LogFAQs > #929756012

WhiskeyDisk posted...

Even the Raidou Kuzunoha games were better than .hack overall.

Again, I'd disagree, but that's because we're back to the problem that I don't give one iota of a shit for that entire franchise.

If you're going to try and argue .hack down in my eyes by presenting RPG franchises that are actually "better", you'd have to put it up against games I actually consider worth playing. The aforementioned Suikoden V fits the mold, but kind of falls down because III was a little wonky, and IV and Tactics pull the franchise average as a whole way down. Final Fantasy could have been a contender, except that stalls out after FFX for me, and never recovers (and had already stumbled with FFVIII, exposing its feet of clay). Dragon Quest could throw its hat into the ring, but as far as I'm concerned that pretty much peaked with DWIII (no matter how much the Japanese may love it).

I'd even accept Kingdom Hearts as a possibility, because I and II were very strong games. But that franchise shot itself in the foot by (ironically) doing something similar to what I've been praising .hack for - releasing so many side games that it drowned all of the elements of the series that was actually appealing in the first place. Though in KH's case, it's also breaking the same rules that I complained about for Halo post-KHII - making the supplementary material mandatory more than optional, and falling into the trap of being WAAAY too "Japanese-y" (at least with the non-Disney characters).



WhiskeyDisk posted...

I mean, to each their own Ent, but $120 to play what amounts to a mediocre 60 hour rpg that was artificially split up into episodes in the PS2 era is the sort of thing that got us to the state of modern gaming we're in now...

HARD, hard disagree. .hack really wasn't an inspiration for publisher fuckery that followed. If anything, the fact that no one else really followed the same model argues the exact opposite.

If we're going to be honest with ourselves, PC gaming was the bad influence when it comes to fuckery, and the trend for consoles to try and be like big brother PC (which I said at the time was going to come back to bite all of us on the ass) is what opened the door to constant post-release dickings. DLC in general was more an outgrowth of expansion packs as a concept (which absolutely predated .hack), and microtransactions evolved along completely different lines (and mostly stemmed from the ease of always on connectivity and post-launch patching fusing with the idea of in-game cheats). We didn't jump directly from .hack to horse armor in Oblivion.

But in its own time, I'd argue it wasn't as bad as you're implying it was even then. Just in terms of the games alone, I'd say a pure numerical breakdown of time spent/price, I wound up spending somewhere between $1.50-$2 an hour (closer to $1 per hour with GU) - which is better than a LOT of other games I've played over the years (including a lot of earlier RPGs). And that's just assuming a single playthrough (which is NOT how I play RPGs, at all). But that's skewed even more when you realize the original games each came with a DVD that had Liminality included, so you weren't just paying for the game alone (and yes, I acknowledge for some people having a packed in anime DVD is more of a minus than a plus. But if we're talking objective cost/value, it's still a factor).

Because of how it was handled, I find it easy to see it more as an experiment in cross-media storytelling than just a cynical marketing ploy. In the same way that ARGs were a popular thing for a while, or how some games would have in-universe web sites (or how older Japanese games would have art books to tell expanded stories),
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