Game: .hack (.hack//Infection, .hack//Mutation, .hack//Outbreak, .hack//Quarantine)
Developer: CyberConnect2
Genre: Action Role-Playing Game
Releases:
– Infection: 2002 (PlayStation 2 (JP)), 2003 (PlayStation 2 (NA)), 2004 (PlayStation 2 (EU))
– Mutation: 2002 (PlayStation 2 (JP)), 2003 (PlayStation 2 (NA)), 2004 (PlayStation 2 (EU))
– Outbreak: 2002 (PlayStation 2 (JP)) 2003 (PlayStation 2 (NA)), 2004 (PlayStation 2 (EU))
– Quarantine: 2003 (PlayStation 2 (JP)), 2004 (PlayStation 2 (NA, EU))
The Playstation 2 era is often praised for the number of innovative titles it spawned. Whether it is the crazy over-the-top shooter “Killer 7” from well-known game designer Suda51, the reimagination of the puzzle platformer in form of the colorful “Katamari Damacy”, the gory deicide marathon that is the “God of War”-series, or any of the tons of other titles which I cannot possibly all list here. However, one interesting little detail that was also covered by Playstation 2 games was the episodic games format. Long before “Half-Life 2” would release games in smaller portions, there was a game series that did exactly that: The “.hack” games. The grand idea is that you get a fully-fledged role-playing game by buying the first title, but it ends on a cliff hanger that you can continue playing with your character when the next title comes out. I only ever had the first game of the series as a hard copy, “.hack//Infection”, but I had my fair share of fun with that game back in the day and finishing the entire series at some point was on my bucket list for years. And with the magic of emulation, I do not even have to pay the quite frankly outrageous collector’s prices to tick this box on my gaming to-do-list. So, today I want to talk about an interesting anime role-playing game that I had quite a number of fresh ideas, albeit being too long for its own good.
Before I go over what happens in each of the four games, let us get some information about the gameplay out of the way that does not really change over the course of the installments. The first thing that people will probably notice are the fairly outdated graphics: The first series of “.hack” games did not age that gracefully since 3-D graphics of the early 2000 are actually rather ugly in comparison to what I possible today; or even what was possible just a few years after the release of the “.hack” games. In my opinion, this can be seen most clearly in the various cutscenes in the game, which show what the technology at the time was capable of; and of what it apparently was not. However, I can ensure you that you can still have fun in the game series despite the graphics not being top-notch, even if you are stuck with it for the entire run. And, as you will see, it is unique enough to still stand out from other anime role-playing games even after twenty years.
Firstly, “.hack” introduces an interesting meta element to the gameplay: Since you are not only the in-game character “Kite” but technically also the 14-year old boy playing that character in the online game “The World”, the “.hack” games try to simulate the idea that you are sitting in front of an actual computer. Upon starting the game or loading a save, you will never simply enter “The World” as your first screen, but rather land on your “ALTIMIT” desktop, the “Windows” of the “.hack” series. I could fill entire paragraphs writing about this fictional corporation and their operating system alone, but let’s just limit the information to the fact that the “ALTIMIT OS” is, or was, supposed to be virus-safe and that it was made mandatory for a while for computers worldwide five years before the events of “.hack//Infection” because of an incident in which a huge virus attack coined “The Pluto’s Kiss” turned off the entire internet for over an hour and caused immense havoc all around the globe. This is what is so interesting about the “.hack” franchise: It is a rabbit hole of a scenario that you can alwaya enjoy parts of, but you will be rewarded with light bulb moments for knowing more parts of the lore.
But back to the login screen: During the game, you will often be required to close the game in order to read mails that you received which can include valuable information to progress the story, as well as casual conversations and meaningless small talk with the various members of your in-game party. Your desktop has a news feed, which serves no other purpose than explaining random little facts about the scenario to the player. You might be wondering why news about the new ways of cultivating apples or the slow death of print media in the “real world” of “.hack” are supposed to be important, but in my opinion this is a very smart way to make the scenario seem more real and believable, all without shoving information you may not be interested in down your throat. You can even alter the background music and the desktop picture with unlockables to customize the desktop to your liking. None of this is revolutionary, but the idea of having a desktop as your menu and starting the actual game “The World” from there is a well thoughtout detail that I have not seen in any other game so far.
After getting accustomed to your PC, you can start the game application, which will then open the option of either playing the game or opening the message board to read up on what other players have to say. Sifting through the message board is another thing you will have to do on a regular basis since it contains anything from random junk to plot-relevant information that you need to have read in order to progress with the story. Which brings us to the actual game: The main idea is pretty much the same as in any MMORPGs you have played before. You always start in a city that serves as the hub you can enter dungeons from as well as containing shops to buy new gear from and sell your spoils to. From there, you can activate Gate Portals, which require a chain a three keywords to from the address to a dungeon, with the various words of said keyword chain have influence on the layout of the dungeon you will enter. For example, every area has an element, which has an influence on how the area will look, with for example a Water-elemental area potentially being covered in snow or being meadow, while a Fire-elemental are might be a desert or has a floor made out of lava. Every of those areas has a dungeon, with a special chest at the end of it that normally contains three “rare” items to reward you for clearing the entire thing. Enemies both in the area and in the dungeon are normally spawned by approaching yellow symbols, although sometimes enemies can roam freely in the area.
