.Hack

The days of making friends and enjoying moments together have passed.

The closest we'll ever get will be Xenoverse or another Sword Art game.

Feels bad, but for those with memories of making friends, making enemies and just being comfortable in their old virtual worlds, that feeling will never leave you.

The new virtual worlds won't be comfortable like the old ones.

The new worlds will be tied to everything you wish to escape.
No longer will you log in to get away from the trivialities of real life, when you log into the newer games, real life logs in with you.

I hate to sound old but fuck, I liked it better when everything you did online was easily concealable unless you were a giant retard.

Simple, make content that requires a brain and don't fucking nerf it. Make a casual filter early on in the game so that an area or encounter culls the normalfags from the people that actually want to play the game. From there create content that requires anywhere from 2-24 people to complete and don't make the part of it feel like a lull in tempo unless you specially want to give the players some breathing room in between.

It's a multimedia franchise with a shared chronology over the course of books, anime series (also a set of OVAs), and games (and without being adaptations of one another either to my knowledge), some of which never having seen an English release. Still, while interrelated, I'm not sure if you'd have to go through them all in the right sequence to get the most out of them (though I do hear that Roots helps set up character relations prior to G.U.), hence why I'm asking here .

I still remember seeing how angry people were that Namco was putting .hack cameo costumes in the latest SAO game instead of doing anything with the actual franchise. Can't say that anger isn't justified either; I've always been kind of miffed that Namco didn't even bother to bring Asbel's (ToGf) Haseo outfit overseas, and I haven't even played .hack yet at this point. Namely that .hack had been a series with a long standing western fanbase, and wasn't a case like with the Miku outfit where the west hadn't gotten any official Vocaloid/Project Diva games yet by that point.

You mean out here in the west, or in Japan as well? But yeah, either way, Namco keeps having them make licensed fighters, or whoring them out to Square for FFVII remake. I have heard they were cleared to make a successor game fir .hack, but it's mobile only because of course it is.

Anyone able to compress link related (u.nya.is/fbhtkc.mp4) by 1mb? It just barely fails the size limit. I offer this best battle theme in trade

Are there any semi decent free MMOs left
I kind of enjoyed Runescape back in the day

Breakdown 2 never ever

fuck this.

Also, what did all of you thought of LINK?
Does anybody else want another fighting type game like Versus?

Man, I haven't played that in years, but most of what I've heard they've done since I stopped sounds pretty bad. At least you can still find the old Runescape soundtrack on Youtube to bring a bit of the comfy back.

There's various download/conversion/resizing sites out there. Trying to set it for exactly 12 MB still made it go over by half a MB. Here is is at 10.5 (I'd told it to approximate for 10MB). If you're wanting it at 12MB on the dot, maybe someone else can help you.

From what I've heard, .hack did have an actual Japan only MMO, but I've also heard people say it wasn't very good. Not sure how many people have played LINK given it's Japan only, but it does have a fan-translation effort (which admittedly isn't always indicative of game quality, given stuff like Tales of the Tempest have been translated into English, though that was done as an April Fools Joke).

The .hack TV series was one of the biggest letdowns ever.

Go play Ultima Online. It's still alive, and probably still the best.

Didn't somebody make a Kickstarter for some The World based open-source MMO? I forget if that was real or not, my brother claims they've shut up about it but said some guy said they were hitting milestones. It's third hand information at this point so I don't trust it.

You guys do realize the company that made these games are being outsourced to make th he ff vii remake right?

Already mentioned it here .

tfw people dont know about oldschool runescape, takes 2 seconds to look this shit up ffs

Man, this franchise just became a clusterfuck. All those amazing ideas. Wasted. It was ahead of its time like the Dreamcast.

Let's pray that Pluto's kiss destroys this shitty Web 2.0 bullshit.

I do know about it, but I'm not all that interested in going back at this point. I can still enjoy the music and memories I've had of it, and I really appreciated the way quests felt like you were actually doing something beyond Kill X/Gather Y and the sheer amount of skills every character had access to, but damn was it grindy in retrospect, and I'm not sure I'd want to go through trying to get a character's various skills up again.

the community is complete crap now, it has been taken over by autistic fuckwits that think the only way to play is doing nothing but grinding for 2k plus hours

I should learn to expect this kind of thing, but sometimes, it catches me off guard.

I would have been just as pissed before I played the game. By the time I beat Hollow Realization, I had 81 or so hours logged. That's more than the entirety of the first .hack game series, and it managed to do that in one game instead of dragging it out to four. Hollow Realization just felt like a shitton more bang for my buck than the .hack series even though .hack is infinitely better in terms of plot, characters, ect.

Yeah, it's sad when a developer becomes better known for something, well, perhaps not exactly bad (I've heard something along those Naruto games are at competent fighters), but most definitely not desirable for fans of the works they were known for before they fell into making what they're now more known for (sort of how Persona has eclipsed SMT in terms of notoriety, annoying SMT fans). Still, at least CC2 hasn't fallen into "Mobile Port Bitch Hell" yet, the way some companies like Matrix Software have (they finally climbed out last year or so after like half a decade of being Square's bitch). Wouldn't surprise me if most people, or at least the ones aware of Matrix's existence, know them more as "that company that ports older games to phones" since that's all they've done since 2011, barring Omega Labyrinth (which most westerners won't even be aware of since it's never coming over due to its content).

Think I've heard before something that IMOQ was originally a single game that was outright split into four and padded with dummy code to fill out the filesizes to be cleared to release in order to charge people four times for the whole thing. Was that actually accurate or just a rumor?

Also, I didn't have a PS2 a the time, but how much were new releases back then? Trying to figure out if IMOQ would have been $200 total if all of them were bought new (at $50 launch price) or $240 ($60 launch price). Either way, it seems like it's just as expensive now as it likely was then, just that the individual game prices are weighted differently (ranging from Infection at like $10, to Quarantine going for $130+ where I live).

