Are these games worth getting into? I played the first one for about 30 mins and really wasnt impressed by it. Does it get better? Does the series improve or is it just 1 big game cut into 4 parts?
Bump
>>12783723It doesn't improve. They took one 20 hour game padded it to 80 hours and then sold it as 4 different 20 hour games.
>>12783904ps2 was a disaster for j-rpg
The atmosphere and world building is best in class but the game design was fucked in the first game and the other episodes just carry on with that groundwork.Imagine if in zelda you had to pause open the menu to choose your bow in order to shoot it. Thats what IMOQ is like for many hours
I completed all four last year.It's... okay. The setting and story is way more interesting than the gameplay. Even then you kind of had to live through late 90s/early 2000s MMOs to understand the feel of the game.The combat near the end of Vol 3 and all through Vol 4 is just you spamming heals and revives hoping to get in an elemental damage spell and outlast the enemies. Some of the bosses have "just pick someone and kill them" moves and all you can do is go in with 99 resurrect items.The whole time I had a feeling of "I have to be doing this wrong?" but looking it up, nope that's the intended gameplay.
I have decided that I am removing these games from my backlog thanks to this thread
Is .hack//G.U. any better?
>>12783723its 1 game split into 300 hours.the gameplay is randomized dungeons with simple PSO combat, but if that doesn't click with you, the game wont.the story is amazing and the single-player mmo aspect is very autistic in a good way.however, be aware the final boss of disk 1 is the peak of the whole series in difficulty, and the rest will seem like a cakewalk.
>>12783976you tried making kite a physical attacker didn't you,much better to have em be a budget wavemaster with every spell in his tool belt there was so much stuff tucked away in the DVD's anime & TV show it's insane & will never be able to be replicated again
soulhttps://youtu.be/dwF8DABIxAQ?si=5wJ3DD_KDiOB0r0g
>>12783723idk. but my brain activated seeing her.
>>12783904This. Although I don’t blame them since episodic games weren’t a thing yet. But damn it was expensive. They were all full price
>>12784087Yes but it’s still super low budget. There’s only one city this time, not four. 75% of the story is “we need to talk to this guy, so let’s enter a tournament and meet him at the finals”
iirc the game lengths are 20 10 10 20. I still remember the EGM review closing quote about part 4: “This really, really should have been one game”
For its contemporaries it’s about the same length as ff12. Shorter than persona 3 or xenosaga trilogy
>>12783723Dot Hack was the coolest idea ever and the story was top notch. Everything about them was wonderful except for the games themselves.
Absolutely no, don't get tricked by mentally ill weebs. It's literally the same game and absolutely nothing happens, one or maybe two games would have been more than enough to tell this story.
>>12783723.hack was the equivalent of charging $60 for each disc of a ps1 ff game
https://files.catbox.moe/gap3qd.mp3Review I did a while back. I share it anytime somebody is interested in the game and generally other anons tend to agree with it.It has some tips in there too for the general gameplay and what to aim for.Tl;dl though, it's a series that has amazing ideas, but more often that not, bad execution. If you don't love the art direction, ost, premise (not so much the story as that's pretty convoluted and is drip fed to you), and a very basic dungeon crawlers, you probably aren't going to have a great time.
>>12785064Also, I need to eventually do one for GU but in a lot of ways, GU is even worse than IMOQ. I'd say the general story is better told and feels like you are watching a pretty decent anime, but it leaves a lot of what made .hack special behind in terms of the premise. Also once you learn how to cancel your attacks you'll never have a challenging encounter throughout the entire trilogy and, in all honesty, can beat almost every fight by just tapping the x button while doing something else. They made the grave mistake of making your partner ai too competent to the point where they can win most battles without you and you'll get healed so much you won't even need to use any items. The other sad thing is that there are the pieces in those games for a really great game, but they just don't implement any of them right so there are a couple system's you'll never interact with as they are too cumbersome to get to and serve very little purpose.They were some of my favorite games as a teenager, but going back through them was an utter slog... and link... oh man... whoever thought it was a good idea to tie every single combat encounter into a baseball minigame deserved to be beaten up and given a swirlie. Who in the world would ever think that was a good idea?
>12783946sure anon
>>12784387I feel like part 4 can range from 2 to 50 depending how you handled cores up till that point.
>>12783976>completing four whole "...just okay" gamesThis is your brain with completionitis
>>12785671I think for some people it's just wanting to actually see what you experienced as a kid/teen to the end. Plus, there are some weird games that just "click" 3/4ths of the way through and you never know when you are playing that sort of game till towards the end.
>>12784387my second game file clocked in at around 80 hours I think,loved just messing around in dungeons wasn't till years later I found out you couldn't find "rare" weapons in the gia statue/chest
>>12787434For me it was just chilling at Mac Anu with party members I liked. didn't have a lot of friends as a kiddo and didn't have money to play MMO's to socialize, so I think that was sort of my way of dealing with it. Also, it was insanely comfy. I don't think anything will ever capture the dream like fantasy atmosphere of IMOQ. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xqRgc8VTN20
I watched the .hack SIGN anime first and I feel like I enjoyed the games a lot more than if I hadn't. The atmosphere and world are the main draws of these games rather than the gameplay, and the anime does a good job at drawing you in to the setting. Helps it both takes place and started airing before the games.
>>12787627What they intended the release order to be vs. how it actually came out is pretty funny.It was supposed to be the games, manga, then anime. Instead, we got the manga that referenced what happened in the games first, then the anime, THEN the games.
>>12788058still remember thinking Yuki was supposed to be Kite
Just play the game that inspired it.
>>12788460anon that came out years after!
>>12788520Anon, a simple google search would show you that you are wrong.
>>12784054your loss anon!
>>12788460actually it was based on Anarchy Online
>>12789109Eh, I'd say for most people it's not really worth it, and I have a weird love for everhthing .hack related myself. You really need to adore the art direction, ost, and premise, then have an autistic love for dungeon crawling to really get anything out of it. The story just doesn't unfold well, most of the characters are boring, and the gameplay is painfully repetitive after you get out of Infection. The more neat aspects are logging out of the game and seeing how the events have affected the real world, or getting to know a couple of the characters via email (Wiseman was particularly fun, didn't like how GU turned him into an obsessive spam though). Another weirdly good aspect, the english dub is really fun. I'd even say it handles some characters better than the jp.
>>12785990>I think for some people it's just wanting to actually see what you experienced as a kid/teen to the endThese sort of games give me a feel of existentialist dread that I will probably never actually complete them, pointless as they would be to complete, or mediocre as they are. It's not unattainable as a task for me in my 30s, I could reasonably take a week of vacation, play 8-10 hours a day, and be done with the four games within a week.But I won't. I simply never will set aside the time. I will spend more time shitposting. I probably wouldn't be enriched by these games in all likelihood, but the fact that I will simply never experience them along with many other games is just one thing that reminds me of my mortality.
>>12789959I will say, for me I definitely don't regret it and for whatever bizarre reason it brings me peace of mind whereas the series used to constantly itch at the back of my mind. I feel like there are those games you have in your life that you just need to see through. They are usually those ones you've attempted to start numerous times but just never actually finish. Sometimes you end with something like STALKER which I always wanted to beat but always got filtered until it suddenly and randomly clicked. Others, you end with .hack which was super soulful in some areas, but the majority was pretty bad. If you didn't grow up with it or feel that nagging sensation though, I don't really see any reason for somebody to play it.
>>12783723I had the chance to play all of these for free and I gave up as soon as I got to the second title. Not worth it