And then there is the combat system, which is where the overall gaming part of the series rears its ugly head the most. In this real-time battle system, in order to attack an enemy you need to press the X-button, meaning that you will do a lot of button presses in order to get the opponent handled via normal attacks. However, “.hack” does feature an accuracy value, so depending on the opponent you are fighting against you might be missing an awful lot while being pummeled in the meantime. In such a scenario, you might want switch to skills and spells to increase your chance of hitting anything due to the higher number of hits. Technically, skills and spells are pretty much the same thing: Both cost SP to use, they normally feature an element, and depending on what you used you either do one hit for big damage or loads of small hits to rack up damage numbers that way. They use different attack stats, since the game does feature both a physical attack and a magical attack value, and therefore are also calculated against different defense values in order to do damage. The real problem with all of this is that you need to do an awful lot of menuing when using skills because the game has no shortcuts to put skills on. Add to that that you need to constantly use items in order to heal status ailments or health points and you will spent a huge amount of time during battles in menus, which is a massive blow to the enjoyment of the fighting system.
You can opt to do the dungeons alone, but the game recommends that you use a party to do your dungeoneering. Like in any real-life MMORPG, you meet people and can exchange contact addresses to invite those players to your party. A party can have up to three people in it, meaning you have free choice of what the two other people are supposed to be. This is a good time to talk about classes: “Kite”, our player character, chose to be a so-called “Twin Blade”, which is basically a rogue class using two daggers as weaponry. You cannot change to any other class over the course of the game, so you are stuck with a jack-of-all-trades character that can use all of the game’s feature but is outmatched in every aspect by some other class. However, you can build a party for the job at hand: “Heavy Blades” do major damage and can wear the heavy armor sets, which makes them exceptional at melee and pretty bad at anything magical and status-related. “Heavy Axemen” are the more extreme version of “Heavy Blades”, also being able to wear heavy armor set, doing amazing melee damage but being absolutely helpless in terms of magic. “Blademasters” use one-handed blades, while “Long Arms” use spears, both being melee-oriented. You can opt to use more “Twin Blades” in your party since you get to know characters using that class. And lastly, the only truely magic-focussed class is the so-called “Wavemaster”, which have the highest SP-pool, do high damage using magic, but are frail and absolutely worthless in melee combat.
Leveling in “.hack” is quite interesting. You always need 1000 EXP for one level up, but the amount of experience you receive from fighting a monster depends on the difference in levels between you and said enemy. This means that running through early game dungeons only gives you one experience per kill, but on the flipside makes it possible to level rather quickly right at the beginning of any part of the “.hack” game series since you can tackle opponents that are way higher in level than you are and therefore receive experience like crazy. There are also some other game mechanics like the fact that you can trade with NPCs for the gear they do not need like in an MMORPG or the Grunty side content that allows you to help grow some cow monsters and take part in mini-games with them, but I think that I covered most of the relevant stuff that should be said about the series. So, let’s go through the games in order to understand the story, starting with the first installment in “.hack//Infection”; and yes, there will be spoilers.
Part 1: .hack//Infection
The player behind “Kite” is introduced to the online game “The World” by his classmate and friend Yasuhiko, who is known in “The World” as “Orca of the Azure Sea”. Kite, being the newbie he is, is introduced to the various game mechanics by Orca by them entering a low-level dungeon. You learn the movement, how to attack opponents, and other useful bits of information to get around in the game; until the two see a white-clothed girl being chased by a monster with a red scepter. Orca, who has never seen that occur before is somewhat shocked by such an event taking place in a dungeon with that low of a level, and suggests to chase after them to see if they can help. This leads to a scene in which Orca tries to fight the mysterious foe, but cannot harm them at all, only to be data drained and sent into a coma in the real world. Kite is saved from the same fate, but learns of the state of his friend later on. Being the only one that witnessed the circumstances that lead to his friend being comatose, he decides to search for clues for a cure that could bring Yasuhiko, Orca’s player, back to consciousness. And in order to do so, he will be using his newfound powers to get to the bottom of the online game “The World”.
“.hack//Infection” is the first game and therefore needs to do some ground work before we can actually progress in the story. Over the course of the game, you get introduced to various characters with relevance to the plot, like BlackRose who also lost a person due to a “The World”-related coma, Mistral, a cheerful Wavemaster that collects items in the game, Piros, a Heavy Axeman that is fond of role-playing in-game, Mia and Elk, a Blademaster and Wavemaster combo that likes Aromatic Grass, and both the Twin Blade Natsume and the Heavy Blade Sanjuro if you decide to do the quests for them. Those various characters are made aware of the fact that you search for a cure for your friend and that the circumstances have gifted you with a bracelet of immense power, an item that you cannot quite understand yourself yet. The journey takes you through various dungeons in which it is clearly visible that something is wrong with the world: You see lines of text resembling code flying through the area, static is popping up regularly, and the various areas look like the were damaged and now show the construction that lies underneath which resembles circuit boards. The enemies also show signs of being damaged in some way: Bosses in those infected dungeons are surrounded by green data, which makes their health pool unreadable and potentially endless since you cannot defeat them using normal means. Cue the bracelet: The same power that send Orca’s player into a coma can destroy that protection, allowing Kite to actually defeat those virus-ladened enemies.
