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Hi everyone, and welcome to the latest Journal Page! In news outside of this pages topic, I’ve just received a new and exciting game for the Sega Dreamcast, called Cosmic Smash! It’s basically a mix of tennis and Breakout (as if Breakout wasn’t enough tennis-like already) but in 3D! It emanates an incredible aura of stylishness, and I’m really looking forward to covering it in a future Journal page.
However, today it’s finally time to give some love to the second game in the .hack//G.U. series, Vol 2//Reminisce! As it follows on from the previous storyline, I actually played it almost straight after Vol 1, yet, for content variety reasons, I decided to wait until today before covering it. Whilst I strongly advise you not to start from this page, as it would be better if you instead went back and checked out when I covered the first game before starting this one (as they’re meant to be played in order), but I’ll do my best not to spoil anything major from Volume 1, so please feel free to keep reading if you’re not interested in going back.
Alright then, let’s get started!
| .hack//G.U. Vol 2//Reminisce |
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.hack//G.U. Vol 2//Reminisce is an MMORPG-like action game, as well as the direct sequel to the first Volume, Rebirth. It came out for PlayStation 2 back in 2006 in Japan, and then later in 2007 for the US, with both releases coming out just a few months after from the first entry. Just like Rebirth, Reminisce was not released in Europe until its remastered version came out, contained within the .hack//G.U. Last Recode pack, released for PlayStation 4 and Microsoft Windows in 2017, and then subsequently released for the Nintendo Switch in 2022, alongside the two other volumes and a brand new chapter, .hack//G.U. Vol 4//Reconnection. As usual, I played the remastered version on my Steam Deck. If you pre-ordered the original Japanese PS2 version of Reminisce you would get a special artbox, which is a special cardboard box to store the trilogy in (I had no idea this existed and now I want it XD). Sadly, American editions didn’t include this collectible, although it did have the unedited version of the first episode of .hack//Roots, where the protagonist Haseo first appeared (I’d say that this is far more useful than what was included in the Japanese release).
As explaining the storyline in detail would be huge spoilers for the first game’s ending (which is amazingly epic and I wouldn’t want to ruin it for you), I’ll instead just mention a few plot points, to give you an idea of the direction the story is going in. First of all, let’s recap a bit of the premise of the previous title; we play as Haseo, a player of The World R:2, a VR MMORPG, who gets his character reset to level 1 after being attacked by a mysterious Player Killer, Tri-Edge, who can put players into comas after killing them in the game, something that had already happened to Haseo’s best friend, Shino. Haseo is now looking for a way to save her, along with everyone else who has suffered the same fate.
With that brief summary taken care of, let’s return back to Reminisce. Just after the ending of Volume 1, the plot takes an unexpected turn, and becomes rather Sword Art Online-like for a moment; the characters get suddenly stuck inside the game due to a certain group of hackers, and can’t log out in any way. Even if we don’t see it (sadly, I might add), the protagonists explain it as though they could neither see nor feel reality around them anymore. You might be asking, “And what does that even mean?”. When you play a VR game, even if your headset covers your entire range of view, you’re still somewhat aware of your surroundings, and, of course, if you’re holding a controller, you’ll feel it, so you would surely understand that you’re playing a game, right? Well, now our protagonist and his friends notice that they don’t feel any of these sensations anymore, and they can’t even take their headsets off, as now they are inside the game. Sadly, we players don’t get to experience any of this, as there’s nothing besides dialogue lines that attempts to explain this phenomenon. Do you remember how on Page 28 I said “At certain points in the story, you’ll be required to log out of the game […], though we never control Haseo in the outside world.”? Making that happen would have been a great choice to explain these story events, but complaining won’t change anything, so let’s go on!
And if being stuck inside a game that can put you into a coma wasn’t scary enough, more mysterious characters appear in The World R:2, and seem to have the same powers that Tri-Edge has! But then on top of that, as though this wasn’t already troublesome enough, several known characters suddenly get infected by the same hackers who trapped the protagonists in the game, driving them crazy whilst also granting them the able to gain that extremely harmful ability as well! Not being able to trust anyone, poor Haseo, who had just learned how to make friends, will have to get to the root of the problem, although perhaps that may also provide him with the opportunity to get closer to the truth about Tri-Edge…
As I pointed out before, this game is an MMORPG-like action game, meaning that apart from the usual tropes deriving from action RPG titles, you have some other aspects that are directly inspired by MMOs, such as the importance of lore, the supposedly PvP Arena (Player vs Player), where if this was a real MMO we would fight other players, the structure of The World R:2, and the relation of sidequests to the main storyline. In this last aspect, something ironic happens, as we both get to play the “story” from the actual The World R:2 (even if it’s not anything much, as it’s mostly lore-expanding events), as well as the story created by human interaction in said world. Just like in normal MMOs, guilds exist and make up their own plots and interactions, and we get to see that by ourselves, without the need to find actual IRL people. As I said on Page 28, the .hack series is a good way to have a glimpse of MMOs the way they were in the early 2000s, without the dedication required in having to keep up with one.
