Get in here nerds, it's time for frägment, the hardcore .hack online PS2 game where death means level down. Join us in an adventure to get loot, cool gear, and maybe find the fabled key of the twilight. Feel free to discuss anything .hack related too.
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heavy blade chads rise up
>Feel free to discuss anything .hack related too.
Because of the large amount of .hack threads over the past month I finally bit the bullet and played these fucking games. the originals and last recode.
I kept seeing people say that GU is more of a sidegrade compared to the original games, and now that I have the full context I'd like someone to explain why that might be. As far as I can see GU is an improvement in literally every aspect possible except for perhaps "the original games were really under-developed so my young mind filled in the gaps with something cooler than what they were actually going for" and all of it's flaws are things that the originals had just as bad if not worse.
I'm not trying to start some brainless OLD GAME BAD thing, I genuinely just don't get it. They were pretty decent games but GU is massively improved, am I wrong?
GU is superior in many ways, I've never seen anyone saying GU is inferior. I'm a GUfag myself.
I think you would be hard pressed to find anyone who thinks the first 4 play better than G.U, but the tone of the games are very different.
The first 4 feel like a mystery with a tinge of horror at times. You feel like your playing a MMO from the golden age of the internet. You see bugs in the visuals, you have areas corrupted and broken. There's a real feeling of the unknown as your stumble around.
G.U feels like a shonen anime, with the main cast having superpowers and can do the unimaginable. They play better, but it dosn't feel like a real game.
That's exactly it. The story an setting is a large part of the reason why the first four games are enjoyable in the first place and GU is just a downgrade in that regard.
People also don't really like Haseo. He's annoying and I hated that they tried to make a connection to the first four games, by saying he's supposed to be Sora, despite not being like Sora at all.
>The first 4 feel like a mystery with a tinge of horror at times.
How much of this is because IMOQ is one, MAYBE two games worth of story stretched out over four games, and even what story content they have is often just people saying "this happened offscreen btw", like everything with lios "trusted employees" doing vague anti virus stuff you never see.
I was way more invested in the mysteries in GU, like what the fuck was up with tri-edge/ovan, than the "if we just drag things out it seems more interesting maybe" anticlimax that quarantine ended up being
>Horror
the 8 phases can be pretty spooky, skeith in particular, but in terms of horror and weird shit I felt way more dread at the more fully realized cyberpunk dystopia presented through the news articles in GU, where kids are ID tagged, civil wars happen, the entire extended sequence where nobody could log out and how quickly that was brushed aside as fake news, ect.
>G.U feels like a shonen anime, with the main cast having superpowers and can do the unimaginable
and the originals aren't? Clueless kid is given an amazing superpower everyone wants literally just because he happened to be in the wrong place at the right time. Every single enemy in the originals is defeated by hitting it with swords in a video game, using your special cinematic laser beam, and one time against cubia where they hit the cinematic laser beam shooter with swords in a video game. They even still have the absurd dragon ball yelling despite this being a bunch of people sitting around in their desks at home and not actually exerting themselves, they just have way less cutscenes compared to GU so it doesn't come up as frequently.
>it dosn't feel like a real game.
the fuck does this mean. it has actual characters who matter instead of single personality trait goobers 80% of which don't do anything. the internet stuff is way more fully realized because instead of a handful of mostly joke web articles like people finding bigfoot and a few posts on a fourm you can't read, you have a bunch of stuff that reacts to your in-game invents or gives it more context (sakiki's absurd melodramatic rants make way more sense once you find out he's a literal child due to online jack) and the fourm is both more in terms of content, better written (it feels like actual people posting instead of exposition on setting lore and gameplay mechanics) and has it's own characters (you can't even meet 95% of the people who post on the fourm in the originals, you can run into almost all of them in GU)
> like everything with lios "trusted employees" doing vague anti virus stuff you never see.
Did you watch the OVAs that came with the original games? They show a lot of the real world things that happen.
After all, it was a multimedia project. You won't get the full picture just by playing the games. You're also supposed to watch SIGN, the OVAs and if you're further interested the books (especially Another Birth) provide great alternate viewpoints to the story and its characters.
Same applies to G.U btw.