There's no evidence for it, but given how the games seem to end so abruptly until the last one, it really does seem true. They probably also realized how repetitive the games were and decided that spacing them out would make players not notice as much on top of getting the extra money.
As for the price thing, there was a ton of price variation depending on where you bought it from even back when they were new. I've heard of people having had to pay $100ish for Quarantine on or near release because the retailer knew what they had and how rare it was. I got lucky and found it at the standard $50 at a non-gaming specialized retailer when it released, so the total for me did come out to $200 for the entire series.

Oh, and I might also add to that first part that Matrix Software is by no means a recently created company, and have been developing games since 1997, so it's not as if they got their start as Square's port bitch either. Just that after WKC: Origins, they got stuck as port bitch for Taito, Level 5, and Square (mostly Square though). Not sure if that PSP game left them on life support or something.

Yeah, I've managed to actually do pretty decently in finding the G.U. games locally (only paid about half the average price in finding Volumes 2 and 3 for $10 each), but had opted to play IMOQ prior if playing both subseries in order adds to the experience, whether it was finding actual copies or working out some means of playing them digitally (perk of now having a working PS2 drive). Given IMOQ's prices, I decided I wouldn't pick up the first three unless I found a really good deal on Quarantine, but that has yet to happen; I think at this point even that store that had the G.U games that low (among other really good finds I've managed there too) is aware that Quarantine is scalper gold and will never sell it for anything less than average. Hell, they've even since learned their lesson on G.U.: last time I saw a copy of one for the trilogy there, they wanted $55 for Reminisce.

Thankfully I usually stick the receipt in the case & I can tell you I payed $29.99 for Infection new in 2003, $19.99 for Mutation used in 2004 & 24.99 for Outbreak used in 2005. As for Quarantine I can't tell as it was a gift from a friend at the time also around 05. But yeah I remember them not being full priced releases at least where I lived at the time.

I never played GU as I had lost interest in the series by the time .hack//roots started airing. I'm thinking of going back to see what I missed. Do the GU games emulate well? My PS2 sadly kicked the bucket a few years back & I haven't been arsed to replace it or get it repaired.

Thanks

Sora Joker was a 10 year old Haseo. Essentially he was Extra/Shinji Matou before he existed

They're both boys fam
You cybered an 11 year old crossdresser with mental issues
Dumpan

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It would be fun if the first true VR MMO was The World. I'd fund it.

Well, I guess if they were given a nonstandard, lower than normal pricing scheme it's a bit better than going full $50-60 per entry. Still, that's usually something you see more towards the end of a console's life rather than early-to-mid life (the way some of the more recent PS3 releases like Trails of Cold Steel and Odin Sphere Leifthrasir have ranged from $40-50 new as opposed to $60 at launch).

I can't personally emulate PS2 on my toaster (part of why I've opted for a PS2 drive), but according to the PCSX2 compatibility site, all of the G.U. games are at least playable from start to finish, though that doesn't exactly mention how well they actually handle. If you want to check it yourself (some entries include the emulator settings used to test them), the games are listed under the "D" section.

On that note, I see something called "Dot Hack G.U. Volume 1 - Rebirth - Terminal Disc" mentioned there. Not really sure as to just what that is or contains, but apparently it's also emulatable.

NEVER EVER

fuck this game is crazy hard to obtain and apparently some games haven't even gotten a western port yet?

As far as the games go (ones for actual systems, I mean, not mobile shit), the west is predominantly missing .hack//LINK, .hack//Fragment (a now dead online game to my knowledge) and .hack//Versus. LINK has a fan-translation in progress, and the latter is a fighter on a region free system, so I suppose not having it in English isn't that huge issue.

As for being hard to obtain, in a way, yes (you can readily download ISOs of them for emulation or playing with a modded system). It's just that the price and rarity depends on the entry: IMOQ has both all over the place, while G.U. is more even in pricing, though still expensive. Going off prices where I live (at least, last I saw them much locally):

It's still a big, pricy investment if you actually want to get copies of them (and don't get lucky the way I have on finding G.U. cheap) to be sure. Shame Namco has seen no reason at all to do a pair of reasonably priced HD collections for the PS3, let alone PSN rereleases to help give people more legitimate options for playing them than forking wads of cash at scalping resellers. If anything, they seem content to mostly ignore the series where possible.

Got more?

I absolutely loved .Hack//GU, they were my favorite PS2 RPGs. I tried getting into IMOQ as well but couldn't do it, aside from being hard to obtain the gameplay felt a little too dated for my tastes.

Every time I played them I'd get a massive urge to play a real MMORPG, and every time I'd end up massively disappointed because real MMORPGs are boring grindfests.

Good MMO when?
I used to play PWI and FW back in the day
And got into the Kitsu Saga beta

Would that make Helba, Wiseman and Elk autists who kept invading other peoples' roleplaying?

//Fragment is still alive, at least in English. Some guy translated it a few years back and there are a few servers up and running. It's pretty fun once you set it up.

You'd think with the rise in popularity of shit like SA:O they would have done something with this IP by now.

Cranky I know this is your thread.

Man, this franchise had great soundtracks.

Fuck. I had to look up that stuff about the SAO shit. I'm mad

Aw fuck I sold all my G.U. games for like 14 bucks each because at the time I didn't think they would be worth as much as the original series in the future. Thankfully I still have all the original games though including Quarantine.

youtube.com/watch?v=YUf3ZY9aNfI

God I fucking love this song. G.U. really had a good soundtrack.

When someone loves .HACK a little too much

A few packs of the first set of CCG cards is a "serious problem"?

What did he mean by this?

It is a serious problem
He should share some

Maybe the problem is that he hasn't opened them.
What's wrong, afraid to get another copy of Alpha Ichigoro? Bonjour!

You just reminded me, why didn't Tsukasa fug Mimiru or Subaru? I mean they wouldn't have been able to feel it The latter in more ways than one but for her it was a once in a life time opportunity

Also english versus never

Oh, they're not worth as much as IMOQ. But counting them as a set, they're still among the most expensive of western PS2 games, only trailing behind IMOQ and Rule of Rose at about $150-180 where I live, if memory serves.

