Think about it -- the original installment of .hack came out almost exactly a year ago. Every few months since then, I've picked up the adventures of Kite, BlackRose, and friends, and re-entered The World: a fictional massively online multiplayer game plagued by viruses, a game which threatens the lives of its players and destroys the very network infrastructure of the real world. This is a fascinating concept, for certain, and it's always been carried off with finesse.

I reviewed all the previous installments. I've beaten the entire saga. I watched the anime DVDs, wore the T-shirt, interviewed the president of the developer twice, and even played through the first chapter a second time after accidentally deleting my original save data. I've had about as much .hack as I can imagine I could squeeze into my busy schedule and maintain my sanity. And at the end, how do I feel? A mixture of satisfaction and dismay, I guess. This experiment in serial gaming wasn't what it could have been. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

The End of The World

The mystery of Aura is solved.
The fourth chapter of .hack starts off much like any other -- which, of course, is the problem. But the story does go new places; the characters have decided to go on the offensive. They know what's happening, and they've decided to take control of the situation and attack it at the source, drawing out the enemy into a trap and annihilating it. The tone of this game is different than the others, because your characters are striving to achieve something instead of reacting to attacks from the outside, and that's a very satisfying change. The story, as always, is excellent and well-presented, although it more or less exists in only the first and last quarter of the game.

It's unfortunate, then, that from a gameplay standpoint, .hack//Quarantine is an evolutionary dead end. The additions between installments have always been minimal. In the first game, the gameplay systems were all introduced, and its speedy gameplay was novel and fun. In the second, exciting boss battles and refinement of the battle system kept the gameplay interesting. It became apparent partway through the third game that the bottom of the barrel was being scraped, though. Out of desperation, perhaps, the developers just made the game really hard.

Well, even that wasn't enough, because by the end of part three, my party was buff enough to take on anything. The fourth game is neither challenging nor interesting. Even worse, the developers actually abuse the game systems they devised -- using them to bludgeon the player and pad the game, with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer slamming into a piece of sheet metal.