.Hack//Mutation Part 2

.Hack//Mutation Part 2 Overview

.Hack//Mutation is the second part of the .Hack series. The title adds various new features to the game including new characters and areas. The main feature of .Hack//Mutation Part 2 is to add to the amount of servers that are usable by players when interacting with “The World”. Mutation enriches the game play of the .Hack series and breathes new life into the saga.

.Hack//Mutation Part 2 Screenshots

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.Hack//Mutation Part 2 Featured Video

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Full Review

.Hack//Mutation Part 2 Review

By, Ronald Wartow

Backdrop

.hack Part 1 Infection (Dot Hack) begins with a bang. Something disastrous happens to your character‘s real world friend, while innocently playing a 20 million-subscriber base, wildly popular online RPG game (MMORPG), The World. To unravel the mystery of your friend’s misfortune, you become an online, ingame rogue hacker, exploring every corner of The World, even some virus-infected ones.

The hero is armed with the special skills of Data Drain and Gate Hack, and some colorful, talented fellow adventurers to fill the two other available party slots. Different adventurers must accompany you depending on the plot‘s development. You have some control over the others in your party, including upgrading them through trades or gifts. You can play only a single class, Twin Blade. Other characters are from different classes, with varied strengths and weaknesses, from a mage type (Wavemaster) to a bully (Heavy Axeman).

Gameplay

Gameplay takes place in three principal areas – towns, fields, and dungeons. Towns house The World’s servers. There, the player can save the game, buy magic scrolls and useful and unique items, store items, buy equipment, and talk and trade with lots of other players in character online. One town has an unusual ranch to check out, a patent homage to an enduring feature of just about every Final Fantasy.

The town’s Chaos Gate provides instant teleportation to a particular wide-open Field, containing monster encounter hotspots, a mystical spring, treasure, and lots of mysterious food. You enter three distinct keywords, some known at the game‘s onset, and others learned through play. Whatever keywords are entered, the difficulty level of the destination is helpfully revealed. This prevents a low-level party from being massacred. Once the keywords are entered, you travel through the Chaos Gate. (You can enter specific keywords learned to continue the plot, do side quests, or do unlimited exploring. Or, you can instruct the Gate to enter random keywords, and take your chances. There‘s also an option to enter any keywords you wish from a word list.) Every Field houses a single Dungeon. The dungeons, where you spend much of the game fighting for your life, are not overly large in size, and always range between three and five average levels.

Many have compared Dot Hack to Phantasy Star Online Episode I and II (PSO) on the Gamecube. Let us gently discredit this. We feel Dot Hack has far better graphics than PSO. The Fields and Dungeons contain many colorful, over stylized backdrops and settings, including weather effects. Dot Hack’s monsters resemble the beautifully-drawn monsters of the later Final Fantasy’s. Dot Hack’s world is gigantic with a seeming infinite number of locations to explore. PSO’s world is relatively small, and plot is threadbare, with meaningless, though fun, side quests, which instill no enthusiasm in the player. Dot Hack’s plot is deep and complex, with each subplot advancing the story just a little bit further. (Remember though, the end of this game in no way comes close to wrapping up the story, to be completed in the three games to be released later this year.) One visual treat, however, was lifted directly from PSO – the cascading rings that accompany the teleportation of characters to and from different areas.

Combat

Dot Hack’s combat engine can best be described as modified real-time. Much like the action-RPG, Kingdom Hearts, button mashing can be effective to beat monsters. Monster combat icons appear as large yellow twirling landmarks. As you approach, the landmark dissolves, monsters come at you big-time, and, undoubtedly, players will feel a healthy adrenaline rush. Some of Dot Hack’s many monsters do not stand around waiting to be pummeled, rather some you need to catch. Dot Hack lets you turn combat almost into a turn-based affair. The player needs only to hit Triangle in the middle of battle to pause the game instantly. From there the player can give orders to the others in the party, anything from healing someone, reviving another, casting a spell, designating a target monster. Without jeopardizing your party from the hailstorm of monster blows, combat becomes a calmer, more strategic, experience. This will help the many action-challenged. Camera angles play a big role in successful combat. You must be facing a monster to do any damage. As in many games, manipulating opposing environmental elements, like fire vs. water, is a key to successful monster combat.