On his own, Kite can only get so far. Even with the bracelet in his possession, he is still only a 14-year old middle schooler in front of a PC. However, the fact that he has an item with immense power does not stay unnoticed and soon the legendary hacker “Helba” decides to help Kite in his investigation. Data draining enemies nets you so-called virus cores, which you need to hack gates to areas that are locked by system administation; the very areas you need to enter in order to understand what is happening behind the scenes of “The World”. But for now, everything still stays a big mystery. The white girl, Aura, constantly tries to contact you but her messages are muddled and even if you can read parts of them it is unclear what you are meant to do. The monster that was chasing her, Skeith, seems to have something to do with the spreading decay of “The World”, but what exactly this entity’s task is in a greater picture you cannot say. All Kite knows is that the monster needs to be brought down to understand what power they are dealing with here. In the meantime, you run into Balmung, Orca’s partner that harbors some hostility towards you, visit various dungeons with strange rooms at the end to receive mere kernels of information, and finally get the keyword to the realm of the monster with the red scepter.
I will not spoil the complete endboss fight of “.hack//Infection” here, but since everything pointed towards it from the very beginning, yes you will fight Skeith. And let me tell you something: If you dislike the menuing part of combat that I hinted at earlier, oh boy will you hate that boss. I fought the battle years ago, so I had some vague idea what is going to happen in that battle. I picked the required character BlackRose and my trusty go-to magic user Mistral and slaughtered every monster both outside and inside the dungeon, leveling quite a bit in the process. I used some potions on the way, sure, but with about forty-seven health drinks and around another twenty healing potions I was confident I could take the monster on. And I did; but about two-thirds of that battle was spent in menus. This opponent could one-shot my caster with a normal attack for way more than she would survive even if I boosted her physical defense, so I stopped bothering to heal her after a while and simply stuck to reviving and then refilling her SP instead. BlackRose was the favorite target of the beast, but she was thankfully tanky enough to withstand one attack, allowing me to heal her up again. However, healing her with a spell was too slow and left me unable to react should anything bad happen, so I switched to using items. Also, since that enemy has an extremely nasty attack to halve the HP of the target, basically drains the SP, and inflicts every status ailment under the sun, I had to use two different status healing items on top of everything else. To show what I mean, this meant that I had to open the menu to:
- Revive Mistral with a “Resurrect” after basically any attack that only targeted her.
- Wait until her red-glowing avatar picture of Mistral is back to normal to have her as a target for “Mage’s Soul” to restore her SP (since those will be at zero after dying).
- Use a “Hermit Blood” on Mistral for the short time she is alive between the attacks of the enemy to buff her already pretty high damage output to kill the opponent quicker.
- Heal BlackRose with “Health Drinks” and “Healing Potions” after every attack because she would not be able to withstand another one otherwise.
- Use “Knight Blood” on BlackRose to lower the damage because I drained my reserves of healing items quite fast.
- Use an “Antidote” on BlackRose after the special attack of the boss to clear her of half the ailments put onto her.
- Use a “Restorative” right after that on BlackRose after the special attack of the boss to clear the other half of her ailments.
- Heal myself with “Health Drinks” and “Healing Potions” after an attack that hits every party member to avoid dying and therefore losing time to heal and potentially risk a Game Over.
Every single bullet point means opening the menu, choosing the right item, then applying that item to the character that needs it. After the damaging special attack of the opponent, I basically needed to open the menu five times to heal the group to a non-critical health pool again so that I do not wipe against the endboss. Until a certain point in that fight, I stood back as far as possible, ordered the two girls in my party to attack with everything they have, and threw items around like a maniac for the rest of the time. You need to get past the first life bar of Skeith in order to Data Drain it; like with so many enemies you had to fight before. Data Draining Skeith transforms the fight into a mere nuisance since most of the dangerous moves are now banished from its moveset, and since you can then see the life bar of said enemy, it is only a matter of time until you manage to claim victory. Skeith will melt down to a puddle in the cutscene following that fight, but it is then that Kite realizes that the enemy he just defeated might have only been a pawn, and that killing said pawn set far greater powers in motion than he could ever have imagined.
After finishing the story of “.hack//Infection”, there are still two things you can do to enter the next game with additional gear: The fight against an additional boss on an airship, and the chase after the last of the goblins. Funnily enough, the additional boss after the main story was not nearly as bad as the story endboss. The “Parasite Dragon” has 9,999 HP and can basically one-shot anything you put in front of it, but I found it pretty easy as the healer of the party. You still do the same menuing, throwing revives when one of your close combat units drops or healing them up to full if the Parasite Dragon has a good day and misses one of the hits of the multi-hit attack, but other than that you just wait for your two melee units to cut him to size, then data drain when the opportunity arises. You want to do that since the Parasite Dragon drops a rare weapon for your class, which is hugely inaccurate but comes with high damage and very solid fire-based skills. After that, I simply entered the field with Martina, the last of the goblin five, drank both a Warrior’s Blood and a Hunter’s Blood to increase physical attack and accuracy, and then waited for her to speed past me to give her a taste of one of the fire-based skills of my new weapon. You will need some tries to get her to zero, but the challenge is totally doable if you do not give that enemy the chance to cast the auto-regen spell on herself. So with that, onwards to the next game.
Part 2: .hack//Mutation
A unique feature of the “.hack” games is that you receive a so-called “Data Flag” after finishing the story, which allows the system of the Playstation 2 to read the previous save data and load it as your save for the next game. This is also the intended method, since I have heard from a past friend years ago that simply starting the third game without any previous data gives you a level 50 Kite, and that’s it. Story-wise, Kite has seen the monster he unleashed, which we as the player’s only know as “Cubia” due to Helba referring to it that way at the end of the last cutscene in “.hack//Infection”. But aside from this entity lingering somewhere in the code of “The World”, nothing much has changed. After the battle against Skeith, there was no visible improvement to anything that Kite or BlackRose could make out. So, BlackRose decides to re-visit the dungeon where Skeith was fought, only to find the area still being damaged like before but completely void of any monsters and with a locked door at the end.
