Frankly, I think Bandai's .hack universe is probably the best intellectual property they have going for them. The anime, .hack//SIGN is intelligent, mysterious, lovely, and has some truly excellent music. The tales of things going subtly weird in an MMO gets more relevant every day as MMOs become increasingly popular. So the .hack *games* should be a shoo-in. Getting to actually play out the sort of weirdness that goes on? Should be really cool. And I've always liked games that simulate real world computing in their particular universe. The big, and, sad to say, fatal flaw in .hack//INFECTION (and presumably the later games in the series, though reading about their similarity to the first caused me to avoid them), is that the MMO it simulates is completely devoid of fun. Wander through bland, randomly generated areas doing incredibly basic hack-n-slash with generic characters. Levelling doesn't produce any impetus, as all you get are tiny upgrades to your HP and mana supplies. The very minimal, boring special powers are all granted by equipment, not by character level, and they repeat on higher end equipment so you wind up with a choice between three or four veeeery similar spells or special attacks. Only one or two of which you can be using at any given time. And which special it grants is the only distinguishing characteristic of the weapons. I could perhaps have tolerated this if all you had to do to keep advancing the (enjoyable) plot was go where they send you and kill stuff on your way to a special encounter or two, or if story dungeons had had any more design than any of the others...but no, and no. You have to go generate random playfields to kill stuff to do tedious levelling in order to survive the story areas, and they're just as random as everything else. Worse, after a little bit the story goes into a slump where several missions in a row simply involve acquiring other potential party members (none of them any more exciting than the next, none with real personality). In short, there are a few good ideas and an interesting story here...but to get to them you will have to wade through boredom incarnate. Skip it unless you have inhuman amounts of patience.
.Hack//Infection is one of the most original games I have played thus far. Originally I picked it up on a whim, not knowing anything about it, and before I knew it I was being whisked into a very convincing sim-MMORPG t... Read Full Review
DotHack...DotHack...this game keeps me up at night. Not because it's rubbish(which it is), but because it had the potential to be great. Listen to this, a breakdown of the story: "14-year-old boy named Kite is invited ... Read Full Review
