The commercial success of the Project .Hack franchise led to the production of .hack//frägment—a remake of the series with online capabilities. The game uses the same engine as the .hack series with an online multiplayer component.
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As good as the original games ever got, years after it could have mattered.
.Hack never got a proper MMO, and it's not accurate to call Fragment one. Even at the time of this game's release, if you just limited your options to consoles and wanted to pretend that there were no notable MMO releases that came out around this time, EverQuest Online Adventures and Final Fantasy XI had been out for years at this point. Phantasy Star Online, .hack's closest evolutionary cousin, was five years old. Monster Hunter was almost a year old at this game's release. If Fragment released a few years earlier, while the anime was still on TV and Infection's sales numbers were still decent, this could have found a niche.
It also could have found a niche if there were meaningful changes to the structure of the game, and there really wasn't. The combat of IMOQ is mostly unchanged, with the two main exceptions being that your party members are controlled by real players, and menuing doesn't pause the game. The combat's still balanced around digging through menus to use skills and spam items. The dungeons are structured mostly the exact same way as they were in the single player games, with encounters largely recycled. Most of the game screams "we had the assets lying around and wanted to see what we could do with as little time or money as possible".
If you just can't get enough .hack for whatever reason, this spinoff does have some things worth checking out conceptually. Important event fights that happened offscreen or in the past are available for the players to check out, but the consist of the same mechanics that every other fight in the game has. Character customization exists, although it's more limited than PSO. There are characters who you couldn't recruit in the main game, including tieins from the followup .hack anime series in the offline portion of the game. They don't have much to say, and their novelty begins and ends with being able to include them in the party so you can grind in the exact same fashion as the previous four games for no real goal. There's technically a main plot, but it's so threadbare and the final boss is such a Mickey Mouse whatever fight that you could be forgiven for forgetting it exists. All they had to do was write non-canon .hack sanctioned fanfiction, and they couldn't be bothered to do that.
It's cool that this game exists. There are diehard .hack stans out there, and I'm glad they got this fanservicey bonus disk with an online component added on. I think it's telling that, unlike something like PSOBB, there's currently zero players on any of the public Fragment servers. The core gameplay wasn't good enough to prop up four(ish) RPGs, and it doesn't hold up what little this game offers. It's one of those games that you probably won't get to play. You can download the game with a full english patch right now, and the staff that worked on the restoration did a great job. I just can't imagine finding two other people who'd want to play online IMOQ with you.
.Hack never got a proper MMO, and it's not accurate to call Fragment one. Even at the time of this game's release, if you just limited your options to consoles and wanted to pretend that there were no notable MMO releases that came out around this time, EverQuest Online Adventures and Final Fantasy XI had been out for years at this point. Phantasy Star Online, .hack's closest evolutionary cousin, was five years old. Monster Hunter was almost a year old at this game's release. If Fragment released a few years earlier, while the anime was still on TV and Infection's sales numbers were still decent, this could have found a niche.
It also could have found a niche if there were meaningful changes to the structure of the game, and there really wasn't. The combat of IMOQ is mostly unchanged, with the two main exceptions being that your party members are controlled by real players, and menuing doesn't pause the game. The combat's still balanced around digging through menus to use skills and spam items. The dungeons are structured mostly the exact same way as they were in the single player games, with encounters largely recycled. Most of the game screams "we had the assets lying around and wanted to see what we could do with as little time or money as possible".
If you just can't get enough .hack for whatever reason, this spinoff does have some things worth checking out conceptually. Important event fights that happened offscreen or in the past are available for the players to check out, but the consist of the same mechanics that every other fight in the game has. Character customization exists, although it's more limited than PSO. There are characters who you couldn't recruit in the main game, including tieins from the followup .hack anime series in the offline portion of the game. They don't have much to say, and their novelty begins and ends with being able to include them in the party so you can grind in the exact same fashion as the previous four games for no real goal. There's technically a main plot, but it's so threadbare and the final boss is such a Mickey Mouse whatever fight that you could be forgiven for forgetting it exists. All they had to do was write non-canon .hack sanctioned fanfiction, and they couldn't be bothered to do that.
It's cool that this game exists. There are diehard .hack stans out there, and I'm glad they got this fanservicey bonus disk with an online component added on. I think it's telling that, unlike something like PSOBB, there's currently zero players on any of the public Fragment servers. The core gameplay wasn't good enough to prop up four(ish) RPGs, and it doesn't hold up what little this game offers. It's one of those games that you probably won't get to play. You can download the game with a full english patch right now, and the staff that worked on the restoration did a great job. I just can't imagine finding two other people who'd want to play online IMOQ with you.