After that went nowhere, fate opens another window for the team: An unknown user wrote them a mail containing the dungeon address to a place that seems to contain further information. Both Kite and BlackRose enter the dungeon, only to find themselves in a white nothingness in front of Lios, the system administrator of “The World”. The man is not exactly happy with what you have done so far, and threatens to erase both characters to avoid further damage; however, Helba intervenes, ridicules Lios for his behavior, and suggests that he could rather let them continue doing their investigations which could also prove helpful to the administrator. He agreeds, begrudgingly, and sends you various keywords to dungeons that you should take a closer look at. And it does not take long until that search actually bears fruit, since we encounter the second boss fight in form of Innis.
I leveled quite a bit before I went into this fight, so I might have been too powerful for this foe to handle, but in my opinion the fight was ridiculously easy. Innis likes to warp around, which makes hitting the thing somewhat tricky at certain times. It also comes with magic immunity so you need to charge it in melee to actually win the fight. But other than that, you can basically stomp the enemy: All of the special attacks deal little enough damage that I could take two of them and still not die, and while the barrage of status ailments from Data Drain is definitely something you should be aware of, you can simply tell your party members to stay in First Aid mode and they will heal you of all of them before you even opened the menu. Killing Innis, like Skeith before, seems to have negative effects on the stability of “The World” though, so Lios is not exactly happy upon your return and commands you to stay put until he orders you to act again. BlackRose has different plans, since she is fed up with being commandeered by some megalomaniac that does not seem to have full grasp of the situation either, so she suggests to go it alone again. This leads to Aura contacting Kite again, but instead of the usual babble, she attached a keyword to follow. It does not take much imagination to know what comes next.
Well, this time our friendly mage Mistral absolutely wants to accompany us, something that I do not have the slightest problem with. A jog through the dungeon later, we do actually meet Aura, but she seems to be dead or at least in stasis. Kite and Mistral do not get to examine the girl any further, since Cubia makes its first move in the series, placing us on top of a platform and putting us at its mercy. For a fight that is not that far after the Innis battle, this was actually a tad more difficult: You cannot hit Cubia itself, but rather need to take care of a so-called Cubia Core, which spawns five more monsters to help it in the fight. The Cubia Core is either immune to physical or magical damage, so you need to alternate between those damage types in every phase, and after defeating one of the cores Cubia itself fires some attack on your party, which means that you want to be healed by the time you kill the core in order to tank the hit right afterwards. The fight is definitely doable though, and after defeating Cubia and it fleeing to god knows where Helba congratulates us on the victory and throws further exposition around. The key to people becoming comatose and “The World” taking a turn for the worse seems to be Aura, and reawakening her might be the solution that is needed.
Apart from the story, we get flooded with loads of side quests to do, which usually come down to either recruiting a new character or interacting with one of the characters we got in “.hack//Infection”. In “.hack//Mutation”, you can recruit Rachel, a Blademaster, during a trade auction in a dungeon, Nuke Usagimaru, a Long Arm and self-proclaimed showman with neither an idea of humor nor fashion sense during his battle show, Moonstone, a taciturn Twin Blade after helping various other characters, and Marlo, yet another Blademaster that challenges you to visit him in a dungeon on your own, but then simply hands you his member address because he forgot what he wanted to talk about with you. Piros, Natsume, Sanjuro, and Gardenia all have their own little missions aswell, which you all in all keep you occupied for a little while. You actually also meet a new Wavemaster who is important to the overall story: Wiseman, a broker for both gear and information, is the one to talk to in order to recieve more information about the “Epitaph of Twilight”, the poem that “The World” seems to be based upon in some way. Turns out that both the name “Skeith” and “Innis” are mentioned in its lines, and Wiseman even suggests that the other characters in it might be the next adversaries.
The access to more vital information requires the party to enter the so-called “Net Slum”, a place that is outside the control of the system administrator that houses both vagrant AIs as well as hackers. Balmung, a character that constantly questions the involvement of Kite and BlackRose in the entire affair, out of all people gives them the necessary key to access that map. So, a little virus core farming later (you simply never have enough Virus Core F), we enter the dungeon that is supposed to bring us to the Net Slum. With the solution to the entry puzzle constantly being repeated by BlackRose, we have a fairly easy time getting into the actual dungeon, and soon enough we stand in front of a strange gate. Certainly a cool area, but not a lot to do there. After speaking with all the NPCs, a cutscene is triggered with hints at the importance of the creator of “The World”, a man named Harald, before Helba, Balmung, and Lios all make their entrance. Lios used Balmung to spy on Kite and BlackRose and now that they have led them to the Net Slum he has the intention of deleting the entire place. Unfortunately for him, the game itself does seem to have a problem with that, sending yet another boss our way: Magus. The Magus fight is yet more menuing, but this time we do not simply hit an opponent in-between menuing section but rather destroy what the boss leaves behind. Magus drops leaves growing at its sides onto the floor, which causes a small countdown to appear over them. I would tell you what that countdown does, but I can only imagine that it is not beneficial to me and therefore gave me enough reason to destroy them all before the countdown reached zero. I needed to heal quite a bit over the course of the fight, but it is absolutely reasonable in difficulty for the level you reach that area at.
