Game Review : .hack//G.U. Series

Finally got to finish this series. Ever since it's release starting from the first volume, I've been wondering how the makers were gonna bring the whole story to. This was important since the first .hack game series before has already been quite wraped up. It turned out they made a whole new story and environment, but still having much corelations to the previous games.

The game itself is set up in the revised MMORPG "the world" called "The World R:2". With this, almost everything changed including the job roles in the game. But how it's connected to the previous game was kinda blurred in the beginning. To understand the whole game itself, it is better to watch the anime .hack//roots which serves as a prequel the the whole story arc in the .hack//G.U games. But even not wacthing it wouldn't be much of a problem since it just adds more knowledge to playing the game.

The protagonist here is Haseo. A adept rogue beginner player in the World who at his first encounter gets PK'd by PK'ers. Luckily he gets saved by Ovan. Then he is ask to join Ovan on the quest to find the key of Twilight together with his guild the Twilight Brigade. By the course of events, his friend Shino gets PK'ed by a mysterious PK'er named Tri-Edge. Due to this tragic event, Haseo than embarks on a journey as a PKK'er to seek revenge on Tri-Edge who has taken his beloved friend away. It is also after this that many mysterious things happen in the world and Haseo ends up joing the mysterious guild called G.U. and together with the members, investigate the many weird events that happen throughout the world.

I guess that's enough as a teaser. Anyway, for the whole game series itself, the development really did make a good job on making me intrigued on who the real villain was. This was caused by the deep intrigue and scheme surrounding the whole stroy. It was not until the end of the second volume that I got to know the real mastermind of the whole plot. This indeed make me as a player really eager to finish of the whole game to get the big picture of the whole storyline.

About the gamplay, well....I guess much of it is standard RPG for you. Compared to the previous .hack game series, the developers did make some improvements in the graphics and the gamplay. But one things that made me a bit dissapointed is the absecence of the double voice dub which enables us to swicth the voice played from English and Japanese and vice versa. This feature was available in the previous games and it was a pity that they omiited this feature in the G.U. series.

Overall, the whole series does offer us a great story. even after finishing the main storyline, there are still loads of side quests that you can finish, with many of them being very very hard compared to the quests of the main stroyline. So I guess it'ld be a while till we can finish of the game completely. For this game, I believe a score of 4 out of 5 stars would be good.