Gostei do que vi neste primeiro Volume, não houve muita progressão assim na história, foi mais algo como "preparando terreno", jogando algumas informações e deixando o jogador pensar o que está acontecendo por trás das cortinas. Gostei muito dos personagens, poderia ter mais algum desenvolvimento sobre eles mas... ainda tem mais 3 volumes, vamos ver se tem mais história sobre eles.

Sobre a gameplay, é bem simples mas em alguns momentos pode ser desafiadora, acredito que tomei game over umas 4 vezes ao todo, o boss final é um negócio bem difícil tive que me preparar bem.

Ainda tem algumas coisas que posso fazer no jogo mas devo deixar de lado por enquanto pois o Volume 2 me espera!

Gameplay-wise it's very simple:
-Game tells you to go to Lvl X area.
-Farm until lvl X and go to area.
-Repeat

But the story's really cool and interesting! And the characters are pretty good! I hope the next games get even better with what they've built here.

God damn is this game a mess. While I admire the attempt to translate an MMORPG into a single player experience, the combat ruined any goodwill that concept created. It definitely needed a few more design passes. Attacks are slow, enemies are fast (especially late game), and crowd control (from said enemies) is plentiful. More than once, I got stun-locked by enemy magic, which is AOE and cements you and your party in place, until I got lucky with enemy cast cycles or I died. To make things even worse, all items and skills have to be menu-ed...EVERY. SINGLE. TIME. There are no hotkeys. There are no quick buttons. Many times, I would have the main character stand back and watch the AI fight the enemy as I menu-ed over and over again, throwing out potions or resurrects as needed. It becomes tedious and boring very quickly, with the occasional dip into frustration. All of this combat is done in randomly generated dungeon zones consisting of sets of monster and the occasional chest (most of which contain junk)

This tediousness extends outside of battle as well. In a typical RPG, you would assign gear to your party members all in the same window. Not in this game though. Remember that it's trying to mimic an MMO, so your party members are, within the fiction of the game, "real" people playing avatars. Thus, to give your party members better gear you have to 1) go to the status window and check the level of their gear; 2) go into your inventory and check the level of the new gear, making sure it is a higher level then the old gear; 3) find them in town (they will run off to "shop"); and finally 4) Talk to them and gift them the new gear which they then equip.

As you read these words you might think to yourself: "Isn't there 3 more .Hack games? Maybe they fix these issues in the sequels." Oh no no. The next three games are not really sequels in the normal sense. Transitioning parts in .Hack is more like transitioning discs in a PS1 Final Fantasy game. Its the same game. No updated graphics. No fixes to underbaked mechanics. You pick up the new game in the exact same place you left the previous game. Its one ~80 hour game split into 4 ~20 hour games. And honestly, this would not bother me near as much as it does if the combat were any fun at all to engage in, but slogging through 20 hours only to get to part 2 and realize I have 40 - 60 more is a bit disheartening. I will probably finish the other 3 parts at some point, but I will need loooong breaks between each.

I should hate .(Dot?) Hack Infection. The main story is paper thin and short, the characters are cliché and the gameplay teeters between a mundane slog and extremely infuriating. All the ingredients of a terrible game right?

Well in this case surprisingly no, the game is saved thanks to one key thing: It's atmosphere, the game is absolutely dripping in this thick sense of mystery and intrigue that I feel works extremely well thanks in no small way to the world.

Infection is part 1 of the IMOQ quadrilogy and having played the first part of .Hack G.U. before I wasn't expecting anything like closure or character arcs and yup pretty much, this is an introduction through and through and honestly the characters feel so threadbare but that's probably due to future parts fleshing then out more. Kite especially feels like he should have reacted to so much more but instead he's just "oh" and leaves even when the wildest stuff happens around him.

The combat is awful. I can't really sugarcoat it. You mash X for your basic attacks in real time and everything else like skills or items are done through menus that pause the combat. It's not only a bit of an immersion break, especially when you consider the hotbar centric MMOs these days like FFXIV and WOW, but it completely ruins any flow the combat could have. The worst part of the combat though has to be the grinding. The next main story dungeon will constantly be a few levels above you and don't even try and attempt them if you're below. Enemies hit hard, can basically stunlock you, constantly poison you and just eat through your items trying to keep you and your party members alive. As such you grind and grind till you get to the requisite level to continue and it gets extremely tedious.

Even if you're of level though you may not be able to enter a dungeon, this is where the virus core system comes into play. Kite has a move called data drain where when an enemy has a portion of their health dealt they'll have a protect break which when using data drain on them they award you with a virus core, in part one either A,B or C, and these also require a ridiculous grind especially considering these unlock some main dungeons you'll need to have more for future parts.

Now I know I've just mentioned negatives and yet this game just grabbed me in terms of the world and its music. It has this sense of intrigue and mystery which when paired with a story focused on giving no answers and all questions really works in you wanting to know more. It's honestly surprising how uneven my enjoyment of the story and world part of this and the combat being such a slog. The music is great. It's not as good as G.U. in my opinion but it's memorable and fits the tone amazingly. Going back to the mystery, it'll really set this foreboding tone of not knowing what's ahead and it works fantastically.

