This place is almost three months dead.

It's time for an overdue phoenix down. And to revive our group blog I shall review/assess/rant a recent game I finished. It is called .hack//GU.

The game takes about 8 or so years after the first 4 volumes of .hack. The servers of The World R1 were lost in a fire so CC Corp. so they decided to create The World R2 from scratch not relying on the programing of Herald Hoerowick. You play as Haseo, the Terror of Death who is well known as a PKK (Player Killer Killer) for slaughtering over 100 PKs. The game takes place after .hack//roots (which I haven't finished watching yet) which more or less ignores alot of. The game starts off with Haseo looking for a mysterious PK known as Tri-Edge (who resembles the character of Kite but covered in stiches and with creepy eyes) who was responsible for PKing Shino, a friend of Haseo's, and putting her into a coma in the real world. Haseo actually finds Tri-Edge
and begins to fight him only to be easily shrugged aside and Data Drained reformating his character back to level 1.

Now you actually start playing the game but in a Xenogears kinda way. You get a lot of cutscenes explaining what to do next and let the characters shine. After about the first three hours is where you are one your own to continue the story or mess around going to fields and dungeons and finding quests on the message boards.

Like in the original .hack, there were two phases of the game. The World where you actually played and the desktop where you read e-mails and message boards to advance the plot. The desktop is extremely revamped. The are multiple forms to read now like rumors, the world, news happening in the real world in the game, even an art board where you can download pictures to use as wallpaper on your desktop. You can even read news websites that sometimes have anime movies played out like actually news stories.

The combat of GU is alot more frantic and action based compared to the earlier games. You have two types of attacks, a bassic attack and a charged attack to break through guards. You can even block now to reduce damage. Skills are carred out through a trigger menu by pressing R1 and then a face button to initiate a skill. Also when you damage an enemy enough, purple rings will spin around signalling that they have been "protect break" and allows you to do a RENGEKI (which is tons of fun to yell) which is when you do a skill from the trigger menu allowing you do massive damage and gain some moral to put in the moral meter used for awakenings. Awakenings are more or less limit breaks that come in two flavors, beast and demon. Beast gives you added strength and faster attack speed. Demon allows you to tap the X button to do an all out magic attack, the faster you press the faster the damage piles up.

Haseo happens to be a new class called a multi-weapon that can use more than one weapon in the game. Story wise there's a point distribution system that affects what weapons you can use but haseo chose to go with twin blades, heavy swords and scythes. In Vol. 1 you can only use twin blades and heavy swords as you can only do one class up quest as it's a story based event in the World. This allows the combat a little variety.

So far my only gripes about the game are the fact that there just aren't as many items, armor and weapons in here like in the originals. The party list is also fairly short compared the the first vol of .hack, but the story, combat and pretty stylized visuals more than make up for these short comings.