Forum - View topicThe Case For Remaking .hack//IMOQ
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TsukasaElkKite
 Posts: 3951 |
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Yessssss people want it to happen!
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tintor2
 Posts: 1830 |
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The big problem with this series according to Matsuyama is that they weren't that profitable to remake. The PSP game didn't even get an actual localization. In contrast the last Naruto game was an actual big hit as it became the 6th best selling fighting game ever with around 6 million units sold. No, I'm not kidding. The Storm games might have simple systems but they compensate with boss battles which change the genre of the game.
Last Recode was fun but it felt really short in term of new content. Haseo gets a cool new form but he only uses it for two stages. Atoli barely has a role and her relationship with Haseo is not even acknowledged despite all the screentime they had together. And the World closes. They left it as a definitive ending to the franchise with the team's desire to try something new. There was a manga that retold the first hack games that even retconned the villain but they are hard to find as heck. |
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b-dragon
Posts: 452 |
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The issues with the "game" part of IMOQ hold it back for me. I wouldn't just want a port, and it would need a more thorough remastering than GU got to streamline it enough that the gameplay didn't provide a serious impediment for new players. There are good concepts in the game, but finding gate keys come to mind as a mechanic that the games would do better to functionally cut.
I'd love to see it. I have fond memories of the original series- which I still own- and of trying to understand whatever was going on in the Liminality dvds that came with them. And GU's success gives me some hope that if the idea comes to fruition, they'll shine it up as best they can. Which is good- it really needs that tlc. |
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omiya
 Posts: 1827 Location: Adelaide, South Australia |
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A bit of history:
.hack concert on 6th April 2018 by LieN: 
In an interesting coincidence, vocalist of See-Saw, Chiaki Ishikawa had a concert at the same venue on the following day. See-Saw's Dream Field live on 15 December 2019 included all of See-Saw's .hack songs including "Edge": https://canta-per-me.net/live-events/2019-see-saw-dream-field-live/ Did anyone else reading this attend any of those lives? In contrast to the IMOQ games and bundled .hack//Liminality anime, I found and bought a copy of the .hack//Liminality OST for 630 yen from a physical secondhand store in Japan in August 2023. Not that common to find, but not impossible either. |
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Sirius_One
 Subscriber Posts: 9 Location: Austin, Texas |
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I'm hopeful that the countdown timer on https://dothack.com/ means that we'll be getting some good news for .hack in the next few months. Been a fan of the franchise since it's start. I even named my cat Mia after the character from this series. Here's hoping that it's a countdown for a new IMOQ release. Ideally, I'd love it if they mash the 4 together into a cohesive single game that can relive a lot of the repetitiveness the original set had. But even a simple port would be nice. I still have my copies I bought new back in they day and my PS2 is still hooked up. So I can always revisit them. But it would be great to have them on modern platforms with some polish so that a new generation fans can experience it. Or make it easy for us old fans to come back to The World.
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LinkTSwordmaster
 Posts: 381 Location: PA / USA |
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*crawls out of the woodwork*
First off, it wasn't given as much attention in the article, but watching SIGN prior to playing INFECTION on PS2 is a great way to introduce yourself to the game world. Unlike the GU counterpart GU/Roots, SIGN on its own is what I would probably argue to be a groundbreaking presentation of storytelling for its time..... or at the very least a perfect time capsule/love letter from the Everquest/Final Fantasy XI era to folks that may have wanted to see that sort of experience realised in an anime. The actions and events the characters experience on the screen are not what are happening to them simultaneously in meatspace IRL, but their bonds and discoveries they make are real. Both the dub or the sub is very solid, though if you plan to experience INFECTION in English, then watch the show in English. As for the PS2 games, it should have been three discs and not four. There are spots in MUTATION and OUTBREAK (discs 2 and 3) that very much feel like filler, and it felt like GU had made a really good choice to trim its later PS2 series down to three discs - something that likely would have benefited the originals. GU solved a lot of the stagnancy problems of OUTBREAK and QUARANTINE by introducing new combat mechanics - by the final third disc of GU, you had some incredibly fun action combat, but by the end of QUARANTINE you're more or less relying on your same bag of tricks you started with - just at higher levels. If you are familiar with how FFXI played at the time, this is pretty much exactly how this sort of MMO played back in the day, but were a re-release of the original DotHack games on PS2 to come to pass, the action would absolutely feel dated were nothing done to spice it up a bit. frägment for PS2 fixes a lot of the gameplay issues of the original four games - the ultimate tragedy is that it was never given an official western release. It does this by actually allowing online party play. Where OUTBREAK ultimately never lets you play as anyone other than Kite, thus be stuck using his limited class' skills, frägment allowed you to pick a class, make your own character, grab two friends, and be a functional party of three people washing over the