Dot Hack’s cyberspace setting provides a wealth of Wow-inducing outbursts. The Data Drain option in combat is a great example. When a monster’s approaches zero, the player can Data Drain to reduce a horrendous, gigantic steel robot, for example, into a sniveling, puny monster, easily defeated with a single blow. Data Drain always results in a nifty, rare item or essential Virus Cores so you can Gate Hack areas of The World now closed, but needing investigation. One bad side effect – if you defeat, a Data Drained monster, but a single experience point is earned. One REALLY bad side effect – if you Data Drain too often without giving the skill a rest, you may overload and explode. Game Over. In the case of Boss monsters, Data Drain works the same, but what remains is no sniveling puny monster, but a full-blooded slightly less tough monster. All of this makes for interesting and captivating combat, a large part of the game.

Fresh Features

Dot Hack is replete with new and interesting features that kept us riveted.

To start, the entire background and story of a real world gamer becoming a rascal hacker, penetrating deep into a virus-infected online game, is quite novel. Combine this with Dot Hack’s emulating the look and feel of an online game universe. (Message traffic on the web shows many gamers mistakenly believe Dot Hack is a real online MMORPG, along with monthly fees! No real Internet connection is required.)

Just like in the real word, Dot Hack replicates your excitement level when “New” appears before a popular forum or on your email screen. Some of the game involves receiving emails as the plot develops, as well as new, crucial information surfacing on The World’s Board. (Look out for emails challenging you to a strange game of Tag.) The online game world looks very familiar with a bunch of characters wandering around the game’s towns, with the ubiquitous balloon icons talking typical “trash” to each other, even criticizing “newbies“.

Combat grippingly called for surprisingly strategic decision-making to succeed, not related to the usual attack or defend choices. Do you go for experience and upgrade your character or try for some special equipment or a Virus Core, vital to Gate Hacking? The innovative control of other party members became second nature to us after some practice. The game rewards a player taking chances, like entering a Field or Dungeon rated 5 levels above the player’s current level. On the other hand, the game scoffed at players entering areas much lower rated the their current level, by awarding negligible experience points for victory.

Dot Hack takes progress reports to a new level, by slowly unlocking books that contain much in the way of statistics and information. There’s even a monster compendium with tips for defeating them.

Some might complain about the minimal “Save Game” ability, but we thrived on it. You explore a very hostile cyberspace environment without the facility to save. Only in a server-hosting town is saving possible at the local Recorder. We may be a solitary voice in the Wilderness, but we like this throwback to the good old RPG days. Those of you old enough to remember the Wizardry series, may recall those fingernail-biting multi-combat treks back to the Castle just to save the game. In case you’re really stuck deep in a dungeon, a common item will teleport you to the outdoor field, from where you can simply gate back to town from the command menu.

Many pieces of equipment come with distinctive powerful attack, healing, and status skills, essential to combat dominance. The player must tradeoff whether to equip something that will raise defense or offense or something less vigorous that lets you use a powerful skill. Trading is the most successful way to upgrade equipment.

In a first, Dot Hack comes with a 45 minute anime video. This gives some great background on what’s going on in The World, as well as provide clues for completing the game. In a nice twist, voiceovers for game speech can be set for Japanese or English presentation. Listening to the authentic Japanese voices really keeps you glued to the game.

Though some may scoff at what follows as meaningless, we liked the game’s unlocking of some nifty new “toys” to like, some only available when the game is cleared. You can unlock many different background music play lists. Tired of creepy tunes, just switch to something more upbeat, or futuristic. Just like real world gamers, who constantly change their desktop wallpaper, new and different wallpapers are unlocked along the way. Some are concept art of characters, while others are full blown anime renditions of the characters. This makes for great fun, and seems to pump additional energy into the game. As you progress over a dozen special cut scenes or movies will become viewable after defeating the game.

Though Dot Hack’s extras and new wrinkles enhance the RPG game experience, much of the gameplay will ring true to those who enjoy RPG‘s. Expect plenty of exploration in a huge 3D world, frequent monster combat, tons of treasure to earn and discover, upgrading your character’s weapons and armor, and needing to level before tackling pivotal story dungeons. The status screens for the characters and all equipment are well laid out and easy to grasp.

