Objectively speaking, I wouldn't say this game is a 10; it has flaws: the combat lacks a bit more complexity and the level design is really basic and repetitive, there's not much challenge as long as you level up enough and the game makes you walk a lot, which is boring.

My rating is a subjective one. This is one of my favorite games of all time. It's very unique and it just got me hooked in a way that few other titles could. The characters are really memorable, I love the story and it got me very emotionally engaged and thrilled. Combat is really fun, though it could have a little more mobility and variety. The audiovisual feedback from connecting hits and skills feels very satisfying to me, and winning battles that had a stake on the story felt meaningful. Outside the main questline, I also felt motivated to grind for better weapons and skills. The desktop system and the game setting as a whole are incredibly immersive imo. I usually don't like reading non-essential stuff inside any game but, in this case, exploring the lore was very engaging, especially in the forum system.

I think the biggest reason why I find this game so good and immersive is that everything you do feels deeply connected to the story. Gameplay and progression feels meaningful because every step you take brings Haseo closer to his goals; even just grinding levels is an essential part of his journey to get his former power back. Nothing feels like a waste of time in this game. It's an amazing experience if you let yourself get immersed in The World.

+Distinctive premise of its MMORPG-based world
+Additional Gameplay features that get added every volume give an adrenaline rush that get you addicted to it, if only for a while.
+Haseo Based
-Very repetitive, story-wise and gameplay-wise
-Extremely dull dungeons

Bit of a rough one to revisit. It held up a lot better in my nostalgia fueled memory than it did to replay it. I think the concept is still pretty solid between playing the MMO but still interacting with the forums and the 'real world' all while trying to solve the mystery of the game.

But it's a pretty slow start and Haseo can be a bit annoying the way he acts given his history, but him and the rest of the characters have pretty good arcs. Music is good overall, it has some great opening tracks.

Gameplay is kind of where it falls apart, it's pretty grindy and repetitive visiting randomly generated dungeons with similar environments and enemies over and over again. It's also very very easy with you mostly using skills/mashing attack. The cutscenes of the game still hold up well but the actual in game assets are pretty bland now a days.

It's an interesting experience but honestly after replaying the games it would be kind of hard for me to recommend vs many other RPG titles. I think it would be a good candidate for a real remake though, smooth out some of the plot points. Fix and improve the gameplay so it feels fresher and more dynamic and tone down the grind. Then you may have something pretty serviceable.

i consider myself a .hack//fan. .hack//SIGN is probably tied for my favorite anime, tsukasa is probably tied for my favorite character of all time, and i've gone through every piece of .hack//R:1 (including those god awful light novels) because of how much of a joy it was to piece together the story and slowly form a more cohesive understanding of the world and the mystery hiding beneath its surface.

that said, i think that basically everything released after .hack//R:1 completely lacks the, for lack of a better word and fully cognizant of the cliche of phrasing it this way, "magic" that makes .hack// what it is to me. every piece of the original story arc is defined by an ethereal atmosphere, a heavy emphasis on video games and the internet as a unique framing device for character studies, and the game only rarely being treated as anything more than, well, a game. sure, tsukasa becomes trapped inside the world and as a result his struggles within are much more real, but they mostly reflect in the pain he feels as a result and the isolation that comes with being the only person who can't log out, can't make connections outside of the game, can't open his horizons up and see what lies beyond the confines of his safety net.

the stakes within the game in .hack//’s first generation are more than anything about the implications for those who play it than anything to marvel at off their own merits. being data drained physically harms the player who falls victim to it, and the infection running rampant throughout the course of imoq is a big deal not only for that purpose but because it threatens the life of aura, the ai born within the game. if anything, imoq's (godawful) gameplay represents this: there's no real glamour, flair or style to it, and just like kite it's not really what you play the game for. again, like kite, you play because you care about the people you meet while playing the game, which reflects much of another part of what makes those early .hack// titles so special: that they were born from a very specific transitional point in general understanding of the internet and the role it was beginning to play in our lives, as well as the ethos espoused by the some of the titles that .hack// was emulating and attempting to coexist alongside. like most things in my life, it makes me think about final fantasy xi: ffxi’s infamous difficulty was a deliberate choice made in order to force people to cooperate and play together, as an extension of hironobu sakaguchi’s interest in games as a means to unite the world and build bridges between people who might have otherwise never met. .hack//R:1 is full to the brim with the cautiously optimistic perspective on the internet and how it can bring people together while acknowledging the blessed burden of interconnectivity and limitless access to information, the sort that can really only come from that specific period of the internet’s early prevalence long before the Corporate Machine stopped even pretending to care about using the internet for good.