The danger of Magus stopped, both BlackRose and Kite decide to leave the area again and warp back into the city. This is where the extend of their actions hits them with full force: Instead of only a few selected areas being infected, all cities are now showing the same symptoms. Cut to black, credits roll, the story continues in “.hack//Outbreak”. However, there was still some stuff for me to do: After finishing the main story of “.hack//Mutation”, you receive another two mails from Bandai, one telling you that you can transfer your sava data over to the next game, and one giving you the address to the game’s additional boss. The area for that additional boss is quite cool, some city ruins in the sky; unlike the boss itself, which I personally found to be quite the push-over. Do not get me wrong, that thing deals massive damage, but I can open the menu during its long series of attack and keep me healthy during the attack chain, completely nullifing the threat. Throw boost items around for everyone, go into melee mode, then hit the thing until you can use data drain for a rare weapon and the fight is over. I did all the unlockables in the gallery before starting the last area, so I was good on that front, and while the last of the goblins, Martina R, was giving me a hard time at first a quick search revealed that you can easily put her to sleep via “The Moon” scrolls and completely nullify her magic immunity by using a “Beast’s Bane” scroll. With all of that done, I was ready to head to part three of the series.
Part 3: .hack//Outbreak
In story-terms, there is quite a lot happening at the start of “.hack//Outbreak”. Kite question whether what they are going is actually the right thing. BlackRose goes into a major tantrum due to Kite even suggesting such a thing, but thankfully explains her reasoning for doing so later on in her usual brash manner. Mistral will not be around for this part of the way, since she is a soon-to-be mother in real life and explains to Kite that she simply cannot take the risk of falling into a coma. And pretty much every other character in the game is AWOL since Kite needs to find new resolve on his own. Switching to gameplay terms, this means that the first dungeon you have to do on the new server with bigger and more dangerous enemies has to be done alone, so you better gear up unless you want to see Kite being dogpiled on and die without some party member to revive him around.
Thankfully, this part is not terribly long. We get to meet Balmung again, the partner of our comatose friend Orca, who tries to fight a virus-infected monster completely on his own. Kite rushes to his help, meaning that we need to data drain and the defeat the monster, which brings us a cutscene that shows that not only Kite thought about his behavior and the effect his actions take on “The World”. Long story short, Kite willing to accept Balmung’s apology and we gain yet another party member to work with. After this short section, the mailbox is innundated by a boatload of mails from various characters in our member list that suggest that they are ready to party again; and the game can take its usual turn of running dungeon in order to find out more about the online game they all play.
Now, before I talk about more story-related stuff, I do have to mention that the game is getting harder; and I am not sure that it is handling the difficulty in a good way. Naturally, every character still only has gear from “.hack/Mutation”, which leaves a whole lot of stats to be desired since we can jump straight to way better equipment by trading and dungeon running; and it seems that the game is expecting the player to do just that. But in order to get more stuff to sell or equip, I need to fight monsters in those dungeons I need the better gear for in the first place. And “.hack//Mutation” was the first part of this game series that actually trapped me in certain encounters; even though I think that that happened randomly rather than being a planned and programmed occurance. I activated a monster spawning portal, which placed one enemy in front of me. Easy pickings, I would say, if it was not for the five caster enemies appearing out of nowhere behind some debris that would lock my entire party from moving since they were constantly looping spells which left me stuff in place. I only got them under control by telling Wiseman to fire spells whenever possible and menuing like a madman to keep everyone alive, but the tediousness of the fighting system certainly starts showing again.
Other than that, the game offers loads of dungeons to go through with various party members again. Marlo searches for a dungeon containing the monster “Necrotic Eye”, the address to which is conveniently posted to the message board right after receiving the mail. Gardenia invites Kite into a dungeon to make vague references to the short lifespan of flowers. Sanjuro wants to take part in a quiz dungeon at which end you can win a rare sword. Nuke Usagimaru is the usual idiot and was thrown out of the party at the first chance I had. Also, we meet one last character to add to the roster: The second Heavy Axeman that you can add to a party, Terajima Ryoko.
Ryoko seems to be a bit of a klutz since she not only entered her real name as the character name in an online game but also got lost in a dungeon and had to be escorted outside by Kite. She does send a mail right after helping her asking Kite to do to some other area with her, so I naturally agreed to help her and added her to the party; only to see that the developer went all in with the idea of her being a newbie. At the point when I received the member address from Ryoko, Kite was Level 61, while Ryoko was only Level 5. This meant that simply doing the mission with her was out of question and that some serious leveling had to go on beforehand; but luckily, due to the leveling system in “.hack”, I went to a lower-level server, found a level forty-something dungeon and saw a whopping 570 EXP plop up after defeating a random enemy. Repeating this for two-and-a-half dungeons brought her up to the early fifties, at which point I started her gauntlet of a mission through a dungeon full of infected mobs. There is an indicator for virus infection attached to the skill menu when hovering over the data drain skill, and this was the first time I was forced to used the skill so often that clearing the entire dungeon would have instantly killed me via virus overdose. Nevertheless, a cutscene triggers, Kite saves the day, and Ryoko is officially welcomed into the group.
After that, I went on with playing the story. Wiseman has a plan to lure the next of the “Phases”. In order to know where to look for them and stopping it, he wants to ask Helba for assistance. With her help, according to Wiseman, it should be possible to track an area with a drastic increase in infected date. So, we need to walk through another dungeon with an infected mob at the end, which is basically a test from Helba to see if we are really capable of doing what is planned. She happily agrees to assist, and with a dungeon keyword given to us we head towards the next boss.
