- 10/09/24 -
Note: I haven't yet finished my .Hack journey (I am currently still within The World R1), but I'd like to release a little of my heart here for the story so far.
I fell into The World through .Hack//Sign, not as a 3AM [AdultSwim] glimpse into a darker digital world, but from the comfort of my Tokyo apartment, 2023.
I'm perhaps a little younger than you'd think - I went to bed just a little too early to catch something like .Hack in its heyday. Instead, my introduction to the grimier side of commercial
anime was through internet discussions. The usual sites, I needn't name names. Evangelion, Escaflowne, Evergrace~ .Hack, Lain, FLCL: There's a small corner of the world built upon these
twilight stories of psychological angst, fading sunsets, and digital decay. They're captiving, right? I think there's a reason why things like Lain or Eva have a staying power. Recently
they've enjoyed a resurgence in popularity coinciding with the Y2K/Grunge digital nostalgia wave - something about these destructive dark dangerous takes on technology have a nostalgic hopefulness about them (in their simplicity?).
So .Hack, how does it fit into the upper echelons of 2000s cyber-horror-grunge history? That's the thing! It doesn't. Despite being positioned as the diametric opposite of SAO, it still fails to capture those who love so much to hate SAO (I am NOT one of them ftr). I think the series generally fails to hook an audience the way SAO did. .Hack is similar to Animal Crossing to me in that there's nothing tangible and physical you can direct your attention to, it's like a warm wave washing over you.
Tsukasa spends the majority of their time avoiding their problems, avoiding people, avoiding themself. Anyone who can look at Tsukasa and see their teen self through their adult eyes doesn't need a huge character analysis to understand Tsukasa. They're there to be felt, I think. This scene where they sit alone by the bed, mindlessly rubbing the eye of a teddybear until it falls out, then continuining onwards into rubbing the broken eye socket - begging for some sort of familiar stimulus to comfort them. There aren't too many words spilled on Tsukasa's mental state, but everything you need to know is visible in how they act. I've been the one repeating the same little motions, hoping for some kind of stability, letting my mind wander off somewhere nicer. Perhaps you know the feeling too. This sort of character - Hazel defines as a "trauma bitch", is abundant throughout this era of otaku media. Personally, the parts of Shinji Ikari, Lain Iwakura, or Ayato Kamina that I couldn't relate with, I was able to dive into and feel within Tsukasa vividly than ever. So, Tsukasa is my trauma bitch. Perhaps it's their body language, their connection to video games, or their queerness - but something within them was within me.
And that's the first strike against .Hack's post-hyper grunge renaissance. Tsukasa isn't immediately likeable, unless you are predisposed to understanding. It's the same crowd who yell at Shinji to get in the robot. .Hack was a little infamous where I come from (the internet), as its frequent comparisons to SAO were often used as a stepping stone to glorify its darkness, interiority, and. . . intelligence(?). For those reasons the barrier to entry was a lot higher. The show has a lesser budget, less action (who cares?), and less . . . what's the word...
Otakuisms?
The je ne sais quoi of SAO to me is its portrayal of the digital world as a valid parallel space to exist. These little scenes of characters lying in the grass, eating together, falling in love, breathing. Such a loving depiction of the kinds of communities and loves forged through data - I watched it as a teenager, and the story understood how real these things could be. Kirito's adolescent outbursts of passion and angst were taken wholesale at face value - what we feel is real, anywhere. I don't think this is necessarily what lead to its explosive popularity, however. The series also was excellent at blending these compelling story elements with trending otaku fanservice content. Harems, young girls, Isekai, Maids, Vine...scenes(?). It was able to sneak a lot of these overt sexual elements in due to its fantasy setting - game monsters and female armour designs and tropes of the genre. In contrast .Hack feels positively revolutionary in its portrayal of women. I mentioned it earlier, but Tsukasa is basically locked in to being either trans or a lesbian depending on your interpretation, due to the discrepancy between their player avatar and human self. I found this to be such an excellent use of its unique setting to represent queer online identity - truly superb. Of note, Mimiru is never a love interest to Tsukasa, but a sincere friend. The other women - BT and Subaru, are portrayed as independent people. BT is selfish and operates on her own guidelines. Subaru enjoys commanding the Crimson Knights, and uses the game as a space to explore freely (as she's paraplegic IRL). It's a far cry from the harem-type disposability of SAO women. Mimiru's armour is of course lacking in many areas, and BT is sold as some sort of MILF-adjacent character (?), so the series isn't perfect. But it's leaps and bounds ahead of SAO, and therefore FAR behind in terms of Otaku sales.
And I genuinely think that's strike 2 against .Hack. In my small time on Earth I have witnessed a huge mainstream explosion of Otaku porn-brain media. People will keep their retweets feed dirty and comment on main. I went to Comiket twice, and both times managed to be surprised at how much transgressive Otaku erotica was available. The west portrays itself as more conservative about sexual content, but within the circles of those who'd be interested in something as niche as .Hack, I think its lack of sexual appeal is a negative.
The last nail in the dungeon for .Hack is its game series. Again, I haven't finished .Hack//GU, but to anyone looking to log in to this world, the anime and IMOQ are a prerequisite.