> He's annoying
I'll admit that I empathized a lot with haseo so I'm pretty biased, but I felt like his character arc, even if he was an annoying dumbass at times, was a lot more interesting than kite, the self insert character who barely says anything to the point where his most consistent character trait is being indecisive. He also doesn't even play video games. Haseo feels like a lot of people playing online games "back in the day" were like and that helps make .hack lean on it's actual strengths as a sci-fi setting where people play a video game, instead of just a fantasy setting where people play video games (which is the impression kite gives off, unlike black rose he doesn't even talk about holding a controller or anything basic)
>by saying he's supposed to be Sora, despite not being like Sora at all.
I had him pegged as sora way before I came across material that confirmed it, personally. Ignoring the fact that expecting someone to act the exact same way a full decade later is pretty wacky. going from a goofy griefer to a mopey edgelord because of teenage hormones is a pretty true to life evolution (again, quite a few people playing online games took this kind of change) even if they don't also have to watch their friend get fucked up. Adept rogue is the closest class to how twin blades worked in the original game as well.
>Did you watch the OVAs that came with the original games?
Did you? If you did, you would know that those OVA's don't cover what I talked about at all (the CC corp employees who end up in a coma that get mentioned in disk 4 while trying to "contain the wave", whatever the fuck that entails) and is instead about a bunch of teenage girls and some goofball helping out during the final boss fight of the game when the server resets. That, and the fact that the one guy you can read about on the fourms is one of the coma victims is all liminality actually does to give you the full picture.
leveling up in fragment takes for ever
I think Haseo redeems himself by the 3rd game.
Hes angry to start, and for good reason. He slowly starts to get over his crush on Shino and progresses as a character. It feels very natural and by the time you confront Ovan for the last time, he is a very different and a much better character.
IMOQ's horror comes from how otherworldy the phases are, and how they are indestrucable. Skeith was the best example, both in how hard he was and youve already seen what he is capable of. The rest didnt have the same oomph, but their into and the static the bring sold the fact they were not supposed to be there. Compare that to Haseo going super sayian with no explanation for his powers and never feels like he is in any danger.
G.U had its own spooky events true, I particularly like the into to Vol.2 with everyone being locked in.
Sure Kite has the bracelet, but he dosnt turn into some monster with a scythe in a way that dosn't even feel like a game anymore. The Bracelet is just a hacking tool that he can use to modify the game. Also he wasnt chose, Orca was, he just gets it by accident.
Something done way better by G.U was the out of game stuff.
>IMOQ's horror comes from how otherworldy the phases are, and how they are indestrucable.
which is a novelty that goes away by the third one or so, even the characters just treat it like a chore they have to deal with instead of anything special after a while.
A couple cool boss fights does not an atmosphere make. If we're allowed to use small moments to represent the whole game, then the ending of GU volume 2 where you enter atolis bullying dimension was way more compelling than the creepypasta AND THEN THE GAME WAS FULL OF STATIC AND A DEMON CAME OUT AND DELETED MY FRIEND ONLY HE ALSO DIED IN REAL LIFE stuff (which is another thing done better in GU, because alkaid getting killed happens to a character you actually have a reason to care about, instead of someone you know for 5 minutes who jokes about how much of an annoying tutorial dispenser he is)
>Sure Kite has the bracelet, but he dosnt turn into some monster with a scythe in a way that dosn't even feel like a game anymore.
True, instead he has literal internet god bail him out at the last minute because he foolishly gave up the only way to actually defeat the antagonist in order to take out another one, but because he has the power of never giving up and believing in himself everything works out in the end anyway. Let's not pretend the original games weren't shounen as fuck when they literally star a shounen who dresses like a mix between naruto and a bike courrier
actually, to be fair to liminality, I guess it does also show the "consequences for using the bracelet/fighting the phases" in the second episode when everything breaks down. But the fact that you had to buy an entire extra dvd (keep in mind in japan the disk wasn't bundled with every version, you had to specifically get the combo) when GU can not only include more interesting consequences but have it in the game itself, its definitely not as good as how GU handled it
haseo is much better than kite because despite having worse problems than kite haseo can actually have fun with things. he's fucking stoked when he gets a cool superpower, he has fun with dumb mundane stuff even a few hours into the first game when he's still peak asshole, he brings the bants and is willing to call people out on stuff.
Meanwhile kite was always just investigating one area or another because blackrose or helba or mia or lios said he should and while he'll make some cheeky comments here and there most of the time its very utilitarian dialogue to keep the scene moving
he did nothing wrong
True.