Meet Fidchell, the fourth of the Phases that needs to be smacked around. I personally found this fight fairly easy, but you need to be prepared in order to get through it without major damage. Fidchell knows four elemental spells that alone do solid damage to your entire party. However, he boosts the efficiency of said spells by using an “Oracle” version of that spell beforehand, which decreases the resistance of your entire party against the element of the spell that he will cast next. So, a little menuing magic is needed. Immediately after being hit by the debuff, throw Antidotes around to remove the effect. You should be able to get two characters healed before Fidchell casts one status ailment, and have a small window of opportunity after that spell to clear the rest before the big damage rolls in. My party took about 500-ish damage from any of the big spells, which is easy to heal back to full in combination with the fact that I entered the fight with the regen spell Rig Saem on every character to further increase the life gain. Other than that, the fight really boils down to hitting Fidchell in the face whenever possible, then Data Draining the opponent when the opportunity arises. After being Data Drained, the fight is basically over since Fidchell can only use the big versions of the normal elemental spells, which pose way less of a threat than the other skills he used before. Upon being defeated, he hits ominously at a bleak future, leaving both BlackRose and Kite wondering what defeating this enemy might have changed in “The World”. Turns out that “The World” has not suffered any further damage, but the virus actually seems to spread into real life, giving the entire scenario a new level of urgency.
However, “.hack” is not really rushing through its story, so we cannot just go and beat the next opponent to get to the root of the problem. No, the actual story mission after defeating Fidchell is accompanying quirky Heavy Axeman Piros into a dungeon that supposedly has epic loot; and we have to go with him, whether we like it or not. Clear the dungeon, receive a number of really unimpressive sounding items, see Piros putting them all on to be hit with various status ailments and changing his character sprite’s color to orange again, and be free from that sillyness again. Piros is not the only one with a new quest though: Moonstone is searching for a weapon called Moon Knife, apparently because it has “moon” in the name. Rachel opened her item delivery service, which turns out to be absolutely useless and is therefore closed after just one delivery that we assist her with. And I finally reached a high enough level to clear a mission received at the start of “.hack//Outbreak”, in which the existence of Skeith’s Wand at the bottom of the dungeon is hinted at. We go there, see the character Sora from “.hack//SIGN” appear briefly, then receive his weapon which was actually worth the effort.
Story-wise, the team realizes that they need the help of system administrator Lios in order to succeed; the only problem is that his stubbornness probably will not let him co-operate with Helba. BlackRose manages to lure Lios to the NetSlum, who thinks that there meeting could be prevented by simply deleting the post on the message board; but for a hacker such as Helba, the deleted data is certainly more interesting which is how she found out about the meeting anyway. Kite explains that they all have the same goal, and after a little bit of back and forth Lios agrees to help the group under the condition that Kite manages to fight an infected mob without using his bracelet to data drain the enemy. Kite agrees, and after a short job through yet another dungeon, we face an infected enemy with a long life bar that we can bring down eventually. Turns out that that monster was of Lios’ own creation and therefore not actually infected, but he still admits defeat and is more or less willing to go along; especially after seeing Cubia earlier on in a cutscene and therefore understanding what the enemy is they are fighting against.
This time around, the team quarantines the Phase to leave it no room to go, with Helba and Lios doing the tracking and Kite and friends being the ones doing the ass-kicking. The next phase on our plate is “Gorre”, which are actually two enemies sharing one health pool. One of them has a orange gem attached to it, which is the one that is immune to physical attacks, while the other sports a blue gem and is immune to magic attacks instead. So, the plan was rather simple: Buff the hell out of the entire party, tell BlackRose to charge the blue one, while Wiseman focusses his magic on the orange one. The duo has some attacks that deal major damage, but they leave enough time for you to heal all significant damage in-between their aggression, so after a short while their defenses drop, you data drain them, and then fight the sorry remains of this boss to end the battle. With Gorre, another Phase is taken care of and it is about time that the tides turn in favor of the group.
With that, the story of the third game is done. However, as with the two game before, there are other things to do before I can import the save to the next title. Namco sends two mail again after the story is completed, one being the usual text that explains how to import the save, while the other one gives us access to the additional boss of “.hack//Outbreak”. The “Black Death” certainly sounds much more menacing than it actually was, since this Cerberus-like monster with 9999 HP certainly hit hard with its fire breath, but was never really dangerous enough to kill a party member and therefore not a threat I would have taken seriously. The last few tag challenges against the goblins were still left to do, which were extra fun since you now have to chase after three enemies that run faster than you and can heal rather than just chasing one; but with the help of a walkthrough I managed to put those golden runners to sleep and eventually brought them down. The last few collectables via the Ryu Books were quite a pain since I needed to hunt down loads of enemies to unlock the last movie, but while that was a massively tiring and tedious experience I was eventually able to finish that task aswell and saved “.hack//Outbreak” for a last time to continue with the last title of the series.
Part 4: .hack//Quarantine
I will have to be honest: It took me 64 hours to get to “.hack//Quarantine” with all the story stuff and collectables involved; and doing what is basically the same idea of dungeon clearing for that long made me somewhat tired of the entire procedure. So, I enter this last game with mixed feelings, since I am happy that I got that far but also looking forward to finishing the entire thing. And it has to be said that the first few story-relevant tasks did noting to increase my motivation. With Gorre, aka Phase 5, being taken care off, there are only a few more left to go if we are to believe the Epitaph of Twilight. However, instead of simply chasing after the next one, we are ordered by Lios to investigate an area that seems suspicious; but which only houses a virus-infected enemy that did so little damage that I could have fallen asleep without the worry of getting a game over-screen. After that, we get our next keyword from a random citizen of the Net Slum, a keyword that requires various virus cores that I do not have in the needed capacity anymore. So, before I can even think about visiting that new area, I need to fetch those from various other places; and since it is possible that opponents do not drop them because their loot list has other stuff in it or does not contain the necessary virus cores in the first place, this is going to take some time. And even after obtaining all the virus cores, the place to visit turns out to be a five-story dungeon with a confusing cutscene at the bottom.