The gameplay itself is the same as in Rebirth, although there were many additions to the system; for example, we can now use a new weapon type, Scythes, and change between the three available weapon kinds mid-battle, through the activation of a Skill Trigger, which can be invaluable when fighting many enemies at once. We also get other tweaks to the battle system, as you can see in the pictures below. Additionally, we are now also able to obtain a new Awakening (an ultimate skill that we can charge during battles), which consists of a QTE, which if done well allows us to spam as many button presses as we can in order to summon a powerful attack that can destroy nearly anything, even bosses. A handful of new status effects were also added, although they don’t substantially change much about the game. Other aspects that received updates are the badass bike, which can now be upgraded, or the added capability to fuse copies of armor and accessories to make them more powerful, since in Rebirth you could only do it for weapons and had to sell or toss any duplicates of armor and accessories. We also get an automatic card battling game, Crimson VS, where you can create a deck of three cards which will then be used to fight other decks. The fact that it’s all automatic is admittedly a bit disappointing to me, but at least we can earn more cards, many of which have exceptionally stunning art!
A nice thing about this game is that you can import your completed save file from the previous title, so that you can retain everything you did and obtained, from your characters’ levels, to inventory and collectibles. Thus, I started the game with my favorite characters at lv50, the maximum level cap of Rebirth. This actually made the first dungeons and bosses extremely easy, because if you don’t import your save data, Haseo will be at level 43, thus by being more than 5 levels above the expected level, you’ll have absolutely no trouble with anything. However, don’t allow this to trick you into thinking that the game will be a breeze, as this higher starting level is balaned out by the fact that you will gain next to no experience until you eventually encounter enemies that are actually at level 50.
If you remember, I mentioned back in Page 28 how the remaster increased the amount of experience given to the players, as well as the fact that the first game didn’t really help you out with any grinding you needed (not much in the remaster, but still). This is something that is likewise carried over into this game, although this time it actually causes a bit of a problem; you see, this game is sadly amazing at adding filler story and dungeons that clog up a large part of the game, many of which were originally designed as a way to naturally grind whilst rewarding the player with characters interactions and small side stories. However, due to the increased experience that the remaster added, many of these sidequests and dungeons are now clearly too underleveled to give you any experience at all, and the character interactions you get aren’t really amazing enough to justify it either. So whilst these were surely perfectly balanced in the original game, providing you with the number of experience points you would have needed in order to help the main story flow naturally, they instead feel more like forced padding in the remasters, which is admittedly quite a shame. Even so, I am pretty sure that this is only a problem with the remastered version, and after having put this into context, I can’t exactly complain about it anymore, even if they could have easily altered the levels artificially.
Plus, the characters’ interactions, even if not amazing, are needed for a certain plot point that I can’t spoil.
However, after this apparently useless arc, the fun begins for real! So many events happen and they’re all absolutely breathtaking, to the point that I’m sure that you will be completely hooked, desperately wanting to keep playing to see what will happen next. Even the final boss battles are immensely exciting, even if, of course, leveling up too much will make them a piece of cake. Once again, the story ends on a cliffhanger, making us look forward to what will happen in Volume 3! If you can bear with the “filler”, you most certainly won’t be disappointed by what you’ll see. All the characters get a substantial amount of growth, and it’s endearing to follow them in their new adventures.
And now, it’s recommendations time! If you have played Volume 1, you’ll definitely want to go on with the story, and if you haven’t, then play that one first, and come back to this one afterward. If you like the early 2000s MMO atmosphere, I’m sure you’ll love this series as much as I’m doing! See you soon with either next Tuesday’s new Italian translation, or next Thursday’s Journal Page! But first, here’s a collection of pictures of the now even more badass Haseo!
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