.hack//FF>ME (Part 3)

    .hack is far from perfect but that’s where some of it’s charm comes from. To play a game that’s quite flawed but still draws you in is something that happens less and less nowadays. Many gamers choose what to spend their limited time playing based on reviews. Games that scored low or didn’t have enough money or time put into their marketing often slip through the cracks. It’s hard to say whether the .hack series had enough time or money, but there’s no doubt it was made with lots of love.

    When I first began writing about .hack I wanted to talk about how it was one of the first games to succeed with a multidisc story arc. Mass Effect is definitely the pinnacle of multidisc story arcs, but it certainly wasn’t the first.

If you own any of these, you're automatically a collector.

    Looking back, one of the many problems the .hack series faced was that each installment of the game played out more like an episode of a show. By the end of a .hack game, one of the reasons you wanted to play the next one so badly was because there was little conclusion. After finishing .hack Part 1 and Part 2, I didn’t feel as if anything was really resolved yet. I’ll compare it to an episode of Lost. Every episode of that show ended on a cliffhanger. I may be exaggerating there, but I think it’s understood what I’m trying to say. Hopefully by the end of Part 4, I’ll feel as if the .hack story wraps up.

Imagine watching Season 3 first. Now imagine playing Mutation first. Same thing.

    In Mass Effect, you never felt compelled to finish subsequent releases in order to complete the story arc. After finishing the original Mass Effect, I wanted to play Mass Effect 2 in order to get more out of the characters and the world. I didn’t need to play Mass Effect 2. The original Mass Effect story reached a rewarding conclusion. I’ve even heard that people playing the Mass Effect series out of order still enjoy it. People playing .hack for the first time that picked it up out of order would probably be disappointed. I imagine they might be taken aback by the mystery of the world, but certainly to enjoy it they would have to track down previous games and play them first.

I wish .hack would have a compilation.

    Rather than comparing the .hack series to Mass Effect, I think it’s more appropriate to compare it to the Final Fantasy games. Final Fantasy became one of the first multidisc story arc games. The difference being that you got all the discs at the same time. After finishing disc 1 of Final Fantasy VII you would certainly need to play the next 2 discs in order to reach any resolution. There was no conclusion before changing discs. Final Fantasy simply needed many discs because the game was too big for just one cd-rom.

I own this game on PSN. If only .hack was available there too.

    I don’t know if the .hack series released the way it did because of storage limitations, but it might have been a better game, and better received, if all the parts were originally released as one. If they couldn’t do that, it would have been nice if the separate games would have finished with stronger conclusions. As the series stands, sometimes it feels like they made the entire game, then just decided to ship parts of it every 6 months. Again, I don’t see anything wrong with this, but none of the games felt like seasons. They all felt like episodes. You absolutely needed the next installment to make sense of the first one and vice versa.

    I wanted to applaud .hack as being one of the first games that carries over saved data. I wanted to compare it to Mass Effect, but thematically, it just doesn’t compare. .hack is more comparable to a Final Fantasy game that chose to release and sell their games separately. It’s still a very rewarding experience, but certainly not an easy one to have.

    In the next article of this 4 part series I’ll be looking at the future of the franchise. Stay tuned for next Friday!

- lvl 99