I’ve always been fascinated by the .hack games, one of the first truly ambitious transmedia projects that involved video games, and yet I’ve never gotten around to finishing the original series. I decided it was high time I corrected that.
For the unfamiliar, .hack (pronounced “dothack”) is a Japanese franchise that encompasses video games, animation, manga and light novels. It began in 2002 with two distinct pieces of media: the video game .hack//INFECTION, which is what we’ll be talking about today, and .hack//SIGN, an anime series that, at the time of writing, I haven’t yet seen.
The project involved something of an all-star cast of Japanese talent, including anime director Kouichi Mashimo from studio Bee Train, Ghost in the Shell writer Kazunori Itou, and Gainax co-founder and Neon Genesis Evangelion character designer Yoshiyuki Sadamoto. Definitely quite the pedigree, then — so let’s take a closer look at the first interactive episode in this saga after the jump.
In .hack//INFECTION, you take on the role of an 8th grade Japanese boy who has been invited to start playing a new video game called The World by his friend Yasuhiko. The game unfolds in 2002’s interpretation of what the year 2010 would be like, following several fictional major computer disasters that occurred in the early years of the new millennium.
This included a virus designed to attack the newly founded United Nations organisation the World Network Commission, which infected over 10 million users worldwide in 2003; the Deadly Flash virus outbreak of the same year, which could cause epileptic seizures and resulted in the deaths of several people; and the global restriction of worldwide Internet usage after the 2005 event known as Pluto’s Kiss, during which all systems worldwide shut down for 77 minutes.
Following Pluto’s Kiss, public Internet access was restricted for anything other than government or business purposes, and the production of online video games mostly ceased. On top of that, the hacker responsible for the Deadly Flash virus was sentenced to death, though as of the start of .hack//INFECTION in 2010, his sentence has not yet been carried out. This period is known in the .hack universe as the “Twilight of the New Gods”.
During the Twilight of the New Gods, it became apparent that the computer operating system known as ALTIMIT OS was the only one to really survive the disaster, and consequently became the most popular operating system in the world. By 2007, the World Network Commission had passed a law making ALTIMIT OS the only legal operating system in the world.
Around the same time, a German programmer had been working on an online video game known as Fragment, and presented his prototype and proposal to the new CyberConnect Corporation, formed from those who had left ALTIMIT in 2006. By 2007, Fragment had been repurposed into The World, which was launched on the second anniversary of the Pluto’s Kiss event: December 24, 2007.
Players, eager to get back online, were keen to get involved in The World, and the game enjoyed 100,000 downloads on its first day alone. This marked the end of the period known as the Twilight of the New Gods, but only the beginning of the troubles depicted throughout the .hack series.
It’s not hard to see the parallels between .hack’s timeline and things that are happening in the real world. Indeed, returning to .hack in 2024, a number of things seem oddly prescient — not necessarily in terms of the major disasters, but the way technology and the Internet has evolved in the real world definitely has some parallels to the alternate history seen in .hack.
Anyway, to return to .hack//INFECTION, you play the role of the aforementioned 8th grade protagonist. The game is fully diegetic, meaning that your TV screen becomes your computer’s monitor, and everything you see in the game is what the character sees; you never actually see the “real” character, only their depiction in The World, because the “real” character is supposed to be you.
The protagonist is canonically known as Kite in The World, so for the sake of simplicity we’ll refer to him as such from hereon.
We join the game as Kite is preparing to log in for the first time and meet his friend Yasuhiko, known in-game as the veteran player Orca. Orca is such a legend in The World that he, along with his comrade Balmung, is known as one of the “Descendants of Fianna”, players renowned for completing some of the game’s most difficult challenges and playing a key role in completing some events.
Kite meets up with Orca and, in true early 2000s MMO tradition, finds himself mostly tagging along while his friend, 50 levels higher than him, obliterates ever enemy in their path. However, things get a bit strange before long when Kite and Orca encounter a strange enemy wielding a red staff, who appears to be chasing a ghostly-looking girl.
