It’s not at all unusual for a video game to come out with the intent of capitalizing on a successful television series or movie. However, Bandai decided to be a bit more ambitious with its magnum opus, .hack. In addition to the 28-episode anime .hack//SIGN, the company released a role-playing game in four parts for the PlayStation 2, simulating the MMORPG “The World” from the anime and giving players a story separate from but intertwined with that of the anime. .hack//QUARANTINE is the final installment in the video game branch of the .hack universe, and it gives the series an emphatic and successful coda, with the payoff for gamers who have faithfully played through the first three as well as players new to the .hack universe.
In this series, you take the role of an unnamed player of the “The World”, acting almost entirely through his avatar, Kite. On December 24, 2005, the Pluto’s Kiss virus destroyed much of the Internet, and five years later, all the world’s computers run on the ALTIMIT OS. In the first game of the series, .hack//INFECTION, your friend Orca was put into a coma by a virus called the Cursed Wave. By the start of this game, Kite and his allies have defeated five of the eight Phases of the virus, but things have only gotten worse. The virus has corrupted the game further and even spread to the real world through ALTIMIT, causing chaos and putting citizens not associated with “The World” game at risk.
.hack//QUARANTINE is where the plot kicks into high gear. In earlier volumes, you take more of a passive approach to the Cursed Wave, waiting for it to act and then neutralizing it. Now, with the help of the benevolent hacker Helba and the reluctant system administrator Lios, you begin to take the fight to the Cursed Wave. With three Phases and other enemies to defeat, there will be a lot less time for leveling your characters and a lot more dealing with the virus. Most of the threads are in place already, so the story in this title is more slanted towards resolving issues rather than creating them, but there is no shortage of emotion in the finale. It certainly speaks well for the game that the sixth Phase, Macha, is a hall-of-fame caliber boss, both because her plot has great impact and she is one of the most difficult in video game history (care to have your entire party charmed by a single attack?).
There are two ways to start playing the game. If you have completed its predecessor, .hack//OUTBREAK, you can convert the data from that game and begin with all the characters, gear and completed side quests from that game (as well as the two prior titles, if you have been carrying the file from the beginning of the series). If this is your first .hack game, you start a new file with all the required characters and a functional but unimpressive assortment of common items to keep you alive until you acquire better equipment. There is a brief plot summary when you start the game, and much of the in-game communication is still there, so you can catch up to the plot before beginning.
.hack//QUARANTINE takes place entirely on the computer screen. You begin on an ALTIMIT desktop, where you can do basic tasks like read and reply to email, change the background to any images you have unlocked and save the game. Entering the game, you have a choice of viewing a message board, where you will get most of the information about tasks and characters, or entering the game itself. Once in the game, you will be in a town, where you can shop, trade with other players (whether or not they have ever joined your party) and do just about anything else you could do in an MMO other than try to kill another player.
The action portion of this game takes place in areas that are accessible from the towns, at the same point where you enter “The World”. Each area has a large overworld as well as a dungeon of three to fifteen floors (though most top out at five). Within each area are portals which contain monsters or treasure; they are viewable on the map by using the item Fairy’s Orb. At the bottom of each dungeon is a statue that holds three treasures. Areas are formed based on a keyword you enter, and every possible combination will work; any area that does not hold plot is generated at the time you enter the keywords. With five servers and over 100 options for each word, there are more than 5 million unique areas to explore. There will never be a shortage of things to do in this title.
.hack//QUARANTINE’s gameplay is fairly standard 3-D action fare. You move and attack with Kite directly, while your allies will follow and take whatever action they feel appropriate. There is a menu that you can open, which freezes time and allows you to use items Kite’s special abilities as well as to give directions to your party members. Usually, you will only give general commands (e.g. heal or conserve skill points), though you can order your allies around directly if you are willing to spend most of your time navigating menus. The interface is intuitive and keeps the game flowing nicely, although it would have been very helpful if you could assign skills to hotkeys rather than having to open the menu every time you wanted to make a non-basic attack.
Kite has one unique advantage – a bracelet he was given in .hack//INFECTION that allows him to enter protected areas of the game and alter monster data. The latter ability, Data Drain, is the same power that put Orca in a coma, but ironically is the only thing that can save him. Data Drain weakens a monster that you have already weakened and gives Kite an item, either a weapon or piece of armor or a virus core, which helps him access restricted areas. Each time he uses Data Drain, the infection of the game increases, and as the infection rises, bad things will start to happen – including status ailments, loss of levels and even a total party kill. Fortunately, you can reduce the infection level by winning fights without using Data Drain. In this title, Kite gets the last version of Data Drain, Drain Heart; this allows him to use the skill on multiple enemies and get the best possible item from each, at the cost of raising the infection level of the server greatly. Many bosses can only be defeated after Data Draining them at least once, and starting in this game, wandering monsters sometimes will as well. This situation results in some dungeons where you are constantly at risk of the harshest infection penalties, and you are implicitly discouraged from fighting unnecessary battles.
