Holy shit this is out tomorrow! .hack//G.U. Last Recode is an HD collection of all three G.U. games, plus a brand new fourth volume (that probably is a lot shorter). I'm super pumped, both because these are some of my favorite games ever, and also because the original PS2 discs are damn expensive.
So what is .hack//G.U. ?
.hack//G.U. is a series of three games following Haseo as he searches for the mysterious Player Killer (i.e. a ganker/greifer) Tri-Edge, in the fictional MMO The World R:2, who killed his best friend Shino in game and put her player into a coma in real life. Things sort of spiral out of control from their. Excitment! Intrigue! Conspiracies! Trolling! Why do people keep playing games that routinely put people into comas!?
Pictured: a humongous fucking edgelordOk but aren't there a ton of .hack things though? Won't I be confused?
There are a lot of .hack things! But most of them don't matter much in relation to G.U.
First is the original 4 games, .hack//Infection, Mutation, Outbreak, and Quarantine. These games star a boy named Kite, who is attacked by a strange monster and finds a bracelet that lets him both hack the MMO he is playing, The World, and fix bugs and glitches in it. He also is on a quest to save his friend who was put into a coma, the player of the character Orca. Along the way he has run in's with Balmung, a player trying to fix the game as well, and together with a lot of other characters they eventually defeat the virus monsters, stop a doomsday prophecy, and make friends with an AI named Aura.
Kite, Orca, and Balmung
Wiki plot dump
In .hack//Infection, Kite's friend Orca invites him to play The World. In the first dungeon they visit, they encounter a girl in white, Aura, being chased by a humanoid monster. Aura tries to entrust Orca with an item called "the Book of Twilight", but the monster attacks him, crashing The World's servers. Kite's player discovers that Yasuhiko, Orca's player, has fallen comatose after the attack, and resolves to discover the cause.[18] Kite meets BlackRose, who takes him to a cathedral where they are attacked by a headless swordsman. The legendary player Balmung appears and defeats it, but the monster revives itself as a Data Bug.[5] The Book of Twilight then activates, altering Kite's character data and giving him the Twilight Bracelet. He uses its Data Drain to correct the swordsman's code, allowing Balmung to kill it. Balmung accuses Kite of causing the viral infection spreading through the game, and leaves.[19] Kite and BlackRose decide to cooperate to help the coma victims. After investigating a number of leads, Kite and BlackRose track down Skeith, the creature that put Orca into a coma. They defeat Skeith, but it transforms into a larger enemy called Cubia, from which they escape.[20]
In .hack//Mutation, Kite and BlackRose encounter system administrator Lios, who declares Kite's bracelet to be an illegal hack.[21] He tries to delete Kite's character data, but fails due to Kite's data being encrypted by the Book of Twilight. Helba intervenes, and convinces Lios to observe Kite for the time being.[22] Lios directs them to an area where they find Innis, a monster with powers similar to Skeith's. Upon defeating Innis, Kite receives an e-mail from Aura, who reveals that she is an AI. They travel to an area to meet her; but Cubia attacks them, and they repel the monster with difficulty.[23] Short on leads, they contact Wiseman, who is intrigued by Kite's bracelet. He suggests that Skeith and Innis are based on the "Cursed Wave", an antagonistic force featured in the poem Epitaph of Twilight, upon which The World is based. Wiseman helps grant them access to Net Slum, a place known as a paradise for hackers and wandering AIs. Upon arrival, another Cursed Wave monster called Magus attacks them. They defeat it and return to the Root Town, where they discover that the computer virus has spread to The World's main servers and into the real world.[24][25]
In .hack//Outbreak, Balmung realizes that he cannot end the situation on his own, and joins Kite's quest.[26] BlackRose tells Kite that her brother became comatose under similar circumstances as Orca, which renews both characters' determination.[16] Wiseman formulates a plan to combat the Cursed Wave, enlisting Helba's assistance. Their teamwork destroys the Wave monster Fidchell, but the aftermath causes networks in the real world to malfunction.[27] Aura contacts Kite again, but their meeting is cut short by Cubia's reappearance. Lios, observing Cubia's power, agrees to join Kite, Helba, and the others to combat the Cursed Wave.[17] In the resulting operation, the team pools their resources to defeat another Wave monster called Gorre, with no repercussions in the real world.[28]
.hack//Quarantine sees the current server becoming increasingly unstable. To fix the problem, Helba replaces it with a copy of the Net Slum.[29] At the bottom of a dungeon, Kite encounters Mia, a member of his party. He discovers that Mia is actually another Cursed Wave monster named Macha, whom he reluctantly defeats.[30] Meanwhile, Cubia grows stronger, and Kite's team barely fends off its latest attack. In contrast, Operation Orca is a success as they destroy Tarvos, the next Wave monster. Kite seeks the advice of Harald Hoerwick, the creator of the game who survives beyond death through his AI incarnations. Aura appears and hints that Cubia is the "shadow" of Kite's Twilight Bracelet.[31] Cubia ambushes them and destroys the AI Harald. In their final battle, Kite recalls Aura's hint and has BlackRose destroy the bracelet, causing Cubia to fade away. Without the bracelet, the final Wave member, Corbenik, ambushes the party in Net Slum Root Town. With the aid of the spirits of the coma victims, Kite penetrates Corbenik's barrier. Aura sacrifices herself to end the battle, restoring the network to normal and reviving all the coma victims.
At some point after the games, an unkown party attacks the company that runs The World and destroys most of the games servers in a fire. It goes offline for a while and is eventually rebooted as The World R:2
Also these games are bad, and very expensive, and you shouldn't play them.
Also also, their is a party member named Elk, who is friends with a cat lady named Mia, and is very sad when she turns out to be a virus monster and they have to kill her. Just, uh, keep that in your pocket going forward.