this is not a review of .hack//R1 (nor is it really a review at all), but it’s important context to keep in mind when i talk about how every time i attempt to pick up .hack//GU i end up dropping it and walk away feeling disappointed. i feel as if .hack//GU lacks more or less everything i just mentioned there, from the get-go choosing to adopt a more shounenesque tone with an emphasis on action and the plot within the game itself taking a spotlight over the intersection between the game and its players’ lives. haseo i feel is the perfect encapsulation of this: rather than being a nobody who happened to be there and was aura’s last-ditch effort to give somebody the bracelet (really a glitched item) like kite, haseo is an infamous, well-feared player killer who is introduced as being all-powerful, admired and loathed in equal respects, and eventually is revealed to be inherently special in a manner that makes him stand out from the rest of the game’s playerbase. really, after a certain point the game stops feeling like, well, a game: with players’ real-life problems and lives no longer centered and the characters’ accomplishments being treated as more or less as if they were actual physical feats .hack//GU eventually begins to just feel like a regular old jrpg. even the real-time, action-based gameplay does a part in making it easy to forget that .hack takes place inside an mmo, since the clunky and menuing-heavy gameplay of IMOQ is deeply reminiscent of the same systems from the aforementioned final fantasy xi, or even the primitive hack-and-slash gameplay of phantasy star online.

the thing is, i’d be okay with .hack//GU being just a regular old jrpg, but it isn’t. it’s .hack//, or at least it’s branded as such. when you strip away that turn-of-the-millenia understanding of the internet, the ethereal atmosphere and the story being focused squarely on the game’s players and the lore of .hack//’s (surprisingly rich) cyberpunk world, you’re left with… something that doesn’t really appeal to me at all. the choice to focus on the more shounen-inspired tone isn’t unique to .hack//GU, as i feel that in the late 00s and early-mid 2010s during the relative dark ages of japanese game development a lot of jrpgs started to veer more heavily into narratives that could have been pulled straight out of the anime of the time with the heyday of things like trails of cold steel, the tales series, and the later persona games. the original run of .hack// was very much a product of late 90s/early 00s anime or the tail end of the golden age of JRPGs depending on which part of the anthology you were dealing with at the time. ironically enough, i really do like .hack//GU’s actual anime, .hack//roots - it was produced by the same studio that did all of the .hack// anime in R:1 (bee train the goat) and as a result i feel like it manages to maintain the same tonal and philosophical core that made .hack// what it was until R:2 came around and basically turned the series on its head.

all of this to say i don’t think .hack//GU is an inherently bad game. i’m sure there’s a lot about it to love and i get why people hold it so fondly, especially if they’re not married to the things about the series that make me so attached to it.

but every time i pick it up i end up dropping it without fail because, at least if you ask me, this simply isn’t .hack//.

This is pretty much going to be a review of the .hack G.U. series as a whole, seeing as I've given each game in this compilation its own review on their own game page, and yeah despite the ratings on each of those games being higher than this I can wholeheartedly say that G.U. is significantly less than the sum of its parts. I wasn't the biggest fan of .hack R1, but after playing through this saga I really didn't realize how good I had it.

My biggest qualms with the .hack R1 series was mostly its hands-off approach to its plot, as the games were mostly one part to a greater whole so things didn't have to be very story-heavy as the greater plot can be experienced through the supplementary content like the .hack Sign anime or the manga/light novels/probably some drama cds in there somewhere too. I rated IMOQ quite low for that given I had only been playing one part in a greater whole at that point, and doing things that way felt really underwhelming. Doing things that way at the very least meant that the focus of R1 was on the overall setting and worldbuilding, as the different tales all told in various ways through the different media forms all take place in the same concrete fictional MMO, essentially making the mysteries behind said world the real meat of the series. After watching .hack sign, I was able to see this bigger picture more clearly and retroactively look back on R1 much more fondly than I did when I had only just played the games. This all serves as important context as for what G.U. tries to differentiate and evolve from, and most importantly, how it sucks!

G.U. forsakes having the world be the focus to instead focus on the characters. Both the game series and the tie-in anime (which I learned from my past mistakes and decided to watch simultaneously with playing) focus around the same particular group of characters, namely the main protagonist, Haseo, and Ovan, the man most closely connected to the grander mysteries of the plot. Pretty much everything that happens in any form of G.U. media centers around one of these two characters, and their relationships with other players in The World. On the good side of things, the more condensed narrative focus makes the games much more story-driven, and the unification of all forms of .hack media onto one plot makes things more focused. On the bad side of things, they made a teensy tiny oopsie and forgot to write any of the characters well! Which is certainly a problem when they are your brand new main focus!!!

