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Reminisce is the middle leg of the .hack//G.U. saga, and that causes a couple of problems. It can only add so much in the way of new gameplay material, because it was obviously made on a schedule and it’s working with the ground rules established in last year’s first volume. Story-wise, it’s the bridge between the intriguing beginning and the exciting conclusion, something like the interest-maintaining in-between.

At this point, is .hack’s episodic approach proving such a good idea at all? Certainly G.U. made a smart decision cutting down its running time to three installments, instead of the four volumes in the original .hack. Slogging through two games just to make the halfway point was clearly too much of a demand in that case (too much for all but the most hardcore fans, anyway). “Beginning, middle, end” is better than “beginning, middle, even more middle, finally the end.”

Cyber Connect2 is a talented developer, and it’s definitely come up with a game’s worth of good ideas in G.U. Whether those ideas are enough to divvy up across three full releases, though, and 100-odd hours of gameplay, is a tougher question to answer.

Too Hacked Up

As mentioned above, in the gameplay department, Reminisce makes only small improvements and changes. In combat, several weapons get longer combos and different charge mechanics (increasing the level cap, if you will), and there are more hidden side-quests to spend your extra time with.

In keeping with the current fashion in card-battle mini-games, .hack also finally gets…yeah, a card-battle mini-game. “Crimson Versus,” to its credit, doesn’t require a lot of effort. After building a deck (of exactly four cards), you send it out to duel with other decks automatically. Fights and their attendant rewards are resolved and toted up every minute of game time. All you need to do is periodically check on your deck’s won-loss record and tweak it if you like, while collecting prizes like booster packs and the occasional useful in-game widget. It certainly doesn’t waste very much of your time, but on the flip side it’s not much of a challenge either.

As for things that actually do take up a significant amount of game time, G.U.’s action combat system is still a welcome addition. It’s a lot more fun to hammer on buttons in real time than to watch combat unfold as it did in the first series.

What’s wearing down its welcome, though, is the selection of enemies you get to kill with those combat moves. Reminisce has a pretty big bestiary, but they’re not spread evenly enough around the different game areas. A given dungeon level, which can take a fair chunk of time to clear, may contain only one encounter, repeated over and over. Fighting the same enemies a dozen times in succession goes well beyond making the point.

Around the World

G.U. is repeating itself in other ways. The game’s narrative uses the same simple structure for every leg of the story – reveal a little background in dribs and drabs, schlep off to get a MacGuffin from a dungeon, go back to hear the next not-so-shocking revelation, repeat. Many RPGs work the same way, true enough, but G.U. is particularly obvious about it. The concept and setting are creative, but the plot that unfolds from there on isn’t.

Keep in mind, it's still neat to see fictional world built around some of the basic elements of online gaming societies. You have your online "friends," rival guilds of players, griefers to deal with, message-board drama, player-versus-player beefing, and other fun stuff like that. At the same time, though, .hack's portrayal of an online game world is getting behind the times, in this new age of World of Warcraft and the like. The biggest problem is that it simply isn't crowded enough. It needs more going on in the background to feel like more than what it obviously is (i.e., a dolled-up single-player game).

It also needs more believable dialogue, and after two games the English voices are distinctly grating. The main character, Haseo, is on the right track, because when he's not forced to holler overwrought anime tough-guy lines, he talks more or less like a normal human being. The chirpy female sidekick, however, is painful, especially through the filter slapped over her voice very early in the game, and the long-winded monotone Jedi Master acts from characters like Ovan and Master Yata need to go. The people in .hack’s world are supposed to be just that – ordinary people playing an online game. It stands to reason they ought to speak a little less “in character.”

Down the Home Stretch

All these caveats aside, however, Reminisce is still a decent dungeon-crawl at heart. Once you’ve escaped the very first couple of hours, which have some of the longest and worst talking-heads bits, the game leaves ample room to ignore the plot in favor of hacking around the random levels. The monster variety improves somewhat down the stretch, and there’s plenty of loot to scoop up down there, which remains a tempting incentive even when the story is starting to drag.

The third volume of G.U. is going to need to step up, though. Once again, it’s a good thing that fans won’t have to sit through two games worth of middle, but even this shortened series demands a pretty big investment from the player. .hack’s story can’t afford to just coast to a conclusion – that investment deserves a real payoff at the end.

Article by: D. F. Smith