Despite my complaints I'm actually excited to go through the next parts and hoping they'll provide some kind of a satisfying conclusion. I have no idea if I've the will to get through the combat and grinding though but I guess we'll see.

after starting with G.U. vol 1 and realising i left the first 4 games without playing i decided to give it a try.

i'm ashamed the previous entries are this bad. i finished this only because i was more than halfway through the game so i said ok why not. and i did try like the first half hour of mutation but i simply can't enjoy the gameplay. it's way too bad. and i can't stand it. if there's EVER a remaster with new gameplay for the first 4 games i'll gladly play them. but as it stands i will not play 3 more games i can't enjoy only for the story. i read somewhere that the terminal disks in G.U. are enough for what you need to know so that's what i'm gonna have to do. very unfortunate since i was planning to spend the next 2 months playing this series but it looks like that time will be shortened because of these unfortunate circumstances.

and yes, the only thing i'm interested in is the story, i didn't really care for any character, didn't really like the ost, didn't like the combat at all, the virus core thing is boring, the areas are very meh, i just didn't enjoy it, and i am sad because it's a series i've been wanting to play for a long while, and seeing how i can't come to enjoy half of it is tragic, i'll keep playing G.U. tho, i think i can enjoy that.

Calling it quits on this one. The premise is interesting as this is basically a single-player MMORPG and there is an infection taking over "The World" (the name of the in-game MMO game) and your goal is to uncover the mysteries revolving around that infection. However, every part of the gameplay is a bore. Combat is clunky, slow, and boring. The levels ("servers") you visit are usually uninspired and bland and the dungeons are multi-layered time sinks that almost put me to sleep.

Definitely bummed as I own all of these games and I went to investigate if the series gets better with the future entries and from what I can gather, the gameplay stays the same but adds more areas and stronger monsters.

The story is the only saving grace here, but I can't force myself to play through a grind heavy slog of a game. Throwing this back on the shelf.

Conceptually, this franchise was on borrowed time from the moment this game was released. A promising (?) start to a bloated multimedia disaster who's main selling points were "the music is really good" and "the card game tie in was underrated".

In a way, this game is more interesting as a time capsule of what people who vaguely knew what Ultima/Everquest/FFXI looked and played like. There isn't a large open world to explore. Getting to different locations in this game requires that you go to an accessible spot in a hub area, and select through menus to get to your destination, which sadly is more in line with where the MMO genre would go years later. The gimmick being that your location is based off of a combination of three words that determine the parameters of where you wind up. Outside of plot relevant/gimmick boss fight locations, these locations are barebones and come off as filler that at best could be used for grinding or gathering resources to trade to NPCs for equipment/consumables, which you will need to do. Unlike Disgaea's Item World, these pseudo-randomized grinding locations aren't engaging because the core combat of the game isn't engaging. You press X to swing, you sometimes cast a spell or two, spank and tank until the fight's over. The Data Drain system doesn't spice up combat enough to break up the monotony, and mostly acts as an execution attack when your opponent's health is low enough.

The three MMOs I listed above aren't fun solo RPGs, the genre was (and still is) propped up by the social interactions they encourage. Marriages have been formed through "we were grinding in a level 20 cave area for a couple of days and kept talking". The party banter in dungeons does not even attempt to emulate this outside of a few quips during combat specific events. The characters that join your party are fun to have around, the dynamic of "this is a game, and people either put on an online persona or talk like someone using AIM" has high points throughout the series, but the script isn't large enough to take advantage of this. There's an out of game forum system, which adds a bit of flavor to the experience, but it's hard not to feel like it's analogous to older RPGs where progress would be gated unless you talked to every NPC (or, in this case, checked every thread).

All that being said, the presentation for a 2002 PS2 game was pretty decent, with the final boss and its introduction being a high point. The only major audio issue I have other than lack of variety was piss poor implementation and direction (the voice actors themselves have done great work in other media, Steve Blum voices an eight year old in these games). The game was light on story, but this is the first game in the series, most of it was probably establishing characters and The World for people who weren't familiar with //Sign. If they flesh out the combat for the sequels and add on to the length, these games could be something neat.

An offline MMORPG with an interesting premise. A decent enough game that I enjoyed as a young teenager.

Definitely a product of its time. I was not an anime watcher back when this released, but it feels like this was a relatively unique premise back then... it was long before the oversaturation of this virtual MMORPG "game within a game" / isekai premise that flood the seasonal anime releases nowadays.

When I originally played this, I thought it was cool that the game was part 1 of a series, and that you could carry over your save file to the next game. In fact, this was the first game where I ever saw that as a game feature. It even came with an extra DVD that contained an OVA of its anime. Surprisingly, I feel this game was incredibly innovative at time of its release.

Now when I look back at it, I realize that they all should have been in the same game, or at least cut in half to 2 titles... they all play exactly the same, and it feels much more like them splitting it up to make more money.