I'm not gonna sugarcoat things, I thought that the characters were written horribly and had a difficult time caring about any of them. Haseo is an edgy gamer man that erratically changes from brooding edgelord to anti-heroic dogooder back to brooding edgelord, all while the plot tries its hardest to constantly remind me "haseo grew as a person throughout all the trials and tribulations he went through" when I can clearly see from the characters actions that he didn't grow shit. I am convinced that the writers have very interesting things to say about women, because every female character in this game fails the goddamn bechdel test. Characters like Atoli or Youko are for some reason head-over-heels infactuated with haseo despite him being like the literal most unlikeable mfer in history. This guy basically spends his time being self-centered and focused on solely his own goals, yet for some reason everyone is attracted to him??? Then there's Ovan, who spends 90% of his screentime just being mysterious for the sake of being mysterious, only for his overall motives to be quite underwhelming once the game finally pulls the curtains for his greater plans. Pretty much every other party member feels dully one-note and tropey. The writing for the whole games plot is just messy and boring, focusing solely on characters that feel more like NPCs than the actual meta-NPCs in the fake MMO.

As for the actual act of playing the game, even that is a bit of a downgrade from IMOQ. The same keyword system is in place, but gone are the overworlds, as now everything is a dungeon consisting of the most boring repeated hallways to slowly run through. Combat is now much more action-y, but the large amount of hitstun on enemies makes it incredibly easy to perform infinites on certain enemies and once you figure that out things become braindead as every encounter ends with the same result of you pushing the X button and sometimes even the R1 button the exact same way with no deviance or variation. Another thing to note is just how absolutely streamlined and linear everything is; dungeons are hallways, and while there's nothing like the virus core grinding in IMOQ here, at least the item farming gave a reason to integrate actual player freedom and exploration with the keyword system to find their own dungeons to grind through. Here, the game constantly tells you exactly where to go to do exactly what you need with no time for any form of deviation. Characters will just email you saying random shit like "hey haseo, we gotta do the big chicken hunt quest! see ya there!" and then you have to do that quest with that particular party member to progress, only then once that's done a different character will be like "im underlevelled, lets go to Σ flattened ballsacks remorse to level up a bit!" and then you have to go there and so on and so forth. The lack of player freedom plus the hallway-ass dungeons and braindead combat just make this series incredibly boring to play through. Hours feel four times as long when playing G.U., and while there IS a few side-quests to do, what's honestly the point when they are no different than the main stuff the game is trying to railroad you down anyways??? Apparently one of the cyberconnect2 USA developers mentioned how Last Recode actually nerfs the balance in order to weaken enemies and give more EXP in combat compared to the original in order to make the pacing of the game smoother and less grindy, which on one hand definitely doesn't solve the underlying problems, but on the other I can't imagine having to also level grind on top of all that sensory deprivation.

Overall, yeah. Individually each game isn't the worst in the series, but as a whole it's really not something I could recommend to anyone. If you really want to play .hack, just try playing IMOQ or watching sign. If either of those filter you then don't bother continuing. I've sunk over 50 hours between all 3 games and the tie-in anime and I definitely would have had a better time playing any other JRPG methinks. I wouldn't say G.U. has zero redeeming qualities, but the good parts are so few and far between that it's not worth the time and sanity investment. I still think that .hack as a concept is cool, and R1 actually is a very unique and cool vibe, I'm just relieved that I am now free of the G.U.-lag.

A really fun collection of the three main .hack//G.U. games previously released on the PS2 I definitely had a hell of a fun time playing this and slowly seeing the series improve.

The story is legitimately gripping stuff and although Haseo isn't really all that pleasant of a main character at first, I did quickly grow to like him a lot at the end. I wasn't quite sold on the gameplay at first and though it would grow repetitive but even that got improved overtime as well.

And as a big ol' Brucie bonus, we get a fourth mini-instalment that acts as essentially a epilogue to the entire series as Haseo goes off to find Ovan and the climax is just fantastic stuff. It's short but it's legitimately sweet stuff and helps to perfectly round off a great HD remaster of these three games. (Really impressive how they got pretty much everyone back to reprise their roles for this and all of them sound like they haven't missed a beat since they last voiced them in 2007.)

And if you still didn't get enough, you even get some comedy redub clips with Yuri Lowenthal and the cast goofing off and a recap of the prior .hack games. What more could you want really?

Unique MMORPG simulation that has a strong immersive core but desperately needed to be condensed into a single focused experience rather than stay as 3 separate, mind-numbingly repetitive games with awkward save transfers.
+ heavenly melancholic soundtrack
+ great main character arc involving serious personality growth
+ insane amount of lore to read about in constantly updating message and news boards
+ some really impressive action cutscenes (for its time)
+/- clear directions for any and all objectives
- relies on having watched the previous anime series for context
- repeatedly copy-pasted "boss fights" that pose no challenge and still show instructions every time
- slow walking speed not helped by the clunky vehicle
- ubiquitous static conversations that can't be sped up
- cryptic story which only gets interesting after dozens of hours
- trivial difficulty until the third volume where lots of grinding is needed
- no NPC interactions outside of the main plot (even party compositions are ignored)
- basic action combat that can't support the large amount of unavoidable fighting and often gets frustrating due to utterly absurd stun locks
- very low number of boring dungeons and quests reused over and over (and over...) again