Yeah, at most .hack just seems to get cameos in other series these days, be it costumes in SAO, the Haseo costume in Tales of Graces f (which, come to think of it, I've seen speculation that we didn't get it despite getting G.U. and Roots here, simply because it was his Versus outfit and Namco had stopped caring about bringing them games west at that point), or a playable cameo costume-class of Kite in Narikiri Dungeon X.

Cranky discovered you can buy cases for 20 bucks each now and is on a mission.

Yeah, it's great. Enjoy those commons. I hate CCGs.

You're a faggot. Dumping imoutos

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I play mmos because I want to feel connected with a community and actually make friends

Good show.

Fuck if someone from Bandai is reading this throw the games on PSN you faggot and I'll buy it. Doesn't even have to be EU, I'll get it from US PSN with my secondary.

Either its a dude trapping or its a girl who trapped herself ingame. Everybody wins.

I don't think you even watched .hack//Sign or finished it. It took place like 3 years before the first game series and after that shit ended everyone had moved on with their lives and didn't have to be the game when Kite and his team are playing. They were written out because their story was done. They weren't needed. And Mia's shitty backstory, while stupid, made perfect sense.

And you didn't have to jump from different media to understand Sign. You either missed 1 or 2 episodes in between others or don't remember. But, each episode made perfect sense as long as you've seen them all from start to finish.

As for each separate media, they were all self contained and simply added to the world building. The only connection you would get was that some events told from one perspective would get a different perspective when told via the MC of the different media. that's it.

Tsukasa's a girl in the real world. Mimiru became her friend in the game and wanted to help in the real world. Bear adopted her because her real parents abused her. Subaru, who is crippled from the waist down in the real world, became her wheelchair bound lesbian lover

Yeah but Tsukasa is was a boy in the game. Since he could feel everything in the game and was a boy…

Tsukasa had a hard life.

Believe me, I wish they would. But given how Namco's been treating it (moreso in the west), I wouldn't put much faith in it happening, unless Sony forks money at them for some PS4 only rereleases. Hell, Tales has become a franchise they actually make a rather big effort to bring west (compared to the past), yet they still act like there's no money to be made in putting Tales of Destiny or Eternia onto the PSN (considering Destiny is like $75-100 and Eternia is $90-120 where I live, a pair of $10 or cheaper PSN rereleases would be easy money for them). Some things they're just content to to nothing with anymore.

Asked earlier and got no response, but does watching SIGN before playing IMOQ add to the total experience and/or potentially spoil things for the games?

Well in the fuckheug expanded multimedia thing they are current starting the '3rd generation' of .hack so you never know.

I really want a steam port of all the .Hack// and G.U. games.
I honestly bought every single one when they came out because when I was younger I won $600 at a racetrack lottery and spent most of it on JRPGs for the PS2.

If Cyber Connect made the FF7 remake with the same anime style as say G.U. than I would be a lot more hype for it.
If it was just FF7 with that level of graphics and the same old active time battles than I'd be 100% on board.
Sadly all I see is FF7 being raped both visually and from a gameplay perspective in order to appeal to a large casual audience and not only that but delivered in a piecemeal format.

In the first two games Watching Sign will only add to the world building. It won't affect your understanding of the story as Sign is a prequel with a significant time gap between the end of Sign and the start Infection.
As of the last quarter of Outbreak and the entirety of Quarantine there will be very minor mentions of events from Sign as well as secret post game, non story related characters and a dungeon that are extremely sign related. But, again you won't need to have watched Sign to understand the dungeon nor the are the characters "real" characters. They are considered "Dummy" or "Joker" AI characters that are just there as cameos for people that watched Sign.
Sign is worth the watch.

tldr;
I think it does add to the story and experience but it won't spoil anything for you.

3rd Generation started in 2013 and basically ended with the current mobile phone game.

We'll be lucky if we see a 4th gen and any console games at all

About the only thing I've seen in relation to that has been a NG article based on something one of the devs said, but that doesn't exactly say if Namco's going to let them do anything with it. Plus, wasn't that New World mobile stuff supposed to be a successor of sorts?

Strikes me that you got pretty damn lucky, having that much spending money when you were young, though I suppose it depends on just how far along into the PS2 lifespan it was (I know you said you got all the .hack games new, but doing that for every PS2 JRPG wouldn't net you that much in the long run, and I know some that used to be a lot cheaper than they are these days).

If it was just FF7 with that level of graphics and the same old active time battles than I'd be 100% on board.
I would suspect that Square got the final say in how anything was going to be, given that it's their series.

Alright, thanks. Guess I'll go and look into where I can find good quality uploads of them (used to know of a guy on youtube with the series, as well as other .hack related anime, but a good amount got hit with a block in the US, probably because some kike at Victor Entertainment wants his shekels from DVD reprints or something).

On that note, considering you mention that it's a prequel but with a significant gap, is SIGN even in the same MMO as IMOQ?

I think WatchCartoonOnline.io has good quality as well as KissAnime and GoGoAnime.tv.

The time gap is like 3 years. It's never explicitly stated but think of The World in Sign as the The World: R1 Beta or Alpha and the The World in IMOQ as the full launch The World.

If there is any anime to watch, it's Liminality, which is the 4 part OVA that came with each copy of the game. You should watch each episode when you are halfway through each game.

You don't have to watch Liminality as you won't lose anything story wise from within the game but it does add a little story of whats going on outside the game with the people trying to solve the problems in The World in the real world at the same time as Kite and his friends are trying to solve the problems inside the game.

It may trigger the infamous Nazi mod on /a/ but Kiss anime is a fucking godsend. Especially if you have a cheap tablet and some wifi.

No way. I don't think the series even leaves room for 3 weeks. At the end of .hack//SIGN events are beginning to escalate, and the events at the end of the series with Skeith and Aura lead straight into the games.

Okay, not 3 years it's 1 year and 3 months. Sign ends in 2009 and Infection begins in the middle of 2010

Despite starting in early 2010?