game world and making friends with the DotHack characters while playing as yourself and not Kite. This instantaneously makes the game 200% better and quite frankly, should have been the main focus of experiencing Kite's story - co-op multiplayer. There should still be a functioning fan server for frägment if you have an online-capable PS2 or know how to set it up on your PC. As much as I would like a re-release, I honestly think the way to go is to do a remake with online co-op. Integrate frägment into INFECTION & so on, and allow the player a bit more utility during play. At the very least, the ability to hit a button on a combat field and swap control to one of the other party characters would be incredibly appreciated but the reason we never got these features to begin with was that each party member was supposed to be a real person IRL, at the other end of the internet talking to and emailing you from within the game. It makes for a hell of a narrative experience, but one that I think the SIGN anime presents infinitely better than the games do. They just re-recorded & performed a bunch of the music from SIGN too, and it's bloody magical.[/url] Last edited by LinkTSwordmaster on Mon Oct 30, 2023 11:59 am; edited 1 time in total |
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Kimiko_0
 Posts: 1796 Location: Leiden, NL, EU |
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A prime example of the "in this essay I will.." meme taken seriously
I'm a .hack// fan myself though (.hack//SIGN was what hooked me on anime), so yay for more attention brought to it. The World 2.0 never really clicked with me though. For me it's only SIGN, IMOQ, LotTB and stuff. I remember paying a lot of money for the IMOQ games many years ago. I thought I got the whole set for US$200, but after your explanation I'm thinking it may have been more. To be honest (there goes my .hack// cred  ) I never made it through all of them. I think maybe I played most of the second game? In my defense it's harder to play them emulated on Linux than on an actual PS2.
What I recall though is that the games were quite tedious. Lots of areas that are mostly empty, walking for a long time to get to the monsters, and boss battles that are too similar. The story is certainly good and intriguing, but spreading it out over four discs was too much, as was padding the games to justify each disc being full price. As for the chances of getting a remake.. Hmm, I'm not so confident. .hack was awesome, but it's been overshadowed by later stuck-in-an-MMORPG anime, at least for a younger audience. A port would alleviate the overpriced 2nd-hand copies problem, but would likely get very bad reviews nowadays. Would a remake make enough money if it's released without a supporting anime? |
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LinkTSwordmaster
Posts: 381 Location: PA / USA |
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Imagine a Pokemon game where you are only allowed three Pokemon throughout the entire game and cannot catch any new ones - that's most of the issue with the combat. At any given time, you can tap a button to do a single slash attack, otherwise you pause the game to select an elemental spell from the list. There's not really any dodging or "don't stand in the fire" either - you go out, find equipment to raise your numbers, then when the numbers are high enough you figure out which combo of spells hurt the boss and you move on. Getting virus cores was the other issue since it ran counterproductive to the MMO combat part - doing so would handicap your stats quite often, and usually cause combat to take 2x as long. For its time, this wasn't too intense in difficulty to achieve, it just made certain aspects of the game more tedious than it needed to be. Were a remake to happen, they would do well to include the anime Blu-rays in a Collector Edition, but I imagine that licensing issues would crop up. Everyone I talk to hates Kirito. Him and Asuna are quite often (mainly among older anime fans) held up as the crowning Gary Stu and Mary Sue of the Isekai genre, and while I'm a fan of some Sword Art properties and much more a fan of Log Horizon, SIGN manages to capture such a perfect interweaving of human problems that are just as relevant today, that to compare it to most of Sword Art would be doing it an injustice. |
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Zerreth
 Posts: 207 Location: E6 |
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The convoluted menu systems, the repetitive combat and field+dungeon system really honed in on the entire sense of the late 2000s mmo feeling that I loved and hated about them at the time. But the big offender was truly Virus Core K, the data drain drop from a medium sized enemy in a level range that you are going to blowthrough a little too easily in Outbreak because it lies within the early third of the about 20 character levels of progression each game metes out. I game sharked it. It was the one thing I gamesharked because by the time I needed the absurd 20-30 or so of them to unlock gate keys mid-late game, my character levels/stats were so high that I was 1shot killing them with everything but couldn't go naked because 1 damage hits don't push the threshold to shield break. I was always under the impression that CC Corp never remade IMOQ was because it would need a complete and massive overhaul of everything to make it more palatable for the modern gamer's tastes, whereas GU would just need minor tweaks. G.U's exp boost really seemed to imply that they believed players really don't want to go through any grind whatsoever and broke a lot of the immersion and flow of cutscenes and story where there were a lot of parallels felt with the characters in game and the gameplay (the colosseum cutscenes were a big offender in Last Recode). I would love to see IMOQ remade, but at this point, I don't know how they could tackle the entire MMO gameplay aspect of that game and maintain the same feeling. Granted, I haven't really touched any of the SAO games, but a bunch of reviews I've seen seem to indicate many of them have the repetitive limited mmo-style gameplay aspect until it gets to battle cutscenes for special attacks.
