Data Draining also has a downside, infecting your character with a virus that can cause random status ailments and end the game if it gets too high. This is serious, when your infection level gets high, your next Data Drain can lead to a Game Over screen, though you do have fair waring and you can lower infection by fighting enemes without hacking them. The problem is that some dungeons are so filled with infected monsters that you have to make sure your infection level is at it's absolute lowest before going in or you'll game over just from hacking. The other characters are interesting enough, particularly Mia and Elk, though most of the others are pretty extraneous. Mia is actually the most outstanding and relevant because she is the only character that isn't human, either in appearance or true nature. While most characters seem to be restricted to the default race of human, Mia is the only character that is a Mock Cat, which aparently is a race only available through a hack that only Mia seems to know how to do. She appears to be an anthropomorphic cat wth purple fur and long rabbit-like ears. She is a Blademaster, and despite her apparent prowess, seems to be content to forming a party with a Wavemaster named Elk and searching for Aromatic Grass, an item that seems to have no purpose except for making Mia happy like virtual catnip. In .hack//Outbreak, the third installment, we finally find out that Mia is in fact not a hacker or a player at all, she is actually an NPC that functions like a player and is secretly the fifth wave Macha the Temptress. Macha is unique because it seems that as Mia it possesses a will of it's own independent of Morganna and Aura. Mia is benign, but as you hack the game and take out the other waves, she becomes less stable util she is broken, which is probably the most interesting thing that happens in the whole game series. In a bizzare twist, the final game, .hack//Quarantine has a bonus dundeon that allows you to recover Mia and play with her again, unfortunately, it is the last dungeon, when you complete it, "THE END" appears on the screen, so you can only use her in random dungeons whch you can create ad infinitum until you are bored with Mia, but you can't use her in the story after you defeat Macha. Another annoying thing about Mia is that she and Elk seem to only be available when they want to be, mainly during their aromatic grass quests, or after you complete an installment and continue to play the aftergame. One interesting aspect of the format of each quarter of the game being treated as a separate game is that when you finish a game, you can continue playing a flagged game which means that since you finished the story, the data can be transferred to the next installment, but in the meantime, until you do grab the next installment, you can keep playing with the story's timeframe paused indefintely. You can use any character(except Mia and Elk in Outbreak, Mia is out of commission and Elk is mad at you for your part in it) and you can complete unique sidequests such as Goblin Tag with Martina who is not available until after you finish the game and a special dungeon which requires a Gate Hack involving a virus core that you can only get from the final boss, so forget about getting to the dungeon beforehand, and of course finishing Grunty raising and racing and unlocking all of the extras, which you may not have done during the game, because they get a lot of crap in there.

Ultimately the .hack//project was ambitious and enjoyable, it's only bad if you overthink it, but if you just sit back and relax and enjoy it, it was the most amazing multimedia blitz I've ever seen and I hope to replicate it with 7th Moon.