“I’m in”.
Multimedia projects can be tremendous accomplishments when pulled off right, drawing upon the unique strengths of different mediums to tell an all-encompassing tale. In the early 2000s, Bandai took a shot at one with Project .hack, which began with an anime and spun out to include a manga, a series of novels, and a four-part collection of video games for the PlayStation 2. This was then repeated with a follow up called .hack Conglomerate that moved forward a bit in the in-universe timeline to establish a new era of stories and characters. The main games to come out of this second wave were the .hack//G.U. trilogy, which saw a re-release on modern consoles in 2017 as .hack//G.U. Last Recode. Now that the remaster has made its way over to the Switch, we can confidently say that it was kind of worth the wait. .hack//G.U. Last Recode is the epitome of a filler game; it doesn’t do anything badly enough to really draw substantial ire, but it doesn’t do anything well enough to deserve much attention either.
The narrative of .hack//G.U. Last Recode is set some time after the original quadrilogy and acts as a largely standalone story following new characters that first-time players can comfortably follow. Here, we play as Haseo, a brash player in an MMO called The World R.2 who gets his kicks as a PKK—a Player-Killer-Killer who defends noobs from the nefarious Player Killers roaming the servers. In the first volume, Haseo is hunting for a mysterious PK called Tri-Edge, whose victims have been falling into a coma in the real world for some horrifying reason, and there’s a revenge motive to this hunt given that one of Haseo’s best friends was a recent victim. It doesn’t take long for Haseo to find and confront Tri-Edge, but he’s hopelessly outmatched in the ensuing battle and is ‘killed’, only to respawn having lost all the gear and levels that he spent hundreds of hours grinding for. Undeterred, Haseo thus sets out on a quest to regain his power and defeat Tri-Edge once and for all.
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