The other thing that ties into G.U. is the prequel anime .hack//Roots. It is EXTREMELY bad and poorly paced and don't bother watching it.
All you need to know about it is that a fresh to the game Haseo meets a man named Ovan and his assistant Shino. Ovan get's captured by a guild that wants his unique character data. Shino gets iced by Tri-Edge. And Haseo becomes obsessed with getting stronger to get revenge, clears a super hard dungeon solo earning him a unique power-up, and then goes a bit crazy and starts murdering his way across the game looking for Tri-Edge. Which leads straight into the first G.U. game.
Wiki plot dump
".hack//Roots" follows the tale of Haseo, a black 'Adept Rogue'(a class that can use multiple types of weapons) and member of the "Twilight Brigade",a small guild created within "The World R:2." In the year 2015, the CC Corporation's building burned down, and with it, most of the existing data for "The World." By splicing in data from what would have potentially been another game with what remained of "The World" after the fire, CC Corp. created "The World R:2" and released it in 2016. The main revisions in this release were that the game allowed for guild and PvP(player vs player) play.
Haseo logs into The World R:2 for the first time and falls victim to the PKers (player-killers) that reside within the game. He is saved by Ovan, who prompts him to join the Twilight Brigade alongside Sakisaka, Tabby and Shino, who are in search of finding "The Key of the Twilight." However, a popular guild named "TaN" obstructs the Twilight Brigade in its mission and is attempting to obtain Ovan's unique character data. The Twilight Brigade has discovered special items, known as 'Virus Cores', and believed them to be the path to finding "The Key of the Twilight" and went to find them all. Once the Twilight Brigade had acquired all 6 cores, the guild headed out to use them in one of the "Lost Ground"s, after figuring out that the two were connected to one another.
However, the group discovers that this was all a trap laid by the members of TaN in order to capture Ovan. With Ovan gone and no sign of the Key of the Twilight, the Twilight Brigade disband and previous members, such as B-set and Gord, quit the game entirely. Soon after, Shino is killed within the game by a mysterious PKer named "Tri-Edge". This somehow puts her into a coma in the real world, which devastates Haseo. Haseo then begins training in order to get strong enough to defeat Tri-Edge and save Shino from her real-life coma. Through this ordeal, Haseo becomes obsessed with power and ends up as a Player-Killer-Killer(PKK), in an effort to find information on Tri-edge. When Haseo competes in a special event that promises a special reward, he gains a new power, but his mind is corrupted and he begins to kill PKers with yet more aggression, gaining him the title of "The Terror of Death."
So are these games good?
Yep! Last recode is also making a lot of nice changes, like smoothing out the leveling curve and adding cheats that will let you just blaze through and see the story if you want.
I'm excited, you should be excited, let's all play a guy playing a fake MMO! WOOOO!
Posts
niiice
I found the core premise, of a mystery story told through the facade of an MMORPG where figuring out who the humans behind the avatars was part of the investigation, to be really compelling. I doubt I'd have hated those first two nearly as much as I did if they hadn't had such a strong hook that they failed to deliver on.
gimme tsukasa and black rose
Im so excited and kinda shocked they decided to remaster these but it's really great that they did
ineedmayo.com Eidolon Journal Updated
I really dig the idea behind the games, but they're such a goddamn slog to get through
.hack seems incredibly opaque to me and I have no fucking clue what is going on
some of the optional party members were stupid as hell
GU still plays really well, I'd just purchased a copy of the first one before they announced the remake
ineedmayo.com Eidolon Journal Updated
god i love how stupid and anime this shit is
BT. Include her serious monologue about her name.
I remember the Hyakkidouran in the first game being a pain to get because the boss would just die before it would protect break, and then in the very next game, you can trade for a better weapon right away in the first new town.
(I definitely also got 100% in all of them though)
i am like 90 percent sure i did this, yeah
also spent way too much time making every grunty
MANDRAGORA
Maybe it'd help with a little background. The whole thing starts in an alternative 2003 and then later 2005 when a pair of computer viruses known as Deadly Flash (2003) and Pluto's Kiss (2005) are released. The former kills several people via epileptic seizures and actually gets it's creator sentenced to death while the latter actually knocks out most of the world's operating systems for 77 minutes. Because of Pluto's Kiss, the Internet gets restricted to businesses and government work for two years. The only OS to not get affected was a small-time one called ALTIMIT. This ends up giving it such popularity that it takes over as the top computer OS worldwide by 2006.
Between those two years, a German programmer named Harald Hoerwick creates a VR-based MMORPG known initially as Fragment and then later The World after he joins up with a game company called CyberConnect to get it going once the public ban on the Internet was lifted. It's based on the incomplete web-only poem 'The Epitaph of Twilight' which was written by Emma Wielant, a woman who died in a car accident in 2004. The reason why he did this is because he was in love with Emma. Like REALLY in love with her, despite her keeping him in the proverbial friendzone. So in love with her that (first .hack era spoilers)...
Let's Play Final Fantasy 'II' (Ch10 - 5/17/10)
PINEY APPLE!
ineedmayo.com Eidolon Journal Updated
oh yeah
in no way am i complaining about this
he is wheatus' wet dream
I love these games
ineedmayo.com Eidolon Journal Updated
Or maybe it was this golden axe?
I still like the silly concept.
I definitely still recommend this to people who have never played it before, just be ready for a bit of goofy-cringey dialogue and people calling each other noob a bunch? Otherwise it's amazing
ineedmayo.com Eidolon Journal Updated
ineedmayo.com Eidolon Journal Updated
ineedmayo.com Eidolon Journal Updated
Yeah, Alkaid is extremely thirsty for basically the whole game