That begs the question of where exactly the halfway points are, provided they're not in your face about it.

Anyhow, I'll give those places a try. Thanks.

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I'm only using the wikia; but the time line there has Sora getting stuck in 2009 which is the first episode of Sign:
dothack.wikia.com/wiki/Timeline_of_the_.hack_series

What is it you're using to get that timeline?

That timeline is from AI buster right? So unless the timeline given pushed he timeline up by a year, it still wouldn't change that there is at least a one year gap between Sign and Infection

That's the one from AI Buster. I'm wondering if there's something different in the encyclopedia that we never got here in the US, but either way, there's really not a lot of space between the end of SIGN and the beginning of the series. As soon as Aura is awake, Skeith starts chasing after her, and I find it unlikely that there was much of a delay between that and the start of the games. It would also mean that Sora was in a coma for a really extended period of time as well.

I am so fucking done with MMOs. I wish I could find my old iRO/Maplestory bros, even my super awkward online GFs.

When will anime be real?

I remember the extra disc that came with G.U. mentioning the extended gap between Sign and Infections and also that the narrator mentioned that the developers of The World did some kind of digital cryostasis thing on Moragana which shut down Skeith and left Aura wondering looking for the Twilight Key.

Sora is Haseo, I think you mean Tsukasa

Wouldn't surprise me if some additional material "World Guidance" style lore book(s) were left Japan only, and in most cases those are never even fan-translated either (Xenogears: Perfect Works being a good example of one that was). Most you can really expect are fan synopsizes of what additional information such books mention.

Nobody will remember this but Wizardry Online was literally the closest thing to a real .hack that ever existed.

It was really fun for a month before the BRs came and bogged the already small and strained servers

Also looking around it seems that Tsukasa was trapped for around 6 months, but I can't find where that number comes from. The most I can really see is .hack//SIGN starting in late 2009 and ending in early 2010 to be followed by the games.

I don't remember that offhand. I'd go get it, but I don't know where my saves are to unlock the data either.

Sora is data drained inside of Skeith's staff, a 3 year gap (or even 1 year) means that's way longer than the series ever suggested.

Sora's player was put in a coma at the end of Sign and woke up from it after IMOQ

I think all we can really do is hope someone for /jp/ with the encyclopedia can clear it up for us. The translations were so fucked over the years with no proper consistency that we may not get an answer without it.

I liked that game. Died too fast.

The only thing that's been a major fuck up was Bandai making shit up on the .hack//SIGN DVDs. I wish I owned that artbook/encyclopedia though, I really do. It may or may not have a firm timeline, but I want it anyway.
I stand by what I said though, anything more than a month between series is just absurd to me. I doubt Aura is pulling her Benny Hill act for a week, let alone that long even.

That's fine. We will have to agree to disagree. One day if there is ever a definitive answer we will have to have another thread to discuss it.

Asura's Wrath, only DLC I've ever sought out.

Just to add, if there is one thing I want Bamco to do is remake all the games IMOQ, G.U., and Link into one game with all the existing characters and separate stories all tied into one big and long game with every single character recruitable and or playable

No, you don't. It's Namco-Bandai, the single greediest, most jewriffic publisher in all of nihonville. If they get their greedy claws back into .hack, you'll be paying more for all of the DLC to complete the game than you would buying the PS2 originals.

In a perfect world they wouldn't do that. But, I know you're right. If I ever become a billionaire I promise to all of you I will use my wealth for good and rescue all these amazing IPs from these companies and then start my own game company and do these IPs justice.

I know what you mean. I don't understand moon myself, but I kind of wish I had Fargaia Chronicles, considering how much I enjoy Wild Arms and have a theory that it might resolve a number of questions about WA2. That shit hasn't even been given a full scan treatment, so the only way I know of to view its contents is photographs of it (which are only around for various pages) or to import the book yourself.

Anyhow, maybe see if there's scans of that .hack one somewhere? If there are, it probably wouldn't be too hard to find a timeline page or something in it, and get an user that knows moon to translate the pages involving it.

Bro, like every .hack fan, I'm sure he's looked everywhere possible. It's not up. We've all tried and the people who paid the huge amount of money to import would not break the binding in order to scan it.

Most people are just nostalgia fags for FF7 user. These people haven't played a JRPG in years.

The remake of FF7 is for the same audience that bought the mini NES.

Go back and replay Midgar alone. Or just chapter 13 of XV since its the same thing. Shits great.

I'm just saying, because sometimes you can find stuff out there in odd places if you look around hard enough. It wouldn't surprise me though if breaking a hardcover binding is indeed what's kept it and other lorebooks (such as the aforementioned Fargaia Chronicle) from being flatscanned, and I suppose transcription of the text to a separate document (therefore leaving the actual book alone and allowing someone else to translate) would be too time consuming for most people.

Also strikes me though that something could very well be done like what Tales of Xillia World Guidance has going for it, being that someone with the book itself has summarized in English various events and such the games don't cover on their page, as well as listing the inbook page numbers covering the event/object for use as confirmation by others with the book.

What have I been missing out on Holla Forums?

Oh sweet thing you are in for a good time.

Also started watching Sign. I get that Tsukasa is scared by his predicament, but acting like a dick isn't going to resolve things.

Watching Episode 2 now. I wouldn't say it's hard to follow, but I assume the show is basically showing slices of time when noteworthy things occur, rather than a full play-time? Just wondering, since apparently Bear knows about Tsukasa's predicament even though Tsukasa never told him, and Mimiru seemed to expect Tsukasa to not be holding true to his "I'm just going to ignore your existence" thing from when they parted in the last episode.

Okay, I get that .hack isn't the easiest series to find actual copies of the games for (seeing copies at stores generally helping with bolstering awareness), but with the fact that seven games over two subseries, along with at least two anime having come west, what rock have you been under?

In brexitville i've seen one copy in 10 years, for £178.

Fuck you CEX.

Please tell me!

