If I Only Had 11 More Days...

    Since the apocalypse hasn’t yet trended this year, I think it’s safe to say that we dodged another bullet folks! Job well done! But just because we’re not on a trajectory orbit to plunge into the most recently discovered asteroid and subsequently eternal darkness doesn’t mean that we can’t pretend… If I only had 11 more days on this earth, and was forced to spend it playing games, here’s what I would do.

    At Dear Backlog, we have lots of deeply rooted, shameful gaming secrets that should they ever come out, we might be forced to actually deal with them. Well, I can’t bear this burden with my merely mortal shoulders anymore. Plus, we’ll all be kapooie in about 264 more hours, so what the hell! I’ve got nothing to lose. The truth is, I’ve never played Mass Effect 2 or 3. The original Mass Effect, which I’ve beaten twice, is one of my favorite games and set the stage for the most exciting sci-fi universe since Star Wars. So in my pending death, let it be known that I would finally cross Mass Effect 2 and 3 off my Backlog.

    I picked Mass Effect not just because it’s a game I know I would enjoy, but also because I believe that it is one of the greatest accomplishments in interactive media. It’s a Triple-A title that captured the imaginations of a generation and actually came through on it’s promises. We were able to play one character, our character through 3 games and now Commander Shepard is a household name in the gaming community. It offered us branching paths and choices that felt weighty. It sold well and caused uproar when players felt the ending wasn’t perfectly executed. It was all there.

    The cool thing about this quasi-end of year/life resolution is that I might just be able to pull it off. I do have 10 days off for the holidays. My roommate did just beat Mass Effect for the 2nd time, all but forcing him to hop on Amazon and order a copy of 2 and 3. And I do feel like playing it.

    What are your plans for the holiday break? If you only had 11 more days before being scorched from the face of the earth, what game would you play? I know I technically said two games, but the rules for the purpose of this article is that you just have to keep it in the family. Please feel free to let us know in the comments below or hit us up on on twitter.

    You can follow me @derrick_be if you want to see how I end up spending my extra time! It might not be Mass Effect, but surely it will be sprinkled with cool games.

    Anyways, Happy Holidays to you all! Thanks for stopping by and reading Dear Backlog. It’s a labor of love and we love you! Cheers!

- Derrick Bettis

@derrick_be

.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