Its not that bad.
Go offline, invite BT and Bear and tear ass on some level 14-20 fields
Carmina Gadelica, home.
meet me @ Dazzling Twilight
Coming.
hidla sucks dick for health drinks in dark alleys
>last recode
Opinion discarded.
Wait is this an actual mini-MMO? Would we all be in a hub world or something and go questing?
G.U. is better other than the story. IMOQ had .hack sign and liminality as an overarching plot with the games. The mystery of tsukasa,the key of twilight, data corruption > ovan and tri-edge.
IMOQ really should've been only 2-3 games though. Outbreak was terrible with the amount of data corrupted monsters and they're so boring to fight.
Yeah thats what Fragment is.
It's only 3 people per server, sadly, so we cant all get together.
But y ou can still run the IMOQ era world with real players. Which is pretty fuckin neato
Why is quarantine such shit?
>throw dungeons locked with virus cores at your face right at the start
>suspense of the game are all gone and it is just you beating monsters non-stop
>throw a bunch of dungeons at your face each locked with virus cores
>finale is predictable and anti-climatic.
If they ever feel like doing a remake, they should do the persona gimmick, have real life segments and game segments. Hospital scenes with Kite and Orca would at least make things emotional
Sadly the only hub is a text lobby, reminder that's a 2005 PS2 game. But yeah, you can go and grind with 2 other people
holy fuck....this exists? i was aware of the game but never played it because it was japanese exclusive and discontinued and whatnot. never even crossed my mind to see if any fan servers or anything was done. guess i have something to try later now, this all sounds pretty cool
i only ever beat vol1 of the original games sadly. fucking loved the GU games though
I would've played the originals if it weren't for the following
>Included the terminal disk and a new chapter
>The changes, outside of a new chapter and some minor visual changes, being entirely gameplay based (unlike say, the silent hill re-release)
>The fact that I had enjoyed literally every last scrap of "phase one" .hack content but hadn't spent a dime, so I figured I should throw CC some of my money.
Except that even with all this multi-media stuff the actual story in the originals is extremely sparse and doesn't even explain all kinds of shit. Why did tsukasa end up in the game in the first place and how did she get connected to aura? How can lios keep his job as the main admin for the world while being married to an infamous hacker that keeps fucking up the game given how shady CC corp is? Whatever happened with the vauge incriminating data the liminality crew finds, given that legend of the twilight (the very first piece of .hack media ever released) shows they still operate just fine. How come balmung is now working for CC corp and is also a big pervert/slacker four years later? What happened to the sign guys, or any of the game party members besides mistral and I guess sanjuro. Why does silver knight keep showing up in all of these .hack anime for no reason, is he a dev self insert like piros?
There's tons of stuff that just isn't fleshed out at all, the only character I felt really had an interesting arc throughout all these different media was albreio and hokuto from the ai buster novels, because their actions actually do resonate throughout the rest of the installments while they themselves have an actual ending that doesn't feel like it's arbitrarily being left open for spinoffs. And yeah I know kite and blackrose got something, years and years after the fact, that's not the point.
Even if we say that GU is in someway more "shonen anime" than the originals (which I personally disagree with), that's still a much better story if only because it's much more fleshed out and consistent. Everything you need to know about GU is all within the games themselves, the other media are just spinoffs, alternate takes with bits of character info that you can accept is probably canon in all timelines, and stuff that gives more context to minor stuff from the games. GU has a much more fully realized vision than the original series did, which is full of cool ideas and segments that string you along so well you don't realize how lacking in substance the whole thing is.
last recode made GU way too easy to be enjoyable.
the only changes to difficulty (besides an optional retry the fight option) are just faster level ups and somewhat better weapons, which I counteracted by skipping lots of fights and never using alchemy. The only time the game was hard outside of ovan and the one sin (and those were mainly just because I had to micromanage my party to stop standing in the instant death laser) were arena PVP fights where the enemies refused to stagger and would juggle me for half my life if I did anything besides fish for rengeki. CC have never made a game with especially deep combat mechanics, they just make satisfying ones.