A very big rock. Hard to get ahold of decent vidya where I come from, even harder to get ahold of anime

Get ready sweet cheeks
kissanime.to/Anime/-hack-Sign
kissanime.to/Anime/hack-Roots
kissanime.to/Anime/hack-G-U-Trilogy
kissanime.to/Anime/hack-G-U-Returner
kissanime.to/Anime/hack-Quantum
kissanime.to/Anime/hack-Gift
kissanime.to/Anime/hack-The-Movie-Sekai-no-Mukou-ni
kissanime.to/Anime/hack-Versus-The-Thanatos-Report
mangafox.me/manga/hack_tasogare_no_udewa_densetsu/

Good luck finding the games, thats on you.

if i could just find that stuff fun
gone are the days when I could have fun without minmaxing in a game where im typically gonna hit the maximum level before winning the game

its even hard for me to have fun in single-player age of mythology scenarios without getting certain relics to spawn AND getting all the ones I want before the others do; if I don't get those relics to minmax with, i'm gonna feel gimped, and still not have as much fun even if I know that I'm gonna win

i would like to be able to have more fun without minmaxing; ill just settle for crestfall and have fun with the huge grind that im actually looking forward to, even though i could just play my 60 guy from nost pve when elysium releases it instead, which im not very excited about, if at all

Thank you kind user! Saved.

Merry Crimbus. Enjoy the month. Then look down on SAO plebs from your high horse.

At that price, I do hope you mean a complete set, be it IMOQ or G.U. Still a lot of money, but better someone asking that for the entire set rather than a single entry. Regardless, unless you get really lucky, the games are likely to be expensive anywhere in the west. I would guess they are much easier to find and cheaper as well in Japan (I'm sure I've seen import PS2 the BEST label copies around at stores here from time to time).

Geez, South America or something?

I'll tip you off though that you can readily find the games online for use with emulation or installation on a PS2 hard drive. IMOQ includes native dual audio (from what I've seen anyhow in doing a quick test of Infection when seeing if my drive was working right), while it seems G.U. has fan made undub patches if that's of interest to you (prepatched game files being at TiZ).

Yeah maybe in 2007 fam.

Honestly I loved the .hack of the PS2 era, where there was a million bajillion worlds with keywords and shit. It felt like there was legit secrets to find, even if there weren't, and the systems in the game felt interesting. I wish there was a real MMO made like that.

You're basically getting a complex version of while Mimiru and Bear are chatting about Tsukasa; here's what Silver Knight and Subaru are chatting about at the exact same time.

I don't know, up until a few years back IMOQ was about $175-200 here, while G.U. was a bit closer to a stable $150. That's just going off the stores I know around where I live though.

because it was shit.
Asura's cutscene was an awful awful game, and honestly barely qualifies as a game with how barebones the mechanics are and how near impossible it is to actually fail.

Average pricing for a new PS2 games at least in burgerland was $49.99 at the time with the occasional release going for $29.99 new & some even going down to $19.99 new like Katamari Damacy & the Sports2k games.
I don't think I ever saw any $60+ games on PS2 other than those preorder editions with steelbooks & whatnot.

The original DVD release of SIGN lets you turn off the the voice acting all together and just lets the music play which was pretty neat. Also a while back I found out the the composer for SIGN also did the music on Madoka Magica which I'm not the biggest fan of but the music was my favorite part of Madoka.

I think it was either the SIGN or the Liminality DVD that also had a timetable of events hidden in the extras menu. I'll have look when I'm more awake if some other user doesn't beat me to the punch.

Actually finding Sign pretty entertaining. Glad I opted to watch it first.

Ah, so I assume that the trend towards an average $60 at launch started with seventh gen?

Yes.

I came

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I found the timeline in DVD that came with Mutation & it seems like Sign takes place in 2009 but with big old question marks because not even the devs/creators know or knew at the time.

Checked
More like a return to vidya pricing from the early 90s though maybe not as bad I remember Mario 64 going for 70 or 80 dollars back when it was new. Might have also been part of the reason why the PS1 got so popular what with all the cheaper games forcing Nintendo to cut the price down to remain competitive, a trend that continued into the following generation.

That doesn't say that SIGN takes place in 2009, it says that The World was updated to the version that we saw during SIGN in 2009.

...

Nobody actually likes .Hack, the games themselves are tedious bullshit. The only remotely special thing about them is the music.

.Hack sign was a mess of a show. It is at its strongest when it shows the type of MMO players that play these games.
Instead half of the series is spent on Tsukasa doing fuck all, and floating testicle monsters the penetrate people and drain them of their essences. None of which is ever fully explained because you had to play the games or read some of the mangoos that never came out over here. Also, some german hacker chick named Olga, that does something, which allows them to find a AI Loli, that is apparently some game devs attempt to make a daughteroo for his dead waifu. Not that those two are ever specifically mentioned. I'm going off from what I remember after all these years, but at most, if there was any mention of them, it was a through away conversation. The music was good.

It was actually new and refreshing when it came out but yeah the gameplay did not age well and the concept of being stuck in an MMO hs now been driven into the ground.

Hack Sign was a good show, it tried to tell an emotionally charged story. Compare it to SAO that is pretty much just fanservice bullshit.
In fairness the target demo for SAO is probably just male teens. Anime "plot".

If I recall correctly, only one character of note was even stuck in "Za Warudo", the rest thought they where going threw some unmarked quest, or beta version quest. Which actually is a pretty good idea. A bunch of players thinking they are doing some expert mode quest complete with some augmented reality game. Only to find out that some mad scientist/game dev forgot to permission lock his folder/database/no that doesn't make sense, and now a bunch of meddling kids/adults decided to zone hop the invisible wall for more unexplored content.

SAO is .hack fanfiction the author wrote when he was a teenager, I mean that literally, that's what he said.

I think I read that somewhere but I didn't want to believe it though that fanfiction written by a high schooler became more popular than the work it's based off of.

Only thing worth coming out of SAO.

I forgot about Gift. I remember how funny that was, good times.

Maybe it's for the best that .hack gets left behind. But I would buy a console just for an HD re-release.