Personally, I love both! I'm definitely not built for mainstream taste-making. The first 4 games are undoubtedly a punishing masochistic dayjob that ask for nothing but time, time, time from you. I never felt challenged in tactics, or skill - it only ever asked for more time. The blood on the dungeon floor is still fresh about this - anyone returning to these games after a 20-year hiatus has had to reckon with the game's idiosyncrasies. Threads are still being written about the slow, clunky combat, the tartarus-esque identitical dungeons, and the lack of interaction in The World. If you played, I know you know. We both know we know. So it's okay. I know we both love it anyway - and why is that?
For me, IMOQ was a chance to understand how .Hack felt for those characters I loved in //SIGN. I wanted to know their The World. When I first logged into Mac Anu, I found myself walking over to the bridge, waiting for a gondola of Subaru's to sail under. We both know it never came. I spent some time trying to piece together how much of this The World was their world, and how much was .Hack the Playstation 2 videogame. Because despite being the only MMO in the fictional world of .Hack, I don't think The World would sell - let alone be popular enough to fund a WonderHawk. The 3 core mechanics of the game are chatting in the hub worlds, dungeon diving, and puchiguso raising. It's similar to Phantasy Star Online in that The World is not a seamless continuous location, but a web of different pocket dimensions you hop through loading screens to teleport to. The combat is similarly repetitive, with the main appeal being the communal aspect. For 2007 this would doom a game, but perhaps in the world of .Hack it's enough just to provide an online world for those who need it.
What twists the knife here, is that of course - we are decidedly not playing an MMO. Whatever joy could be found in connection has been lost on the Playstation 2 game .Hack, as it can only approach about 1% of how it truly feels to play an MMO. Characters will run around you in circles in the hub worlds. Once summoned, they'll stay with you as long as you need them until you quit playing (without a goodbye). If you die, they can't do a quick run back to town to get you a resurrection potion - and you can't ask them to give back an item you accidentally traded. You can save (AN MMO?) the game in each town, and load old versions from before you emailed the characters. Your mail conversations don't impact gameplay or in-game chitchat. The main gameplay tactic is to constantly pause (AN MMO?) and use items. The more you open your eyes the more these discrepancies seem to split the game. How do you even make money in this game? Selling items? You only get a couple good ones at the bottom of each dungeon - you're supposed to use Data Drain to farm better items. But what about the players without data drain? Why does no one react when you use Data Drain in a party with them (without introduction). It starts to get unnerving. Not only is this game vastly different to what was portayed in //SIGN, but it begins to feel different to the game Kite talks about in his e-Mails. The disconnect began to tie into the horror elements of the game for me, a sort of
unreality - I couldn't tell how much of this was The World and how much was .Hack. And in a weird way it all wrapped around to being one of my favourite aspects of the game series (SORRY LOL).
The horror is where the game anti-shines the best. The air in the fields is thick, you feel it in the back of your throat - wondering where all the other players are, what's happening behind the scenes in this world. Deleted threads, glitched mails, characters you can't trust, and a reality that bleeds in and out of truth all the time. The cutscenes are few and far between, but their portrayal of fear and despair is excellent. Sometimes you're too scared to close your eyes, or look away. When there's someone in your room, sometimes it feels better to stay still than to run. I love the purple/orange gradients of the skies, and the way the dungeons fade into black around the edges. The way even the glitched texture are low-resolution. Aesthetically there's someone on the team with an eye for rust, someone after my own heart. The music takes a step back from //SIGN, which used this matrix-esque religious choral techno industrial soundscape with lyrics about insanity and reality. It's more akin to the Evergrace soundtrack, minus the emo/postrock influence. I do adore some tracks, but I wish there was a little more adventuring done in this aspect (I was looking forward to glitched/buggy songs!!!!). That said, the music really does portray a sense of ... being lost. Crestfallen about something you can't remember. Emotionally, it's excellent. I think as a package .Hack is really able to sell itself on atmosphere. It's why gifs of Mac Anu still get posted to tumblr, and why Yuki Kajiura is still slaying exclusively on the fantasy/horror/techno front.
As the game progresses the horror/mystery takes a backseat. The BBS and e-Mails become less important, and the grind/farm/loop bloats out to fill the space. Many don't enjoy Quarantine for this reason. I struggled the most towards the end. I find it weird to separate the games into their 4 subtitles - they truly are the same game, and modern analyis/release of the game needn't cram itself into Bandai's scummy marketing schemes. I would suggest this to generally be what sealed .Hack's fate as a relic. Lack of accessibility TO the games, and WITHIN the games. They're simply not fun unless you're already planning to hurt yourself with early-2000s RPG trends and stretched-thin gameplay. And for those outside of Japan (SUCKERS) it's nigh-impossible to acquire them for their home console. I got to enjoy the dark scour over small areas of Tokyo, hunting for the full collection in little used game stores in the summer - fighting heatstroke for just 1 more BookOff. It tied into the full experience for me - I've never played a game that was so actively hostile towards me for wanting to play it (even xenogears!!!!). It's truly a conspiracy of a game that seemingly wants to delete itself.
I still don't know everything about .Hack. The games don't really function as a complete satisfying story. The majority of what happens/happened is still buried in mystery - presumably to be unearthed in future installments. I'm taking IMOQ as just another (very long) password to a series of locks around the heart of .Hack.
And so .Hack will for the foreseeable future remain a broken little mystery that couldn't. Swallowed up whole by time, chewed up and spit out by more popular series, and buried by more accessible "weirdcore" "cybergrunge" "hyper-emo-post-digital" otaku series. I love it. I hope you know why now.