And even though the game that everyone is playing seems to slowly but surely take hold of the real world, that does not stop the characters in your party to invite you to seemingly random places for whatever reason. Moonstone found an area that is good for leveling in his opinion because it houses strong monsters; and I would agree since the area is for level 85, which I was not when I received the mail. Piros also has more to do, since he wants to avenge a player that was tricked by some charlatan; only to find out that the player that was tricked was Piros himself and that the player that tricked him did not mean to do so and promptly returned the money upon seeing his error. I started doing the collectible stuff for the Ryu Books early this time, because “.hack//Quarantine” wants you to do A LOT of stuff in order to complete it. And since every story-relevant area is now locked by a gate hacking mechanic, I am forced to farm for virus cores in order to progress, which streches the game even further. So, after farming enough for two areas in order to progress, I actually see something relevant happening again: We located the next boss.
Drum roll, the sixth Phase turns out to be Mia. Elk and Mia sit at the bottom level of the dungeon that Lios made out to be housing the next opponent, with Mia stating that she has no memory outside of “The World”. Kite enters the scene and Mia transforms into “Macha, the Temptress”. Now, this does not come as that much of a surprise since the game hinted at something being wrong with her since “.hack//Mutation” due to her odd behavior when around Kite or the loss of memory in general. This was actually a boss fight that kept my attention due to one little trick she had up her sleeve: She can charm your entire party! The spells she casts do not really threaten Kite who could easily tank one from full health, the normal attack does drain SP on top of dealing damage but was easy to heal back up from aswell, but charming every party member means that the ensuing melee will kill two of the party, leaving Kite to revive them as quickly as possible. Thankfully, the sixth phase leaves lots of time between attacks, so you can be up at full power by the time the next attack comes your way, but the first time everyone started smacking each other I already saw me losing that fight. And the first instance of the boss fight is the most dangerous, as with all the phases so far. As soon as you can data drain Macha, she will become the usual assortment of rocks that can still cast spells but pretty lost all ability to seriously threaten you. After that fight, Mia is freed from her form again, but she is seriously worse for wear. Elk is ported back into the area, tries to heal her, but ultimately fails to do so and can only witness her body fading away. Needless to say, Elk is not exactly happy about Kite killing his online love interest, so we cannot rely on him for the next phases; not that I am terribly sorry about that since I still have Wiseman to fall back to if I need magic damage.
However, it seems that Elk was, at least for story-telling purposes, needed in the plan of using a vaccine program to limit the movement of the next boss we need to fight. Things get out of hand and we are able to enjoy yet another sequence with Cubia, who is again just using Cubia Cores to attack us with while using skills whenever one goes down temporarily. The increase in difficulty this time around is meant to be the fact that you need to fight against three cores instead of the two we had to take care of last time, but I did not think of it as much of a challenge anyway. After defeating Cubia yet another time, we try to track down the actual phase we are chasing after again, which succeeds this time. Behold Tarvos, a stone formation that like screaming a lot. Jokes aside, Tarvos actually proved to be quite a fight since that thing has an instant kill move to keep you alert at all times. It also switches resistences in battle, which means that you should be capable of dealing both physical and magical damage to slowly chip down its rather sizeable health pool. After that, I took care of a few side quests again: Marlo invites us into a dungeon for an unknown reason, but it turns out that he cares about Kite and leads him into a room full of stat increasing items. Rachel may have closed down her courier service, but now opened a rescue service to help adventurers in need; which obviously fails since she is just used as an item mule. The Moonstone quest that I postponed earlier was also up for clearing, with Moonstone showing interest in a spear to trade against a Moon Helm … and the member address of a female player.
After all that, we are on the final stretch of the “.hack” games. The NetSlum residents that we met in “.hack//Mutation” appear again, all talking some cryptic nonsense but also providing the keywords for various dungeons we need to clear in order to gain the necessary virus cores to enter the last story dungeon. However, that is easier said than done since all of those dungeons do require a frankly ridiculous amount of virus cores to be entered. Unless you happen to have loads of spares or farmed with the intent of having enough virus cores at that point of the game, you will have to do a lot of backtracking in order to even access the next few areas. Virus core farming is what I would consider to be the worst thing in the “.hack” games: You only have a small chance to gain them anyway, but add to that that the opponent needs to be data drainable, have a virus core as a possible drop in the loot list, and that the chance seems to further decrease the higher your infection level becomes and you have a few hours of tedious and frustrating farming ahead of you. And on top of all that, the game seemingly even makes fun of you by letting the enemies drop an item that is literally called “Heh Heh Heh”, a rather weak staff, as if to mock you for trying to get virus cores to continue playing the storyline.
Eventually, I did get enough virus cores to end this long journey once and for all. The four dungeons all have a virus infected opponent at the end, which each drops one of the necessary cores to continue; but almost more important than that is the fact that they also spawn an opponent called “The Guardian”. The Guardian is a strange looking shape that seems to be made out of energy and has an impressive health pool of 9999 HP. It does little damage, however it can be data drained as early as 6000 HP which will transform it into “The Bracelet”, an opponent with only 3000 HP but an arsenal of high damage spells that make it a formidable foe. If you manage to bring it down you will most certainly gain 520 EXP for doing so, since it seems to be treated as a level 99 monster and therefore is the perfect way to quickly level your party; aside from also dropping some seriously powerful gear. So, apart from the areas being required to move on, you should also take your time clearing them out because the loot and experience are worth getting in any case. Fetching the necessary virus cores allows you to enter a dungeon in which Harald, the creator of “The World” seems to reside, so both Kite and BlackRose are heading there in search for answers.
