For those who want to get their online game on and don't want to have to deal with those other pesky human players, then you'll be happy to know that .hack is back. In Namco Bandai's .hack//G.U. Vol. 2//Reminisce you continue the adventures of the player in a massive multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) without ever having to connect an ethernet cable.
The games themselves are a sort of sequel to the Anime series .hack//Roots where a newbie gamer named Haseo, embarks on a journey in the widely popular MMORPG, The World: R2. (The servers of the first version of The World caught fire in an earlier series of .hack games) In .hack//G.U. Vol 1//Rebirth, Haseo, who has become feared across the gaming world as the ultimate Player killer killer (PKKer), the Terror of Death, faces off against the equally feared player killer (PKer) Tri-Edge. He had recently PKed Haseo's online girlfriend, Shino who never returned to The World since. Haseo loses his battle with Tri-Edge as well and when he logs back in, he discovers his character has been reduced from level 333 to one.
From there, you play Haseo as he tries to level back up and hunt down Tri-Edge to get revenge. Along the way, he runs into an elite group of players called Project G.U., who have some connection to CC Corp., the company that makes The World. They are searching the game for some corrupted data, called AIDA, which may have some connection to Tri-Edge. Represented by little black bubbles, AIDA is PKing players and causing them to fall into a coma in the real world. This, Haseo discovers, is what happened to Shino as well.
The members of Project G.U. have the ability to play The World on a sort of higher plane than the average gamer. They call themselves Epitaph Users as they use avatars to fight battles in ways regular gamers can't observe. They use their avatars to collect samples of AIDA for study and fight other Epitaph Users. Haseo finds out he and Tri-Edge are also Epitaph Users and so he has to learn to use his avatar properly before he faces his nemesis again. So he agrees to help Project G.U. in the search for AIDA in exchange for training and any information they gather on Tri-Edge.
In .hack//G.U. vol. 2//Reminisce, the adventure continues. Haseo has successfully beaten Tri-Edge, but one of his other gamer friends, Atoli is attacked by AIDA. She survives but her avatar is stolen, leaving her partially paralyzed.
To make matters worse, it seems no one is able to logoff of the server. All the players are trapped in The World.
After a bit of playing, the gamers manage to logoff. But in the interim AIDA infected a number of players, driving them insane beserk and making them go on a killing rampage. And anyone that's Pked by them, like with AIDA and Tri-Edge, fall into a coma.
So Haseo reluctantly decides to wage war against the AIDA-infected players to stop their mayhem, save Atoli's avatar and hoping that by destroying all of AIDA he will be able to awaken Shino and the other comatosed gamers.
As I'm sure you can tell by my convoluted rambling, that's there's quite a lot of story to this game, which one expects from a Japanese RPG. But it goes further than most, as you can logout of the game, read countless forums and news articles about what is going on in both The World and the real world. Much of this is quite dry and a little mind-numbing to search through at times. But it also continues the Online Jack expose on “Doll Syndrome,” a cartoon series of reports that investigate a condition that seems to befall a number of children where they inexplicably fall into coma-like trance while playing an online video game. It has all the sophistication of an episode of Astroboy, but it's mildly entertaining.
If you have finished the first game, you can import that data, allowing you to maintain the levels and items of all the characters. Otherwise, you'll start the game at level 40. After completing this game, you will be able to do the same with this data for the final game in the trilogy. Though, the characters do seem to max out at level 100, so it appears you can't, as I joked in my review for the first game, level back up to 333. Hopefully, none of you tried.
Like its predecessor, much of the gameplay is about running around killing things and collecting treasures. You can travel in groups of up to three people, and the fighting is of the hack and slash variety. The other members in your party, who are theoretically real people playing the online game, fight independently of you. Though, you can instruct them to use certain items they're carrying, perform special attacks or use their skills.
In addition to regular battles, you also use your avatar Skeith to battle AIDA and other Epitaph Users. These battles are still fought in real-time, but are more akin to a space battle game as you float around, shoot and try to avoid the enemy's attack.
And much of the journey you go on replicates the first game. You travel to various areas with a Chaos Gate (a teleportation device that uses word combinations as coordinates) to fight monsters in fields and dungeons. You go on a number of quests which often involving retrieving an item after fighting a bunch of monsters in a field or dungeon. And you have to compete at the Arena (the only sanctioned zone for players to fight other players) to become the Holy Palace Emperor. In the first game, you had to fight to become the Demon Palace Emperor and in the third you'll probably have to vie for the Sage Palace Emperor title. Winning these tournaments does serve a purpose in the actual games, but in The World, the emperor title seems to be for little more than prestige.
But the game does improve on many aspects of the first by opening up more of The World. After playing for a bit, Haseo's guild Canard gets upgraded to intermediate status, and moves to a new town. Here there's a Chaos Gate with access to more types of fields and dungeons with higher levels of monsters and treasures. The town also sells a better class of armour, weaponry and other accessories, which you can upgrade by “alchemizing” them at your guild. (This term “alchemizing” may have been translated incorrectly as the items don't appear to turn into gold or give the carrier an extended lifespan. Essentially this alchemizing, is just combining two of the same item together to raise its values slightly.)
You can also expand the storage at your new guild and even allow you access your items from teleportation platforms in other areas. Finally, some quests offered in the town, allow you to utilize your steambike. In the last game, the bike was simply something you could use to get around a little faster in town or in fields. You could sometimes crash your bike into a monster in a surprise attack, but that was about it. But now it's necessary for some missions and doesn't feel like some extraneous addition anymore. These quests aren't integral to finishing the game, but it provides distraction. You can also buy parts to upgrade your bike at your guild, to make the quests a little easier.
But by far, the biggest addition to this game is Crimson VS. Since The World has had numerous server problems because of AIDA and what not, much of the online environment has had shutdowns at one time or another. In addition to this, there was an accompanying online Magic-like card game that was offline that was offline for the entirety of .hack//G.U. vol. 1//Rebirth. But now it's been re-launched. The cards themselves are a little odd, in that they carry the identities of the characters in the game. Obviously, in most cases, this makes perfect sense, but the majority of the characters you encounter in the game are supposed to be other real gamers. It's sort of like creating a side-game to EverQuest using the images of some of the more popular users. But then maybe I'm reading too much into this. But suffice to say, there are cards for Haseo, Tri-Edge, Atoli etc.
Frankly, Crimson VS is not incredibly interesting. You essentially login and create decks of four cards, each assigned with various abilities. (You have three decks and can have them battle one another to see what works best.) You then register one of your decks and then logoff. The decks then fight automatically. The next time you login, you can see how many times your deck won or lost. You can choose to watch the matches if you want but they rarely seem to make much sense, kind of like War on steroids. It seems that the trick is to constantly change up your deck as you get new cards. One of the forums in the game suggested you write down all the attributes of the cards to figure the best combinations to use, but even with me having really no clue or interest in how to play the game, I eventually became the champion.
While playing you also unlock all the typical extras, such as artwork, music and cutscenes, which has never have been of much interest to me in games. But it does give you the first episode of .hack//Roots to watch. It's nothing spectacular, especially as there's a lot of setup, but I've seen far worse.
Ultimately, much like the first game, you have to be a fan of the genre to enjoy .hack//G.U. vol. 2//Reminisce. If you are, then you'll have a lot of fun here.
WHAM! Rating: |
7 out of 10 |
ESRB Rating: |
T (Teen) |
Official Web Site: |
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