After pursuing the pair, Orca is captured by the strange staff-wielding entity, which uses a peculiar ability on him known as Data Drain. Chaos ensues, culminating with Kite finding himself in possession of the same Data Drain ability shortly before the entire game shuts down. He loses contact with Orca, and it transpires that his friend has fallen into a coma, seemingly caused by the happenings in the game.
This isn’t the first time this has happened, either; on the .hack//LIMINALITY DVD that is included with .hack//INFECTION, we see the parallel story of Mai Minase, a young girl whose boyfriend suffered a similar fate to Orca. Mai herself was almost afflicted in the same way, but something allowed her to break free and wake up, allowing her to cooperate with former CyberConnect employee Junichiro Tokuoka to investigate the situation.
From hereon, it’s up to you, as Kite, to start figuring things out using your computer. You can achieve this not only by simply playing The World, but also by reading and replying to emails, browsing the Web and looking through the official message boards for The World. It’s probably worth noting for anyone still unclear that none of .hack//INFECTION is actually Internet-connected; all of the “online” stuff in the game is simulated.
The bulk of your time will be spent logged into The World as Kite, playing the game and making progress. Indeed, the “game within a game” is fleshed out enough that you can just enjoy playing it without pursuing the main story, though you will find there is a soft cap on how much meaningful character progression you can make in this first volume due to you not being able to access higher level areas.
So let’s talk a bit about how The World works. Ostensibly it’s a massively multiplayer online RPG, but it’s a little different from how that term would have been understood by people in the west in the early years of the 21st century. Rather than presenting you with a large, sprawling interconnected world of zones as in popular titles like EverQuest and Final Fantasy XI (which launched the same year as .hack//INFECTION in Japan), the execution is closer to something like Sega’s 1999 hit Phantasy Star Online.
What this means is that there are “massively multiplayer” areas where you can see other (NPC) players wandering around and doing things — here known as “Root Towns” — but going out into the world involves picking specific areas to complete, which are primarily intended to be completed with other players in tow. The nature of The World means that it is possible to run into other players in the field, but it’s quite unlikely unless you specifically know to meet someone somewhere.
Honestly, .hack//INFECTION doesn’t sweat the “how it works” thing too much, and that’s probably to its benefit. All you really need to know is that it’s an action RPG in which you alternate between preparing for your next expedition in a Root Town, and heading out into an “action area”, which consists of an infinitely looping field area and a dungeon with a predefined layout.
One of the most intriguing things about The World within .hack//INFECTION is its wide range of different areas to visit. You choose which area to visit by constructing a “keyword”, actually a short phrase consisting of three sections. Each section of the keyword controls various aspects of the area you’re going to visit, ranging from its overall difficulty level to its weather conditions and monster populations.
It’s not explained very well in the game — deliberately so –because it’s supposed to be strange and mysterious; in-universe, it’s something players are supposed to investigate and discuss among themselves, and over the years it’s actually become something quite similar in the real world, too, with players to this day still trying to figure out the intricacies of how the keyword system works, and which ones are “best” for particular purposes.
In practice, we should be honest here: pretty much all the action stages in .hack//INFECTION unfold almost identically, with the only real differences being the visuals, music and the specific monsters you’ll encounter. This was one key criticism of the game back in the day — that it was repetitive and could even get boring, particularly across four 15-hour installments — but it’s also quite an accurate reflection of the reality of long-term online RPG play, too. These games aren’t about exploring a big, beautifully crafted world and discovering all the wonders it has to offer; they’re about growing in power and getting shiny loot.
And on that side of things .hack//INFECTION certainly delivers. You’ll feel a meaningful increase in power with each passing level, and equipment drops are varied and plentiful. To keep things really interesting, your character’s skills are attached to their equipment rather than innately learned, so when acquiring new weapons and armour you’ll need to not only consider their stats, but also whether they provide you with the ability to cast certain spells you might find useful.
Kite is canonically a “Twin Blade” character, which means he’s an agile fighter with decent magical abilities, making him quite flexible. As you progress through .hack//INFECTION, you come into contact with a number of other “players”, each of whom have their own character class and thus fall into various different party roles.