As a side note, there's a funny instance where in the vtuber community and various written articles about them, there's a certain human charm to when models go off kilter when the camera can't interpret properly, or the rigging freezes or defaults to neutral while you hear the personality screaming in frustration in the background. I couldn't help but be reminded to an old parallel in SIGN where Mimiru, BT and Bear were talking and Mimiru had to step away for a chore thereby freezing her character mid-pose and Bear comments on how we, as humans, pick up on the disparities that separate the data from the human elements which helps emphasize we're human players in the game world. |
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scanlines
 Posts: 59 Location: in time out for bad behavior |
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I remember renting the games at a local Hollywood Video and was excited that they included the anime dvd along with the game. I would love more dot hack
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dabanbo
Posts: 24 |
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G.U. was the easier choice to remake not only because it had aged less poorly than its predecessor, but also because it's .hack//Shippuden, where it's effectively just a character-driven shonen anime applied to .hack's world. IMOQ is extremely slow-burn and much more mystery-driven, and I don't know if it would have the kind of mass appeal that would be required for Bamco to give CC2 the go-ahead on a full remake.
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MFrontier
Posts: 11253 |
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Man, I was really into .hack back in the day, especially G.U. Haseo is one of my favorite JRPG protagonists (also Atoli For Life). I became so into the lore and continuity of the games.
Some kind of remake or re-release of the original four games would be great, or just a new entry in general. I want to see The World again.
Is that the one with the human Cubia? I think I own those...and the G.U. manga. |
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TJ_Kat
Posts: 364 Location: Saskatoon, Canada |
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*goes and looks at his IMOQ discs on the shelf* I had no idea what these were worth. I... I paid $20 for the whole set.
The problem I remember with the games' combat was that you were locked in to a class that really wasn't good at anything. Your attack range was terrible and your power (attack and magic) was below average. You basically HAD to use a weapon with the Death effect if you actually wanted to do damage with it - no other stat mattered. But even that didn't matter since magic was almost always a lot more effective. You also had to be your party's healer because the NPCs were pretty useless at it. |
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GNPixie
Posts: 298 |
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XXXX. Or X 4th/4th Unknown if you want to get technical. Less of a retcon and more of an outright reimagining similar to GU+ or GU's novels. |
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LinkTSwordmaster
Posts: 381 Location: PA / USA |
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Give Sword Art Alic/Lycoris a try, it suddenly brought feelings of DotHack rushing back. As soured to Sword Art as I am, that particular game is absolutely worth giving a look, I feel like they did very well with it - just make sure you have an RTX system if you do since it's a bit of a demanding game. Am glad to see someone note the EXP issue - GU was never a particularly bad game, it just had VERY bad pacing with its boss fights on PS2. It was quite often I'd enter a PvP boss where I (trying to 100% each disc) would be a minimum of 10 levels higher than the boss and quite often one-shot them the moment the fight started...... only to have a cutscene play where Haseo would be struggling for dear life and the boss was having of the upper hand & a twist in combat would see Haseo escape by...... narrow margin? Wut.....???? .....figuring that the wait between discs was gone, they further screwed that pacing by outright dumping EXP on you in the GU remaster. The challenge is no longer the completionism, it's desperately trying not to be SO over-leveled that you kill things so fast that you cannot get rewards from the kills. It's honestly a bit of a tragedy when the game is otherwise a blast, and just about only thing that can fix the balancing is CheatEngine to nerf the EXP tables..... but setting that up is a nightmare. But yeah, a remake of the original PS2 series.... the more I think deeply about the pacing and the combat, they really would do well to pull a Crisis Core remaster and re-work the combat entirely, give us the ability to direct-control the party characters, and gain virus cores in ways that don't halt the already-methodical combat. Methodical can be fun, but you have to be in a specific mood for it, and for general audiences I don't know that's as much as an easy sell as the GU remaster was. Alternatively, you announce you are releasing frägment as-is, just with fresh servers and a 4K coat of paint, and I think you are suddenly going to get a ton of interest in a massive DotHack//PERFECT collection with all of the PS2 games, their extra discs, and all of the anime shows leading into them. |
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