.hack also had the comfiest music.

Fffffuck this took me back in fucking time.

Makes sense.

I myself had really shit taste when I was 15, it happens.

mortal had this except guards are also killable though they're pretty OP.

mortal is run by swedish sjws who dont know how to code properly though, not worth playing seriously. one of these days i'd like to be in a group that all joins the game at the same time and causes some havoc over the course of a week or two before getting bored and leaving.

Since I've been watching SIGN, I do recall hearing Bear or Crim mention a line like "Since its debut in 2007, The World has seen numerous updates" when talking about locations that remain as scraps of now unused data. Or something like that; has to be between episodes 10 and 20 since I watched all those yesterday and I heard it then. Of course, I'm not certain how bad the series is about potential retcons, this having been my first experience with it. I might double check in a bit if I can find what episode it was.

Oh, right. Though if memory serves, there wasn't a static "all games launch for the same [X] price" like are seen today. From what I've seen of old Toys'R'Us advertisement scans, it seems like they ranged from about $40 to $80, or something.

I looked at the initial air/release dates a while back. It seemed like, in Japan anyhow, SIGN started airing a few months prior to Infection's original release, and kept airing to conclusion months after the game was already out. Ergo, by the time it was over with people would already have access to the game to continue with.

On a related note, it looks like SIGN's run ends on Episode 25, but had three additional OVA episodes. Should I stop after 25 and wait until after playing the games to view the other three episodes, or can I keep on watching?

How many MMO related/themed anime are all that good anyhow? SIGN seems to be pretty interesting in my experience with it thus far, and I've heard pretty good stuff about Log Horizon (the first season, anyhow).

So would that make that infamous Chapter 14.5 a .hack fapfic in some bizarre way?

So, did everyone get fucked up at the end of SIGN? I mean, Sora obviously did (not sure if that Skeith thing just fucked him up, or if him getting fucked up was used to bring Skeith into being; that scene confused me), but I'm left wondering if deleting the field did anything but just trap the characters (Tsukasa and Subaru anyhow) in another hell, this one being one explicitly for them, given the way it cuts from what seems like real life to some artificial freeze.

I have to wonder just how many people thought of/knew just how rare and expensive the games would get. Plus, if you were a kid/teen back then, I don't think many would blame you if trading games you liked in was the way you'd get to experience more games due to limited budget to fuel your hobby.

UUUUOOOOOH~

Double checked, it was from episode thirteen, about eight minutes in. B.T. is speaking with Crim (I guess I got at least one person involved in the conversation correct) in the desert about the Eye needing particular parameters, or a very particular field, to be able open.
She does also mention though the idea of data from a prototype or beta test that came before the game's official release that would have been mostly dummied out, but could still potentially be accessible. So I suspect that as far as SIGN went, the official timeline then would have had The World debuting in 2007 (with the events of SIGN itself taking place in 2010 according to wikipedia; I can't recall if they directly mention the year in-series though), but the development and testing would have been from 2006 or earlier.

Since when were you under the impression that tsukasa is a boy on the first episode?
Already figured it out somewhat when tsukasa showed up on ep.1 that she IS a girl who people think - both in the anime and some viewers, apparently - is a boy, only clearly confirmed as a girl on later episodes. and this was back then in 2005 on Animax

so drama happened

someone cheated on coldbirds fragment server
the admins lost their shit and said "fuck the community you dont deserve to play the game" and they shut down the server and deleted the forums. "fragment is cancelled" they said.

then in less than 24 hours someone set up another functional fragment private server and now they are whining on reddit about it

the salt is real

On one hand, I suppose any amount of power leads to drama. On the other, shit like someone going "Fuck everything and fuck you all" only to have someone else setup and host the game (with the prior person having given up any power they had) is hilarious.

Someone linked the thread on the subreddit as soon as you pointed it out. I'm guessing it wasn't you.

i dont even post on reddit
im just a lurker

oh i see someone posted the thread in discord
thats how caycee got it

epic

Makes you wonder why they browse here if they get triggered so easily. :^)

Are you trying to recreate the salt mines we had yesterday from that Furry obsessed with that one castlevania game that lets you play as a werewolf?

Because I'm ok with that.

Salt mining is always fun.

So, do the games themselves have music in a similar style to Sign? I really like the soundtrack there, but I did notice in looking up the composer for it she apparently didn't work on the actual games' OSTs.

Also looks like LINK has passed the 80% mark for the fan-translation for anyone interested.

The games have some pretty comfy tracks, see & vid related.

Wew lad

The soundtrack is different in the games but is still a pleasure to listen to.

For SIGN you should watch up through Return(ep.26) Intermezzo(27) is optional as it's just a side story, but Unison(28) you should save until after IMOQ because it is a (non-canon) epilogue to R1

ayy lmao

...

I'll give a few tracks a listen to, but I'll admit I usually like to have the bulk of a soundtrack as a surprise. Was more curious as to if they kept a similar vibe.

So why exactly did Sora just let Tsukasa, Aura, Subaru, and Mimiru warp out from wherever it was that Aura had been brought to? I mean, it's pretty obvious that it's just some shitty edgelord kid playing as Sora and doesn't quite seem to get that actions have consequences (considering his shock at being crucified or whatever for his betrayal), but considering how readily Sora had killed other PCs through the entire series it seems odd he'd just let them go. Especially considering how he seems to play without much in the way of a conscience. Sparing them for giving him something entertaining in watching Aura awaken and that voice flip the fuck out about it, maybe?

That one is a really damn pretty track. I have to ask though, do Infection, Mutation, Outbreak, and Quarantine all share the same basic OST (I assume that some tracks might only come into play in certain games), or are they still mostly different individually? Same question for the individual G.U entries too, I suppose.

