HA! Bet none of you heard of THIS one! .hack, an action/strategy RPG. This series has an AWESOME story. I love it. The characters were unique and memorable. The villain was awesome. The plot line was even new for it's time (basically Sword Arts Online before Sword Arts Online for you anime nerds out there, but with more mythology and symbolism. And before you ask, no, it's not pretentious about it). So what's the problem here?
Well, honestly, it's not the gameplay. It's not the most inspired, but it wasn't bad. The problem is how it's delivered. The game as a whole is four disks. Each disk is sold SEPERATELY. When they were new, they were forty dollars. PER DISK! The blow is softened by the fact they were sold with a part of an OVA that accompanied (and did in fact add to) the story with each disk (well, until G.U., which has no excuse in that regard), but that doesn't really do much, especially today when the whole package is still an accumulative total of $120 used from Amazon (you might not get the OVA disks, either).
G.U. is something of a different beast because it's updated with a darker story, a more robust combat system, three disks to the last .hack series' four, and a lot less pointless side-questing stuff. However, without an accompanying OVA, there's really no justifying the old $40 price point from back in the day that EACH DISK HAD!
So yeah. There's a lot to love about these series, but the way they were sold, nobody wanted to buy them, and for that, I am disappoint. So if they were repackaged for one case per series, maybe put the whole OVA onto ONE disk to accompany, .hack would be something worthwhile, but for now...there's a reason why it hasn't seen beyond the edge of the bargain bin.