The player characters in .hack//QUARANTINE come from six different classes, each with a different specialty: heavy axeman (defense), heavy blade (power), blademaster (speed), wavemaster (magic), long arm (range) and twin blade (balance). You bring Kite and up to two other party members into each area. Each class uses one type of weapon, and the latter three have restrictions on which kinds of armor they can wear. As skills are granted solely by equipment, this limits what attack abilities each class can use. Battle-oriented characters can use any magic, however, by equipping weaker armor. The only other difference between the classes is their stats, but the variance is enormous. Kite is a twin blade, which gives the player the option of focusing on either magic or combat or taking the middle road. Allowing the player to select a class for Kite would have been better, but twin blade is a reasonable compromise between complexity and choice.
Your allies represent all the classes about equally, although you are somewhat low on wavemasters until you are practically at the final boss (a problem that has existed since the end of the second game, .hack//MUTATION). Very few of the characters have a direct bearing on the storyline, and those who do will force themselves into your party to take on significant areas. Each does have personal side quests and a distinct personality, though a number of them are aggravating – no one likes the heavy axeman Piros’ plots, except that he usually gets humiliated at the end of them. Your allies don’t develop without you. You must give them new items and help them gain levels. This is not as annoying as it could be, since money and new gear is plentiful (especially if you Data Drain a lot) and characters you could have chosen but did not still get some experience points.
As in the first three games in the series, you are given more tasks to complete after defeating the final boss. The first is a dungeon related to some plot from earlier in the game which requires you to Data Drain so often that you’ll need some luck to clear it, even using perfect strategies. The other is the item completion quest hinted at in early emails. This requires you to find every non-rare item in the game – over 700 of them. It only counts if you have them during the quest (so things you had and sold or traded earlier in the game don’t count), so there is a lot of backtracking involved. This job alone could take longer than the rest of the series, so any completists will be interested in .hack//QUARANTINE in perpetuity.
Graphics in this title have not evolved since the beginning of the series. The game does experience slowdown rarely when there are a lot of abilities happening at the same time, but generally the animations are smooth. A lot of detail when into both player characters and enemies, and there is great variety among the visually pleasing characters which could just as easily have been cookie-cutters. Backgrounds, on the other hand, suffer from a dearth of variety as well as low polygon counts that rob the game of some of the creepy and ominous mood set by the story. There can be issues with the camera, both because you are stuck behind solid objects on occasion and because you can’t attack anything you can’t see no matter how close it is to Kite. The game allows you to both rotate the camera as well as to focus it in the direction Kite is facing with one button to ameliorate this problem.
The sound in .hack//QUARANTINE is relatively good. Most notable is the voice acting. Bandai provided English and Japanese language audio, and both are well done. The characters all sound like they should, based on what we know about them from emails and other interaction, and there is legitimate emotion in most of the dialogue. The in-battle vocals during attacks are iffy – Kite’s attack phrase for his Tiger Claw maneuver sounds more like “Pelipper” – but you won’t be paying enough attention for this to matter much. The music is generally appropriate to the situation, and some of it is quite good (especially during battles against bosses). There is a music test for which you can unlock all the songs in the game, and doing so is worthwhile simply for the chance to pay attention to the songs from the eight Phases. The sound effects haven’t changed since .hack//INFECTION and are forgettable at best.
The game also comes with a DVD with two animations. One is the final episode of .hack//Liminality, an anime which takes place simultaneously with the game series, but deals with events in the real world. It won’t make much sense if you haven’t seen the other three, but it does provide keywords to areas with optional side quests if you watch carefully. The other is a piece called .hack//GIFT, which is a parody of both the game series and .hack//SIGN. It’s funniest if you have watched the anime, but is still entertaining on its own. There is brief nudity in .hack//GIFT, so you may want to keep the bonus disc away from the children.
If you’re only going to play one game in this franchise, .hack//QUARANTINE is the one to get. A powerful plot (including the series’ conclusion) and access to most of the gameplay from the prior three games makes it the definitive title in the series. However, don’t be surprised if you start from this title and find yourself wanting to go back and play the prior entries. This title is a conclusion, not a story in and of itself. The .hack series is the great work that Bandai intended it to be, and even published as four games, with the commensurate issues of price and shelf space, it is a worthy addition to any player’s collection.
