I finished .Hack//G.U. Volume 1 last night and I figured I’d write a little mini-review thingy.

First of all, .Hack is a RPG for the Playstation 2 which simulates the experience of playing a MMO game, complete with people calling you noobs, misspelled character names and people who type in all caps. In the “simulation of a MMO” concept, it does fairly well. You can walk up to anyone in the game and try to trade with them. I didn’t find being able to trade with everyone all that useful in the grand scheme of things, but it was a nice touch to have it there.

The main story revolves around Haseo (the main character) having his girlfriend placed into a Coma after being PKed (Player Killed) in the game by a person named Tri-Edge. You set out to find him, however during the confrontation, your character gets “data drained” back to level 1 from level 133. Haseo then sets out to level up and get his revenge.

The story is pretty good. It’s obvious that it’s a multi-part game and the pacing can move a little slow at times due to how much space they’ve got to play with. This episode is, obviously, going to be mostly character introductions and setup for later episodes. Even so, I found myself empathizing with Haseo. I thought he was a jerk a lot of the times and did things the exact opposite of how I would have done them, but when it’s all said and done, he had motivation for his actions. The story plays out through in-game cutscenes as well as some full motion video stuff. Characters also send you e-mails which you can reply to in order to learn more about them and the games story.

If there’s one thing that the game falls down on, it’s the lack of interesting enviornments to explore. True to MMO fashion, there’s a limited number of dungeon tilesets, and rooms which seem to be randomly generated. You can only see a cave so many times and think it’s interesting looking. The combat system is entertaining, but limited in it’s depth. It’s still fun for mindless action though. You can have up to three characters in your party at a time, however you only have direct control over one of them. The AI does a good job directing the other two, based on general instructions you can give it in the menu.

Overall, it was an OK game. It took me about 22 hours from start to finish which was about what I was expecting. It wasn’t the best RPG I’ve played recently, but I felt like I got my money’s worth at the end and I eagerly await the second game in the series to see what happens.

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