Time for Completion

Game length in hours always concerns many purchasers. A short RPG normally takes a lot of flack, and many online are asking about Dot Hack‘s time for completion. (Some have questioned whether Bandai should have released a single 80 hour game for $50, rather than four 20-hour games for $200 for a single story. This matter is beyond the scope of this review, but our high opinion of this game as a standalone is obvious.) Our experience, playing the plot without doing side quests or extra exploration, is in the 12 to 15-hour range. Players side-questing and extensively exploring, aside from the main plot, can expect to spend 25 hours to complete the game. You can even continue to advance your character, after game completion, to get a jump start on Part 2 due in May. In the next game, your character can be imported from Part 1.

Furthermore, imagine trying to explore every nook and cranny of the fields and dungeons accessible by a large number of 3-word combinations. Doing that would put the game in the 50-hour range, if not more. However, at a certain point, new items dry up, and a single experience point is earned for any defeated monster, no matter how tough.

Shortcomings

While, as is evident above, there is much to recommend in Dot Hack, certain concerns to varying degrees deserve mention.

From the “Why oh why did they leave this out?“ File. Pregame game board traffic and information about the Japanese version released months ago had many salivating for replaying the game in “parody” mode. This mode apparently converted all Dot Hack’s game world characters into satirical comedians. Sorry to say, this highly-anticipated feature is missing from the version released here.

The game requires massive amounts of button pressing. Every item or treasure uncovered from combat victories or exploration (opening chests, searching expired adventure remains, collecting food for Grunty’s, as examples) must be confirmed with a button press. When there could be 50-100 such occurrences in a single dungeon or field, over the course of the game, finger cramps seem inevitable. Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance also required lots of bashing for buried treasure and chests, but the items literally flew into your inventory, a much better way to handle this.

The manual is woefully terse and lacking in some crucial information and guidance. While the ingame tutorials fill in many of the gaps, one extremely important gameplay feature is missing from both the manual and tutorials – instructions on control your characters directly during combat.

Final Word

We got a kick out of Dot Hack. The feeling of “just one more dungeon” dominated our lives for the 3 days to completion. The engaging environment held our attention without much effort. The strategic nature of combat, plus the convoluted plot kept us going for hours on end. The constant unlocking of both frivolous and important gameplay features created a “what’s next” anticipation. Now, if I could only read Japanese better, Dot Hack Part 2 is already out in Japan!

Final Grade: B

If you believe in the theory that “You can’t get too much of a good thing!”, then .hack Part 2 Mutation is the game for you. Mutation begins precisely where .hack Part 1 Infection ended. While Mutation offers some minor innovations, this second of a 4-game series brings back the familiar gameplay, combat, skills, graphics, world features, available characters, and travel systems employed in the first game. On finishing Mutation, I persist in recommending the .hack series of games.

With the series now at the halfway point, gamers can look forward to .hack Part 3 Outbreak and .hack Part 4 Quarantine, to be released in early August and November, respectively. (All four games in the .hack series have already been released in Japan if you just can’t wait until August and November.)

Story

Mutation continues .hack’s greatest strength, its intriguing and compelling storyline. The games takes place just a few years from now. Kite, the central character, intensifies his quest to discover what sent his real world friend into a coma while playing a trendy MMORPG, The World. So as not to reveal how the first game ended, for those yet to play or finish it, please note that Kite’s online hacking romps and eventful encounters through virus-infected areas of The World raised more questions than were answered, a situation clearly expected from the first of a series of games.

Mutation moves the interesting story along in a variety of ways. Special events are triggered after defeating special bosses and dealings with both playable characters and NPC’s. The constantly changing Bulletin Board on The World, frequently updated Web News Articles, and the copious email flowing into Kite’s account continually add frequent pieces to the giant jigsaw puzzle that is .hack‘s plot. Sometimes, certain games generate events or missives to keep you on the right track. (One hilarious way this is done is when one of Kite’s comrades forces the hero to head for a specific area or dungeon. No amount of coaxing or tomfoolery can influence the game character to deviate from the required course of action.) Story interludes, so-called cut scenes, are effective and concise. (Contrast this to the pure agony of sitting through the cut scenes in Xenosaga: Episode I, at least two of which exceeded 45 minutes in length!)

For those who can’t get enough of .hack in the games, check out the blizzard of other available .hack media: a book, several anime TV series, and the anime DVD’s included with the games, which provide background and possible clues to secret areas.

