.hack//G.U. Vol. 1: Rebirth - CyberConnect 2 - PS2

[sidereal]

I never played the original .hack, so this is my first foray into the series.  The concept is that the player is playing a character who is playing a character in a fictional MMO called "The World".  Very mise en abyme.  However, interactions outside the game consist entirely of reading email, news, forums, and chats on a virtual desktop (for which you can change the wallpaper -- nice touch).  So an astute reader will wonder whether there's much difference between playing the game .hack//G.U. Vol. 1: Rebirth and playing the game The World.  And the answer is no, not really.  A vast majority of playtime is spent in The World and time spent outside it isn't 'play' as much as it is, well, reading.

The World, it seems, is plagued with PKs (player-killers) preying on helpless noobs who're just trying to grind foozles.  Your toon, Haseo, begins as one of the few PKK (player-killer killers) and is a particularly l33t one, with a legendary nickname and an xp bar sitting at level 133.  Presumably all of this potency is a holdover from the end of the first .hack series.  Unfortunately, beginning a game-journey as a total badass makes Joseph Campbell very sad, so in a huge twist Haseo encounters a mega-PK with a mystical weapon and is killed.  Killed so thoroughly, in fact, that all of his gear is destroyed, he's knocked down to level 1, and all of his email is deleted.  That, my friends, is a death penalty.  Problem solved!  Now Haseo is a noob again and has to grind his way back to high levels for the revenging.  However, despite the entertaining familiarity of the MMO trappings, they're actually a fairly thin layer over what would otherwise be a typical JRPG plot.  Replace 'noob' with 'peasant', 'PK' with 'bad guy', 'PKK' with 'good guy', and you're in pretty familiar territory. 

The strictures of But Is It Fun require that I figure out whether the game is fun in the first few hours.  This is a little tough with .hack//G.U. Vol. 1: Rebirth, because in true JRPG style, most of the first few hours are spent on exposition, via cutscenes and obscenely long dialogue.  Also, I'm a completist, so I read all of the available forum posts, news, and The World backstory in the virtual desktop before even launching the The World client.  This meant that after three hours I'd really only been through 20 or so battles and had leveled to 7.  The combat mechanics are meh, particularly for a turn-based aficionado.  This is straight button-mashing.  One button, in fact.  The x button.  Occasionally you hit another button to launch a special attack, then go back to mashing the x button.  Built on that stimulating combat is a whole framework of instances, parties, loots, quests, guilds, and so on.  At this point, despite the lackluster combat, I'm cautiously optimistic, only because the enormous effort put into decorating the game (you can literally spend an hour reading fake forum posts from virtual people arguing over whether PKing is ethical and be entertained) suggests that similar effort was put into keeping the storyline engaging down the road.  And as someone who loved KOTOR, I'm willing to mash the x button, experience a good story, and call it a good game.

Rent It.  Why not?

[sidereal]

Note: I added the image as an attachment, on the assumption that it's more reliably hosted on f13 servers than in my basement.  Someone will have to fix up the post to show it (or provide a better one, of course)

[Hoax]

I have played this game at the very very high levels, in fact the first time I sat down to play it I went through 3 high level randomly generated instances with almost max level characters pwn'ing all the way and decided it was fun.  I asked my lil bro what part of the story he was on and lo and behold it was a badass boss fight.  So I said I'd help and went through a pretty fun boss battle tossing the controller to him to handle the final snipe-shot minigame (I suck at sniping and my fingers were tired from all the mashing I had been doing) and we beat the game.

It was pretty cool.  Cool enough that I was left wondering why the fuck nobody can make a MMO with combat at least as fun as that?  I mean really, if you could play .hack//G U with other people it would be 

@sidereal:  I think the story in the end will be a bit shallow, its very much a game intended at kids.  There are lots of side bits to do, like leveling up your weapons, your guild, completing all sorts of insane do X 1 million times tasks and whatnot but the story itself is hardly epic.  If you don't like the combat I'll be amazed if you end up finishing.  I thought it was nifty.

I would have written a biif, but I did Genji instead, plus it seemed like cheating not starting the game from scratch.

[sidereal]

Is it the end of this one you played or the end of Vol 3?  I've got Vol 2 sitting on a desk and 3 waiting somewhere in Gamefly's bowels, and I'm not sure if it's one storyline broken up over 3 games or if they're 3 distinct games.

[Hoax]

It was the end of Vol.1 which wraps up very little and would have had me pluging in vol.2 if I knew wtf was going on, but is a fairly cool esp for a JRPG boss fight.  Because basically the fight is its own minigame only stage 1 has anything to do with your normal attacks/items/party/hp shit.

[schild]

I have Vol 1 through 3 sitting on my shelf.

I'm on the fourth disc of the first series right now though.

[Rendakor]

This isnt a sequel to the original games; those tie in with the .hack//Sign anime, and wrap up nicely at the end of disc 4, with an extra anime ep afterward for the loose ends.

This game series actually takes place in The World 2.0 (so besides similar concepts, bears no relation), and follows the .hack//Roots anime directly, which shows Haseo going from n00b to PKK badass. However, the anime was quite boring (Za Warudo's fansub of the filler episode [13 IIRC] using netslang was epic though).

I've had this since it launched, never got around to playing it.