Their meeting with Harald, and his daughter Aura as we get to know in the cutscene, is cut short by none other than Cubia for yet another showdown. Cubia has not given up on using Cubia Cores as the main form of attack even after three failed attempts, so the first few stages of this fight are against the same strange jellyfish opponents that were clubbered so often before. Switch between magic and physical damage depending on what can actually damage to cores and you will soon find yourself in front of the entity Cubia itself. With no resistences whatsoever, you can pretty much fire whatever you deem most damaging and Cubia only interfered with my assault whenever 1000 HP were lost to use an attack of varying effectiveness. The giant laser attack called “Armaggeddon” was quite effective in the damage department, while “Abaddon’s Terror” only ever managed to poison my party which was cute at best. Some other attacks were also fired to stop my party, but all that struggle from Cubia was in vain. In the end, with the life bar completely drained, Cubia heals to full only to become the victim of a cutscene that takes the monster out of the picture. Only one more enemy left to go.
In quite an unusual fashion for the games, we do not even need to clear a dungeon in order to fight the last boss of “.hack//Quarantine”; instead, it visits us instead. The eighth phase, Corbenik, does not look like anything threatening with it peanut shape but do not be fooled since it is the last endboss of the “.hack” series. The first stage of the boss fight already makes clear that the opponent is not to be underestimated since it can use the usual earthquake normal attack, but instead of attacking once with it Corbenik hops three times for massive damage. It is also able to use the highest level Wood element spell, which might even be more dangerous depending on the defenses of the target. In fact, BlackRose seemed to be the favorite target for Corbenik’s ire and died so frequently that I did not bother renewing her buffs since she would lose them fairly quickly again anyway. However, if you manage to survive the damage gauntlet that the first stage happens to be, you should be able to bring down it’s health quite fast; which triggers stage two. Corbenik brings forth a leaf, which is now the new form of the enemy and yet another life bar to clear in order to progress. The leaf can stun the entire party and it likes to drain Kite of most of his health in order to heal by rooting itself to him, but since I was able to summon the fire avatar Vulcan as my go-to magic choice I had little trouble beating that drained health out of it again. Around one-fifth of the health bar remaining, Corbenik’s leaf form will encase itself in a shield that I would basically call plot armor since you cannot break it until a cutscene plays that does it for you. Which brings us to the last stage of Corbenik’s fight: The eye form. How the developer got the seed > leaf > eye idea is up for speculation, but with yet another full health bar as my enemy I had no time pondering about that any further. The eye takes the Cubia approach and spawns smaller enemies to support it, but other than that it is not that hard to keep in check. Kill the monsters it spawns as fast as possible, then focus on the main opponent until it fires an attack. Heal up, kill the monsters it spawns again, then continue dealing damage and soon enough you will be treated with the finale of the series.
However, this is not the end of the game yet, only the end of the main story. Orca is back and both he and Kite received an invitation from Aura to the area where everything started. Since the level 1 dungeon is hardly a challenge for a level 50 and a level 90 character, the two reach her rather quickly, which leads to Kite receiving an item that conveniently function just as the old bracelet that got destroyed; so, we can data drain enemies again. And we will need that skill very soon if there is any fight left to tackle the final dungeon of the game. The events are again triggered by Aura, who this time writes to both Kite and Elk hinting at the possibility that Mia can be revived. Elk is thrilled at the idea and therefore wants Kite to join him on this final journey through said dungeon.
The last dungeon of “.hack//Quarantine” is a real slog. Unlike any other dungeon in the game, this one has a time-consuming fifteen floors. On top of that, you constantly need to data drain enemies to progress, which will fill your infection meter insanely quickly and can reward you with an instant game over screen. So, understanding how data drain works is really important in order to get through this mess: Level Kite to 99 because he builds less infection for drained enemies under his own level, while making sure that you deal the killing blow against anything in the dungeon in order to restore at least some of the infection in order to survive. You are rewarded with an endboss that I can only describe as lame, since it deals pathetic levels of damage when compared to some of the stuff I had to fight during the dungeon run on a regular basis, while also being fairly easy handle health-wise if you know that each form has 9999 HP and the life bar draining is actually the health remaining, despite the garbled mess of a name that would suggest a data drainable enemy. For all that work, we get to revive Mia, albeit with all memories gone except for those of Elk and finish the game with the last screen basically saying that we got it all.
Overall, the “.hack” series was certainly worth playing. It serves the full scale: I think that the worldbuilding is admirable, the story itself is passable, and the fighting system is tedious and dull. After over 90 hours of running through dungeons using either the X-button to attack the enemy or constantly switching through menus in order to use spells, I sure am glad to have finished the experience. Now, if you want to still see the games for yourself despite the fact that I have basically spoiled the entire story, I would recommend emulating the games since the actual disks are not only hard to come by but also demand a premium price after all that time; and I would never pay 200€ or more for the collection to play it. There are fans asking the developer to make a remake of the series, since they already re-released “.hack//G.U.”, but with all rights being with Bandai Namco it is anyone’s guess when that happens; if it happens at all.
Cubic Creativity 