Past and Present: Dot Hack Series

The year was 2004 and the Playstation 2 was in full-swing. With many much-loved titles available to the masses. It was a hard to enforce market buzz for new intellectual properties. Bandai weren't afraid however and with the help of CyberConnect2, Bandai begun building a new role-playing property that would take the world by storm.

The series that culminated from both Bandai's and CyberConnect2's many years of work was Dot Hack (.hack), a role-playing game series that was based on the idea of you playing as a character inside a massively multi player universe. Even though most of the games in the series weren’t online-enabled, they did a reasonably good job at simulating the feel of an online gaming experience.

The game has had many anime and manga spin-off's which follow the storyline of the original game series. The properties either used Kite and his friends or other 'The World' players to portray the underlying plot line. Through this, they all followed a similar set up in which players were either becoming ill or falling into coma's after playing the game.

Initially, the game series came as a four-parter. The games involved in the initial series were Infection, Mutation, Outbreak and Quarantine. Each game continues where the last one left off, requiring that the player has a save game from the previous outing.

The games follows Kite, a new player to 'The World'; a persistent online game. Upon entering 'The World', Kite and his friend Orca find a girl with a red want running from a monster. Upon accepting an item from the girl, Orca is killed by the monster and The World's server crashes. Kite, who contacts Orca in reality finds out that Orca has slipped into a coma and resolves to finding out why this has happened.

While the games were well received in the west, they became rare extremely quickly causing much frustration for the gamers who wanted to collect the titles. The cost of each game went up increasingly and anyone looking to get into the series late on in the series was left with an up-hill struggle to find the games.

Unfortunately, the series was unfinished in Europe with the next instalment in the series known as  Dot Hack G.U. not being released for fans of the series. While North America received the Dot Hack G.U. titles, I always felt let-down by Bandai over the fact that they felt Europe didn't deserve the titles even though Europe had a larger following overall.

My love for Dot Hack originally came from watching the Legend of the Twilight anime series. It followed Shugo and Rena who won the avatars of the legendary Dot Hack players, kite and BlackRose. Upon meeting the inner artificial intelligence known as Aura, Shugo is given the Twilight Bracelet, an item that should help him unravel the mystery behind the players slipping into coma's.

I also ended up with the Legend of the Twilight manga. It was the original material that lead to the anime series. Both are identical so no matter if it's read or watched, it's a great series for Dot Hack beginners to get to grips with the series.

From there, I attempted picking up the initial game series but fell short when I couldn't find the third instalment of the game. From there, an uphill struggle set in but it was all in vein as the price of the third game at the time was ludicrous. Since I was in full-time education at the time (high school) I never did finish off the collection.

With Dot Hack: The Movie coming soon, I'm feeling tempted to finish off my game collection but I refuse to pay the high prices still demanded by the gaming populace. It's a shame to see a series that was so well thought out unfinished because the company behind it got lazy with their publication, especially in the later years when many titles were left out of European territories.

So, what do I hope for now? Well, with the reincarnation of the series coming in movie form, I'm hoping that the series will eventually make it's way to the Playstation 3 and XBOX 360 in either a reboot of the original games storyline or a brand new set of games built around the same premise as the original titles.

There's also the wish for a Dot Hack MMO but this doesn't seem to be in the pipeline. This has been discussed before on many forums though and each and every time the news has been pure vaporware. It would be good to see the game entering the MMO field though, especially if done in such a way that the game feel like you're truly playing in 'The World'.

Lastly, I'd love to see all of the games in the series given the Playstation 3 HD Classics treatment to bring them to a whole new set of gamers. They are true role-playing classics that deserve some love and attention.