I'd personally take a better framerate over having to hit the boss a bit longer before he dies, but I do empathize. I personally think the black boxes the PS2 version had looks a bit better, the cutscenes definitely have a lot of empty space on the sides that those were supposed to cover
The story and feel of IMOQ top GU in every way
If I have a PS2 with OPL playing games over SMB via a RasPi using a LAN cable, is there still a way to connect to the custom server?
>The people bashing GU
At least it was not //Link and the MAMA plot.
Not with SMB. You already use your adapter to stream the game. Dump it on an usb stick or your hdd if you have one.
>oh no I gotta consume outside media to understand plot
A group of strangers coming together to solving the mystery of the world is infinitely better than a generic revenge story. GU really is a shonen anime where Haseo gets a new form each game. The story had dumb plots like PK'ing and PKK'ers, why would someone care so much about being PK'd when you can just respawn.
They increased damage dealt to enemies, hit stop reduction, and made bosses weaker. It's too easy to be enjoyable, game isn't fun when you just kill everything in one hit before the end of the game.
Starter tips for Heavy Blade:
>Put all bonus points into P.Hit
>Unequip your -5 P.Hit equipment immediately
>Stack Warrior's and Hunter's blood
>One-shot everything
>Don't get greedy, if your health falls below 50%, heal, you may not hit on your next attack anyway
FFXI was 2002. Mostly it was dev-team constraints. Seems like they wanted to do larger servers considering that the member address system is still in but they had to lower the scope to make it easier to program.
I keep getting the "unable to find network adapter" message when booting the network adapter startup disk, what do?
Do you have CLR_DEV9 plugin selected or an equivalent?
screencap it
>A group of strangers coming together to solving the mystery of the world is infinitely better than a generic revenge story.
This is an extremely charitable spin on what actually happens.
>Sign: a bunch of people care about what happens with tsukasa and kind of dig into a deeper mystery before literally looking at the camera and saying "even if we don't figure things out it's fine, because someone else will (when you buy a video game)" and then tsukasa gets better so nothing else matters for them anymore
>ps2 games: kite and black rose spend four games having no idea about anything and make literally no deductions except "hey, these bosses have the same name as this poem, so there's probably 8" and then internet god saves the day at the end
>AI buster: probably the most interesting of the lot but it's basically just "man, AI is maybe people after all?" repeated a few times
>Legend of the twilight: lol
calling GU "a generic revenge story" is childish considering that haseo gets his revenge, in the first and then for real in the second games, admits how hollow it all felt, and then the story continues from there. even just focusing on haseo and not all the other characters who, unlike the original games, actually have some kind of character arc and focus outside of optional emails and sidequest dungeons, there's a lot more going on I can't fit in the span of a Yas Forums text limit.
>The story had dumb plots like PK'ing and PKK'ers,
The original games are about how some guy invented god and then put it in an MMO and events in that MMO being able to effect the entire world because they hooked up everything in the entire world to the internet and children are given the death penalty for making computer viruses.
>why would someone care so much about being PK'd when you can just respawn.
Not only is this an argument presented by tons of people in game, with nothing that isn't a characters personal opinion to condem them, most of the anti PK characters are revealed to either be huge hypocrites or mentally imbalanced children. Even haseos PKK autism isn't specifically "I hate PKing so much that I'm going to kill all pkers", that's just the reputation that came about because of literal fake news and internet rumors because he refuses to explain himself, it's literally just "this girl I like was taken out by a PK and somehow it fucked her up, I should ask other pk's if they know about this pk" and then beating them up when they tell him to fuck off and die - something that's explicitly pointed out as a pretty retarded and childish line of thought by multiple people, most explicitly phyllo in roots because haseo is a retarded child at first.
Whenever I click on the Dev9 settings in the dropdown, it says "this space has been intentionally left blank"
with that said
>why would someone care so much about being PK'd when you can just respawn.
This is an rather shallow statement to make about a series with VR technology so good that it can either literally absorb your consciousness into the internet (which is the only thing that makes sense for tsukasa given she isn't appearing to wear a headset in the hospital) or at the very least hypnotise you into thinking that's what's happening when actually you've just lost your sense ability to notice anything else (which is an argument that the LoTT anime and most of the GU stuff goes with). Reality being signals interpreted by your brain and thus your perceptions shaping your reality is philosophy 101 tier (what do you think hallucinations are?). Even if it's not "real", the experience of being hit with a sword is. People react to horror films and games despite them being way way less immersive than The World because the human brain in its most primal form can't tell the difference, it's only after those signals get processed by the higher brain functions do you go "oh, the train isn't actually about to hit me, it's just a movie".
