Ten to one in the morning again, oh no. But hah, it’s Friday night so it doesn’t count. Well, okay, it does, because this probably now means I’m going to sleep until lunchtime tomorrow, but who cares. The weekend is for enjoying, and a valid means of enjoying it is sleeping late.
The reason I am once again coming to you from the Dark Hour is that I finished .hack//INFECTION this evening. I’ve beaten this before, but never actually played the other three, despite owning them all back in the day, then reacquiring them all at moderate expense a few years back. (Reacquiring them now would be great expense, so I’m glad I nabbed them when I did… although I discovered my copy of .hack//QUARANTINE has the wrong manual, and people online want somewhere in the region of fifty fucking dollars just for the manual, so fuck that, it can just be wrong.
As discussed the other day, .hack//INFECTION is an interesting beast in that it’s the first part of a tetralogy (apparently that is the correct term, not “quadrilogy”, I learned something today) of PS2 games that tell one coherent story in four parts. The cynical would suggest that this was done so that they could make four times the money out of one normal length RPG, as each individual part is around 15 hours long, and they’re probably right. But it’s still interesting. To me, anyway.
In each part, you play the role of Kite, a player in the online RPG The World, and much of what you do in each of the four volumes is… simply play The World, which is a Phantasy Star Online-style affair in which you head off into dungeons with or without some companions in tow, hack and slash your way through a bunch of enemies and gather lots of phat loot along the way.
Its unique twist is that its various areas are generated through various combinations of keywords that control everything from the level of the enemies in the area to the weather and geographical features you might stumble across. This is an aspect of the game they don’t explain very well and no-one over the course of the last 22 years appears to have successfully figured out, so you’ll just have to take their word for it. What it essentially boils down to is that you can jam three unrelated words or phrases together and it will send you to a new area with an amusing name like “Bottomless Someone’s Giant” or “Raging Pagan Fuckwhistle”.
There is a certain amount of method to the madness, because in combining different keywords together, you can cause different elements to have dominance in the field, which means you’re more likely to find items related to that element. And elemental weaknesses are worth exploiting in The World… plus the items that temporarily boost your affinity for a particular element are a popular trade item with the in-game NPCs, so they’re worth collecting to get your hands on the often rare stuff they might give up in exchange.
.hack//INFECTION (and its three follow-ups) are not RPGs I would necessarily recommend to everyone. They’re a far cry from the big budget cinematic spectacles many had come to expect from the genre post Final Fantasy VII, and thus they suffered a bit in reviews back in the day. However, if you’re on board with what they have to offer, which is a convincing simulation of playing a 2002-era online action RPG with lots of dungeon crawling and loot collecting, there’s a lot of fun to be had. The basic mechanics are simple and straightforward, but there’s a pleasant purity to just ploughing your way through a dungeon and watching everyone’s levels and related statistics go up.
My main draw is that I’ve always been a sucker for the “something sinister is going on in a computer game” trope ever since I read the short story Vurfing the Gwrx from a book called Peter Davison’s Book of Alien Monsters as a child. (The Peter Davison in question who endorsed that book was, in fact, Doctor Who, but my family and I just found it entertaining that “I” had a book.) I don’t remember much about the story — I should probably revisit it with grown-up eyes — but I do remember finding it both entertaining and pleasingly chilling as a kid. And I like .hack because I get a similar sort of vibe from it.
.hack doesn’t go quite into the “if you die in the game you die for real” territory that Sword Art Online ran with some years later, but the idea of a video game (and the virus contained therein) causing people to fall into real-life comas is a concept I found intriguing and creepy, in a good way. To this day, I still don’t know where the story goes after the conclusion of .hack//INFECTION, which really just acts as an introduction and setup more than anything, so I’m intrigued to finally dive into the follow-ups and see where things go from there.
For now, though, I think I’ve earned that lie-in.
Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.
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