Gameplay

If you played Infection, particularly to conclusion, Mutation’s gaming system, environments, and look and feel will be immediately familiar. (Our Infection review on this website is found at http://www.just-rpg.com/default.asp?pid=265 .) Returning in Mutation are another large secret area, the need to raise you comrades’ affection levels as high as possible, the Springs of Myst, and Goblin Tag, and Grunty raising.

What’s new? Mutation does offer some minor innovation. Fresh playable characters are accessible to quest in Kite’s party. The number of unlockable extras increases, and there is a new small town housing a server increasing access to The World‘s areas. New equipment can be found, and the level and skill quality of materiel increases. Treasure chests now contain more than throwaway items. Combat has turned a bit tougher, and changed slightly with the ability to Data Drain multiple enemies, the appearance of previously-unseen monsters, and more appealing boss battles. Grunties (the .hack equivalent of the Final Fantasy chocobo) raised can now be raced in towns for special prizes. You can even unlock flashback scenes from a .hack anime TV series.

Based on my experience, all that’s old and new played out to completion by mirroring Infection’s gameplay time of 12 to 15 hours, for a no-nonsense straightforward run through the game.

Mutation continues Infection’s credible job of simulating a real-world MMORPG atmosphere. You may return to Infection’s two towns and servers, and explore the new town, then head for the ubiquitous fields and dungeons. In addition to servers for The World, the towns still include equipment sources, save game ability at the Recorder, and most, importantly, trading with others players in the game’s virtual world for the very best in weapons, armor, and special items.

The Chaos Gate instant teleportation mechanism returns to whisk Kite and the party off to particular adventure destinations based on triple-keyword combinations that fix the destination‘s type and level of difficulty.

Combat

Anyone having mastered Infection’s combat system will feel right at home with Mutation’s. Except for some minor tweaks mentioned above, the system is identical. A player still has to make the sometimes difficult, strategic choice when fighting monsters — go for the experience necessary to level, or Data Drain to acquire the good stuff and vital gate hacking Virus Cores? If the player wants to, a button mashing real-time combat heaven can be employed all through the game. The careful player may use the instant pause capability during combat. Once paused, the combatant may give or change orders to others in the party, including using skills or magic, or just reflect on what to do next. Manipulating disparate ecological factors affixed to areas and equipment, like fire versus water, is a key to successful monster combat.

Combat felt to be more difficult, as Mutation’s monsters seem radically ramped up in skill, tactics, and strength. My party appeared to suffer crippling status attacks at the beginning of many combats, something rarely experienced in Infection. As with Infection, there seem to be wide gaps between power levels of monsters in the same area. That’s not supposed to happen, since the keywords result in a display of an area’s destination level. Camera angles, controlled by L1, L2, R1, and R2 and the right analog stick are still crucial, since, you do no damage unless you face a monster.

Side Quest Mania

Nothing excites an RPG gamer more than numerous side quests, garnering the best equipment, plenty of intermediate goals, and collecting stuff for rewards. Mutation fills this need commendably. For more gaming fun, the Mutation player can even complete goals not achieved while playing Infection.

Mutation gives the player back The Book of 1000, split into 8 Ryu books (1000 is binary for 8.), which calculates your accomplishments, contains lots of useful info, and gauges whether new extras are to be unlocked. Maxing out the statistics and information updated in the books through progress is a game unto itself.

Valid Criticism

Unlike Infection, Mutation contains no ingame tutorial, and just the briefest of story background. The manual, once again, is uninformative and bare. New players will need to practice way too much trial and error because of this, and probably will be baffled. Though all of the emails, and board messages from Infection, are brought over to Mutation, that’s a lot of reading, a real game stopper, just to get the flavor of what the game involves. A decent summary in the manual or ingame would have been helpful.

Worse, there is absolutely no information ingame or in the manual on bringing over your Infection save data into Mutation. This anticipated and admirable ability is a linchpin of the .hack games, brazenly trumpeted on Mutation’s back cover. When you boot the game, an option to “Convert” appears, but what this means is left entirely to the player’s surmise. Through trial and error, I discovered that you can bring over all your characters’ data from Infection, but only if you have defeated the major boss at game’s end.

There is no mention that there really is a tremendous benefit to finishing Infection and converting its data to Mutation. Unless you transfer data, new Mutation players begin with characters assured of being defeated early and often, making for a frustrating experience. Because of this, I highly recommend that Infection be played and completed before tackling Mutation.