And with that said, not only is PKing only one of the parts of GU, but it's not even just "pking is LITERALLY MURDER" that's the argument, it goes into stuff that happens in real MMO's too, like literally any kind of playstyle except "murder everyone you see and be the max level so you don't get murdered instead" becoming harder to do, the ideas that people don't want to deal with this kind of stuff in a passtime. I mean shit, there must've been some point on your life where internet comments made you feel a little raw before you became a fully jaded Yas Forums poster, right? It's just pixels on a screen, the same way that someone being stalked and constantly beat up, wasting time/exp in a video game is just pixels on a screen, it's still also effecting real life people. GU gives the whole PK thing about as much nuance as the arguments do in real life and never makes any kind of statement (the main PKers that you do see who aren't literally effecting people in real life, bordeau and negimaru, even get a lot of characterization and sympathy in the later two games, with bordeaux even being a party member without having to "give up PKing" or otherwise redeem herself
TLDR: for someone that says "oh no I gotta consume outside media to understand the plot" as if that's an argument, you seem pretty adverse to doing that in regards to GU
holy shit finally, a .hack thread. Just watched all of .hack//sign after reading through the thread last week. I'm a few hours into Infection as well. What the fuck was the ending of sign? Skeith shows up out of fucking nowhere, data drains sora, makes it to netslums and helba pulls the plug and THATS IT! Next fucking scene is tsukasa and suburu meeting in real life as tsukasa leaves the hospital. Did I miss something? Then the next episodes has nothing to do with the plot, just mimiru telling bear about her mentor who got her into the game. Then the "last" episode, Unison, is the celebration episode with everybody from the show AND the game together. Thats what I don't get, does that final episode only take place after the games, and the rest of the show before the game? Also how the fuck is sora there, he was fucking data drained. Is that just a non-canon episode?
the last two episodes were OVA's that came out after the four ps2 games that sign was a lead in to, the last one in particular assumes you've seen the series and then played all the games for it to make any sense
ok that makes more sense, but what the fuck about sora? Is being data drained by skeith the same as being "defeated" by the guardians? Because the guardians seemed like they only made you unconscious for a few hours?
So does Fragment have a small standalone story or is it just random grinding? As much as i like grinding, i have to sucker my friends in somehow.
>going through G.U Vol 1
>Finally get job extension
>Forgot you can't weapon swap with skill Tigger in 1
>Have to spam artes.with edge punisher to level the weapon skill
>still have like 10-15 hours to go
Fuck me I just want to play Vol 2 already
Sorry to interject, you two wouldn't happen to know how I can get my game () working, right?
Alright, just starting infection, I'm at the part where mia asks you to get to the bottom of the dungeon to meet her alone. It's a level 7 area and I'm 11 but I still have all starter gear. Whats the trick to getting better gear, just spamming areas to go to spring of the myst? I threw in some armor for Kite and it came out stronger but was no longer equippable by kite, it was a different armor tier. Is it just a crapshoot?
Sora became the body of Skieth. In the extra story's he takes Sora's form while interacting with another character called Carl. Sora's real body went in to a coma till after Quarantine.
the offline mode seems to have some scraps of story stuff but it was only translated through the tutorial so you can get data drain for your character in multiplayer, which is like 15 minutes max
it's about the grind, just like PSO1
instead of getting better gear play smarter, status ailments are broken as shit in this game and pretty much every enemy has at least one that works most/all of the time that makes them a helpless punching bag
Screenshot your plugins
okay wait, how would I know that? Is Sign not the end to their story? I know theres other animes like...liminality I think its called? But I just assumed that everything would wrap up in sign.
It is not the end of Sora's story.
Sora is the main protagonist of GU, he lost his memory's of playing the first version of the world due to the Skieth data drain and creates Haseo in The World:R2
>the 8 phases can be pretty spooky, skeith in particular, but in terms of horror and weird shit I felt way more dread at the more fully realized cyberpunk dystopia presented through the news articles in GU, where kids are ID tagged, civil wars happen, the entire extended sequence where nobody could log out and how quickly that was brushed aside as fake news, ect.
this is just a case of you having shit taste/not being very smart.
IMOQ are much, much darker than GU.