Also, why throw an episode about Mimiru's past at the very end of the series, after things have been resolved? Just seems like a rather weird place to put something as far as character background goes.

there was this one story where a dragonboy was playing a virtual reality mmo and then someone started playing with his cock in the real world then when he took his pants off in the game he discovered that in the game he was a nullo so he was desperately rubbing his null patch while at the same time his cock was being stimulated in the real world

All the games share the same basic soundtrack with a few new songs for special events and enemies. G.U. has a similar thing going as well.

The entire time Sora thinks that it is just an in game event. It's only after he can't warp out that he figures out just how much trouble he's in. He was just messing with Morganna for fun.

Intermezzo and Unison are really just OVAs but they get listed as episodes

Ah, so he thought he was just fucking with another player or something, and didn't realize he was fucking with an malevolent and vengeful AI? Still doesn't explain letting Tsukasa and crew go, as dicking over other players was his shtick. Or did fucking Morganna over weigh as more fun than eviscerating the others?

secure.dothackers.org/netslum/

new fragment server stuff

He thought that stabbing Morganna in the back would be more entertaining.

Simple pleasures.

Either way, he comes pretty damn close to being Coldsteel the Hedgheg tier, albeit in a setting where death is a slap on the wrist for most (being an MMO they're playing). Bit surprised I haven't seen Sora on "Edge Meter" images, really.

He got devoured/mutated into Skeith, didn't he?

The difference between Coldsteel and Sora is that Sora is hilarious. Haseo is way more Coldsteel teir

He got Data Drained to become Skeith's wand

True, meant to say earlier that Sora kind of reminded me of Zed (WA 1/ACF villain lackey) between his goofiness and attire, leaving a similar "humorous jackass that gets zero respect" feeling from both. Difference though being that Sora seemed like an outright malicious character to be avoided if at all possible, while Zed is just a nigh-incompetent shmuck and actually a nice, if strange, guy on the wrong team.

>>Got turned into a weapon.
Is he somehow still sentient in his own personal hell there? Curious as to if that's going to serve as an extended life lesson for him, or if he's going to learn absolutely jack shit.

You should probably finish IMOQ before I tell you

Fair point, thanks for not spoiling it.

Speaking of IMOQ, anything to know before going into it? I seem to recall hearing at least something about a particular amount of items needed in one entry to progress, but can only be obtained in a prior one, or something.

As it's intended

Once again glad KHInsider exists.

Too bad some seem to have forgotten the "interaction" part in favor of becoming much more accommodating to people that would rather treat them as single player games.

That'll be virus cores. You'll want to stock up in the first game because A, B, and C cores are a pain to get later on.

Good to know. So, will I need to grind for some ridiculous amount of them, or is it more straight forward "Just keep this minimal number on hand during Infection for later?" And do they get harder to find for plot related reasons, or did someone at CC2 not think something through?

If you have a dozen or so of each at the end of Infection you should be fine. I remember spending hours trying to get my high level wavemasters to melee a low level monster for a shot at a core. There might have been a better way but that's what I had.

Ha, what a bunch of fags.

Checked.
Alright, I'll try to remember that.

Jesus dude, that community was already fucked in the head.

Madmins + drama queens everywhere.

G.U. runs better than IMOQ emulated.

Leviathan server?

From what I can tell, the actual issue is that the group of users behind the "new" server, the ones who were banned, have been going around posing as the "official team" even though said users don't posses any the skills required to have worked on the game.

Those users are also claiming that the actual team behind the revival of fragment didn't do anything, and that the code they(the 'new' team) are using for their server just magically appeared out of thin air.

All this drama IS hilarious, because it all started with some person named Caycee getting banned for shit people usually get banned from games or communities for, and his response which was to lose his shit over it.

The funniest part was when that all went down, Caycee was trying to get his boyfriend Ourico, who also liked to cause drama to jump in on it, and from the last I saw, he wouldn't. I left when Caycee's tantrum started going from funny to sad, so I dunno if Ourico swooped in to come to his boyfriend's defense or not.

I played fragment for like, 5 minutes. That game is boring as hell. community wasn't bad until this last wave of people came in and decided that having to play by rules and dealing with the consequences of breaking those rules was unfair.

this didnt start with caycee

someone that Mai was banning told Mai "of course im using cheat engine, is that bad?" this triggered Mais super special snowflake severe autism or some shit and caused Mai to have a mental breakdown and ragequit. Someone also mentioned that Dyson had gotten bored and had quietly disappeared in the past month. This caused Belldandu to freak out about the major developers leaving and started banning everyone remotely related to the cheater that triggered Mai and justifying the bans with months old incidents that they had let slide before. Then the drama started between just a few people and the developers decided to burn the whole project while telling the whole legit community to go fuck itself for not being elitist programming wizards.

What are you talking about and what does it have to do with .Hack?

See video in

It's what allowed Sora to summon Skeith in R2, see Ryou Misaki

Well Ryou was in a coma the whole time until just prior to Unison so it's anyone's guess

WHY DOES THIS HAPPEN IN EVERY GODDAMN MMO THESE DAYS. TRANNIES RUIN FUCKING EVERYTHING REE.

While Ryou did wake up he didn't remember even having played the game and Unison is non-canonical

It's the little connections between the different series that make everything that much more fun.

He's talking about .hack//fragment unofficial western server drama, or something.

How can you tell? She's hardly visible.

roleplay has always been gay even if it's with a girl
but that's expected coming from OP

you shit talkin, Trae?

ftfy

>>>/x/

If you have the solution to the hard problem of consciousness, you should publish it. Otherwise no.

I tried, but couldn't find anything. But thanks for the tips.

I dropped this comic fiften blue moons ago, is it just as boring nowadays?

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alleged_plot_to_kidnap_Pope_Pius_XII

holy shit The One Sin event is online in dothack fragment

why did no one tell us about this
found it on the new server
not even modded in, its hidden vanilla game content

>[email protected]/* */
Sent ;)

holy shit

what an idiotic thing to say. Nobody stares at a minimap 90% of the time.

I guess that makes much more sense when there is just this one zealot believing in his abstract ideological cause than 5 cyborgs with the power of nukes all eager to give it up for a somewhat more just world.