Probably the most major party member is the girl known as BlackRose, who it seems also has someone who has been affected by the mysterious “coma” incidents; she is a tad more “tanky” than Kite, so is always useful to bring along.
You’ll encounter other party members through various happenings in the story, including some seemingly chance encounters after reading posts on The World’s message board. It’s a nice reflection of how chance encounters in real online RPGs can sometimes result in lasting friendships, but mechanically acts like a party selection option in an offline RPG. The best of both worlds!
From hereon, .hack continues through a combination of two things: simply playing The World to accomplish any goals you might set for yourself, and progressing through the main story. The former provides plenty to do, including discovering rare items, completing various challenges you might find listed on the message board and acquiring the items you need to trade for valuable items with various NPCs. The latter usually involves discovering new information via email or the message board, then acting on it in The World, usually by going to a particular area to investigate.
Later in the game, you’ll find yourself having to go to “Protected Areas”, which are supposedly undergoing maintenance. In order to enter these areas, you need to acquire “Virus Cores”, which you can get through Kite using his “Data Drain” ability on various enemies.
The way this works is simple. When fighting an enemy, knocking them down to a certain amount of health — usually around 10-25% or so — will put them in “Protect Break” status. When this occurs, Kite has the option of using his Data Drain ability on them. This transforms the enemy into a weak, low-level counterpart, but also rewards Kite with an item. This can sometimes be valuable weapons or armour, while at other times he will acquire the aforementioned virus cores.
Small enemies give up “A” cores, medium-size enemies give “B” cores and large ones give “C” cores, allowing you to plan when it’s worth using Data Drain and when you should just keep fighting. Data Draining an enemy causes it to be worth just 1 experience point, you see, so it’s not something you should do on every enemy. There’s also Kite’s own infection level to take into account; Data Draining too many enemies in succession will cause this to rise, and Kite will die if this gets too high.
Data Drain has other benefits, too. Sometimes it goes “out of control” and provides buffs — or sometimes debuffs if you’re unlucky. And incentive to Data Drain a certain amount is provided by the creation of “Ryu Books”, which show up after certain numbers of enemies have been Data Drained, and provide access to various statistics and information about your playthrough. Reaching milestones in these Ryu Books also rewards you with bonus material such as music and wallpapers you can use on the desktop of Kite’s computer, plus the ability to re-watch cutscenes from various points in the narrative after you’ve cleared each game.
On top of all that, certain enemies in the game, portrayed as being “corrupted” somehow, and featuring garbled names and HP readouts, have to be Data Drained before they can be defeated. These usually give up special Virus Cores that are necessary to proceed to subsequent story areas, effectively gating progress and preventing you from accidentally stumbling into certain areas “too early”.
For the most part, .hack//INFECTION feels like it’s primarily working as an establishing piece to get you used to playing The World, and giving a few interesting hints as to the mysteries that await in the subsequent volumes. It’s definitely an intriguing start — and the whole thing has a compellingly menacing atmosphere that only grows as the main narrative progresses. As someone who only ever finished .hack//INFECTION back in the day — and once again more recently — I’m definitely intrigued to dive into the subsequent volumes and see where things go from here.
The cynical may say that releasing the game across four volumes was just a (mostly successful) attempt to get people to pay four times as much for what is essentially a single RPG. But I don’t know; there’s something about how the game is split into these four discrete parts that I find endlessly intriguing.
I wouldn’t go so far as to recommend everyone jumps on board with these games, because they are repetitive in gameplay terms — but as previously noted, that’s at least partly deliberate as a reflection of what online gaming was like around the turn of the millennium… and what it still is like to a certain degree, even more than 20 years after .hack’s original release.
If you’re happy to “method act” your way through an interesting story, though, there’s some worthwhile time to be spent with the original .hack games. I’m certainly looking forward to discovering what’s next — and you can bet there’ll be some reports on what I find as I go.
Want more Pete? Check my personal blog I’m Not Doctor Who, and my YouTube channel ThisIsPete. If you enjoy what you read here, please consider buying me a coffee.
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