During the frenetic real-time button mashing combat, in many ways similar to Kingdom Hearts, there is one huge deficiency in the Mutation scheme, carried over from Infection. There is no ability to auto-target one or more of the numerous enemies flying around the combat screen. To target a specific enemy, the player needs to awkwardly spin the ingame camera, using the controls mentioned above. Moreover, doing all this spinning at times seems to turn the combat screen into a disorienting mishmash of colors, blurred graphics and statistics.

Tenuous Criticism

More than one gaming site, and a vocal minority of gamers online opine that .hack should have been a single long-play game rather than four full-priced potentially short, uneventful games with the same gaming system and world environment. I staunchly respect opinions divergent from mine, but feel these criticisms unfairly ignore recent RPG gaming history, the gameplay bang for your buck in the series’ games, and Bandai’s clearly stated intentions.

The reason .hack became a series of 4 concise games, rather than one huge game, was just reported in an interview with some of the games’ creators. (http://www.rpgfan.com/news/2003/1487.html). Apparently, the .hack series follows the customary route of Japanese comic books, where a sprawling, intricate story is normally spread over 4 issues. The first introduces the story and mystery, followed by a direct sequel. The third volume initiates a core incident or conflict. All is resolved by volume four. (Note that the Xenosaga series apparently is also set up this way.)

As for game completion time, Mutation, like Infection, takes about 12 to 15 hours sticking to the main plot, carrying out the appropriate leveling, and doing little else. If a player decides to fully exploit all the gameplay offered, completion time easily doubles, or even triples. Many will want to perform all the side quests, develop playable characters to the max, explore the huge number of The World’s areas, unlock all the extras, top out your hero’s level with the best gear ready for transfer to Outbreak, spend time to raise and race Grunties, maximize the affection level of Kite’s comrades, or just plain experience The World. (See Side Quest Mania, above)

As for the use of a virtually identical or static gaming system in the .hack games, Bandai has always presented a consistent front that .hack is a series of games, and a first at that. The official .hack website clearly confirms this and announces the new features in Mutation as simply more exciting battles by using higher level skills and equipments, improved party member AI programming to allow for advanced battle tactics, new comrades, and the ability to race the Grunties you raise for great prizes. That’s it!

The critics bemoan the fact that .hack is a series not a paramount game followed by traditional sequels that bring forth improvements to the gaming system. The more sequels, the more improvements. These critics seems to have forgotten that the sequels to some of the greatest RPG’s ever made used the same gaming engine as the original, including Baldur’s Gate II, and Icewindale II. In fact, PC RPG’ers have played those games, plus others, for over 5 years, and all have used the virtually unchanged Bioware Infinity Engine. On the console side, the triad of games of the well-liked Suikoden trilogy all contain the major plot device of finding and recruiting 108 NPC’s. Like the .hack games, those games did not mess with a proven system, and the purpose of the sequels was to advance or modify their terrific storylines, whether the games are sequels or not.

For those complaining about the monetary outlay for the series, there are less expensive methods to acquire the games. Game rental is now widely available and extremely inexpensive. Also, there are many online avenues to get the games cheaper if you are search carefully. The best online, in our opinion, is eBay, where recent knockdown prices for Infection and Mutation are in the $30-35 range. For Mutation, that’s an amazingly steep discount for a game released 3 weeks ago.

Final Words

After playing Mutation, I renew my unqualified endorsement for the .hack series. The story and gameplay are just too inventive and riveting to abandon without discovering how it all ends. The value of the series concept and its sound execution in the .hack games far outweigh the criticisms. I strongly encourage those “on the fence“ to look past the shortcomings. The one condition is that you should play and complete Infection first before tackling Mutation.

All that I liked in Infection returns in Mutation, plus a few new things to divert my attention. In fact, I, and all the legions of gamers who enjoyed Infection, celebrate the lack of newness in Mutation, plus breathe a sigh of relief that Bandai did not tinker with a great gaming system. That‘s what sucked me in, and kept me playing for hours on end. The very reasons presented by those who criticize the series actually intensify my desire to play it out to the end.

Finally, Mutation, like Infection, moved the enduring .hack storyline forward, but ended with a jolt that, put me on the edge of my seat. I eagerly await the next game in the series, Outbreak, to be released on August 5, 2003, where, as Bandai has suggested, I expect major plot events, all leading to the climactic end in Quarantine.

Final Verdict: 87%

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