I can't really fap to the characters in that game. I tried but Raiden's voice doesn't fit to his feminine kicking and slashing

No.

.hack is a shitty anime to begin with

Nice, is it as impossible as it's supposed to be?

I really don't know who best girl is.

But thats not what i want. I want something that is as deep tactically, as it is customizable and mechanically complex. Also i very much like how reliable air combat is and want that type of polish in the gameplay but not without lack of complexity. Stuff like how in dissidia you can use kain's jump ability and cancel it by dodging before the falling spear attack. That makes combat fun and gives each player a unique style.

believing*

Fuck no. It's a great idea.

Project Diva is too hard for me.
Thank god for Mirai.

how can i upgrade my freezer?

we couldn't kill it and we had 2 lvl 99s

this isn't video games

I guess the first thing they'd have to do would be to give every character a home stage, or at least every franchise.

D or F

Shitty meme thread.

Perfect

Also this spam is out of control

What a slut!

All bought for £10 - £25 from a GameStation six years ago, when they were getting rid of all their PS2 stock.
I only knew about the series from the "Legend of Twilight" manga, and had no idea of the games' rarity. To this day, I'm still telling co-workers about things Sword Art Online ripped off from dotHack.
A sincere "Fuck you" to whoever decided not to release the G.U. series in Europe.

Nice, I certainly wish I'd known more about the series in advance but back when Fucking Gamestop was getting rid of all their PS2 stuff I had only just gotten the system myself, wasn't too familiar with the library yet, and didn't have access enough to shell out for a set of games I'd need to drop money on 3-4 times (whether IMOQ or G.U.) to have that much interest in picking up what copies I was seeing at the time.

Not the only time Namco fucked you guys in PAL land over (Neither Tales of Legendia or Tales of the Abyss was cleared to come over there at the time, and it's fucking silly they only gave you guys Xenosaga Episode II but not Episodes I or III). Really, I feel both sorry for PAL JRPG fans in general, and happy that I live in North America myself. Well, at least emulation and system modding are things these days, so you're not completely fucked if a company declines a PAL release.

Might as well settle this now.

Mimiru > Blackrose

Fug. I posted the wrong one.

Considering the issues the other characters had (emotional abuse/neglect, physical disability, family issues, stress and tedium of day-to-day life and work), I was a bit surprised how the main issue that seemed to be brought up for Mimiru was simply that her dad was always busy with work. She seemed like the only major character actually playing the game to have fun (aside from Sora), rather than escaping her real life being the main factor. Of course, eventually it seems more like she just logs in to keep Tsukasa company, but still.

They're both good but not the best in their respective series.

heres a vid of the one sin

would you settle for a 2D platformer?

...

Jesus Christ what did you kids do to generate shit like this :

have one last thing to say before i take my leave of this disgusting place, This is not pointed at every user in this chat. this will be directed at the goons. who are the most winiest pieces of shit of vile scum imaginable i have ever lay eyes upon. before anyone says anything, One i was angry at the dev team, after i misunderstood things and after i put two and two together, I felt disgusted with myself and quite angry. Two i am a complete fucking idiot sometimes. and i also ended up hurting people with my misunderstanding. that is what makes me the most angry at myself. you people attack relentlessly at hardworking individuals that spent years working on this for a very long time, reverse engineering and programming such as this cannot be done in a night. When you sacks of shit sit there and barrage attacking people. You must have the most tiniest dicks imaginable to mankind. and think you are are all that, when all you do is sit there in front of computer and twiddle your fucking thumbs. You know karma is a fucking bitch, one day its going to hit you hard and when it does, i am going to laugh like the bitch i am, Cause no one is going to help you. not a single person, you will cry, you will scream and i hope to god no one fucking hears it. i am sick and tired of seeing people who have worked hard on a game be degraded any further by the likes of you scum, you vile pieces of fucking shit have cause so much pain and anguish. quite frankly i am sick that i even associated myself with you temporary when i was angry. now i shall take my leave and may god help your souls. -From HarutoYakumo. Leader of Phase 0 -

Yeah, same issue with . Victor Entertainment's done there best to block the bulk of official SIGN related stuff in Freedomland. I sense jewery afoot.

I remember checking some other video hosting sites and coming up with nothing there as well. Might be just KH Insider with the OST freely available to listen to at this point.

Im glad .hack was one of the first animu i got into back in the day, meant i could buy all this stuff as it was released.

trippy digits man

I thought only the first of those came out in English. Or are there two volumes for the same story, rather than AI Buster 1 and AI Buster 2?

Not that user but they were definitely released in english in europe. The second one is a series of short stories iirc.

[spoiler]I keep on seeing people say that Unison is non-canon because of Sora's actual identity in regards to G.U. but is there any other evidence that proves this?

To be honest I always thought the Sora who appeared in Unison must have been the A.I. one from Quarantine's Post-Game after learning he's Haseo[/spoiler]

When Misaki gets out of his coma he doesn't remember The World at all. His parents don't tell him a thing about it either. Hence when we get to R:2 Haseo is clueless.[spoiler]Though it could be AISora, but I never bought into that.[/spoiler]
I thought there were other stuff that didn't line up but I haven't watched Sign in a couple of years.

Huh. Well, it would certainly make sense to want to try to capitalize on the series' popularity back its heyday. Maybe I was getting it confused with Epitaph of Twilight not coming west for whatever reason (I suppose games tend to be more fun/rewarding to fan-translate than books, but given .hack's multimedia nature and having a decent western fanbase from what it seems, I'm surprised no one's picked that one up for translation).

Okay after doing some digging I found out that .hack//Link & a bit of Versus explains how it's the A.I. Data version since those games have A.I. copies of characters belong to the same player/person active at the same time as each other. The "Sora" in that game references the dance party from Unison while Haseo is active as a party member.

Weird that they would only have the one but not the other two ai at the party. seems reasonable enough though.

Yeah the choices of who has an A.I. copy and who doesn't is pretty strange in Link, like how "Sieg" has an A.I. copy while his G.U. counterpart is there for example.