Thread 11929146

to think this was supposed to be a huge multimedia franchise, not just games but also anime, light novels, and all that. But it didn’t live up to the big expectations the producers had, and it ended up as a relic from the past. That’s both kind of amusing and sad. So what exactly made it fall into obscurity?

>Make one game
>Split it into 4 parts and sell all of them for full price
This shit should have been illegal.

>>11929146 (OP)
Whenever stuff like this is attempted you just know it's cashgrab garbage. Digimon for example is just another example of a cashgrab franchise but honestly with .hack I can at least see some passion behind it

Yeah that's super amusing. If you're 13

>>11929146 (OP)
The original Project .hack (the first generation of the .hack series) was a HUGE success, which is why Bandai greenlit a second "season" (.hack Conglomerate; G.U. and its anime, movie, novels, and manga), which was also a success and arguably the peak of the series in terms of popularity and quality. Then two things happened: first was SAO, and then the enormous drop in quality of the series after the G.U. era. //Link sucked, //Beyond The World was mediocre, //Versus was barebones, and the two gacha games (Guilty Dragon and New World) were utterly terrible. So, Bandai made the very sensible decision to stop putting money into it. They gave the series one last chance with the G.U. remaster, which also included a new epilogue, but by 2017, other than fans, nobody cared.

The first anime was good and it was pretty famous at the time. The problem is that a multimedia franchise can only work if there's a leading medium like Gundam or if every medium it's acts independently like Pokemon.

It was a huge multimedia franchise for 5 years or so.

>>11929237
Was it? Never heard about it.

>>11929203
This guy's sums it up pretty well.

Retrospectively, its a series with a ton of amazing ideas but also a lot of poor execution. It just never managed to get that one perfect game or fulfilling story. It also lost its identity about half way through.

You could write a legit essay on the series, how it started, how it pivoted, what worked, what didn't, the failed revival, and what it was eventually replaced by.

>>11929251
Yeah but you were born in 2005

>>11929203
I remember when SAO came out and everyone was like
>"this idea has never been done before"
And I'd say
>"Ohhh like .hack"
And they'd get so defensive and move goalposts, not unlike the oot cultists.

I really enjoyed the first .hack games and the anime, sucks about the drop in quality. The games definitely gave me dark cloud vibes tho.

>>11929269
I never really got the hype around Sword Art Online desu. The show and its concept never struck me as particularly interesting, and Log Horizon pulled it off much better.

>>11929281
What you have to understand about anime is that people get into it and drop it pretty fast. So of course Sword Art Online don't know any of those. Log Horizon? And much less .hack

>>11929281

I think what's sad is even .hack kinda abandoned what made it good initially. The online urban legend phase was just hitting its stride online as were mmo's so the early .hack media almost felt like a creepypasta in a way. You'd just have these regular people hearing about rumors then coming into contact with those rumors and bad things happening. There was also a mystery there too but it was often too cryptic for its own good and at the same time, not delivered well.

Even though I think GU had the better story delivery, I think by that point it had all but lost what made .hack special outside of some of the message board messages and the Salvatore cutscenes.

>>11929146 (OP)
I used to love projects like this.
Nowadays zoomers and retards would rather binge watching instead of waiting for the next episode to come out.

>>11929210
No, genuinely wasn't baiting, that's coming from someone who grew up with Digimon World actually

>>11929371
are you retarded? Digimon -is- a massive multimedia franchise. It's still fucking going

>>11929146 (OP)
It was huge for a while, there were somewhere between 25 and 30 volumes of .hack light novels and manga officially released in English plus even more only in Japan. The problems are that the anime are slow, the gameplay is repetitive, a lot of the manga/novels aren't great, and Bamco forced CC2 to make Link for PSP on a shoestring budget. The bad reviews and sales of Link were then used to justify less and less funding to make way for SAO. I'm kind of glad it was forgotten since I can enjoy it in peace

>>11929379
Oh yeah it is, I just meant that the media itself wasn't of particularly high quality. I mean speaking of .hack, //Sign was an alright anime with its own distinct atmosphere but the games just aren't really good, just wanted to say that

Did you know that SAO is actually as old as dot hack?

>>11929391
>with its own distinct atmosphere

I think thats one of the saddest losses with .hack aside from the whole "internet urban legend" thing. The art direction and ost were so unique. It was like a dreamy fantasy.

>>11929391
Gameplay is repetitive, yes.
But the setting, music, characters and story are all pretty good.
I really loved that login screen for The World every time you started the game.

>>11929406
True, I think it's the reason why most people got interested in the franchise in the first place

>>11929391
Fuck off, Digimon is great

>>11929394
Retarded post. SAO exploded with the animated series. No one cares about light novels

>>11929394
Not really. The .hack project began its pre-production stage in 1999. The first .hack-related content published was a chapter of the Legend of the Twilight manga in Comptiq magazine back in 2001 (and, funnily enough, the manga ended a few months after the release of the final game, Quarantine). So, no, SAO doesn't predate .hack, but the concept of characters trapped in cyberspace precedes both.

>>11929391
World is a great game massively hampered by a terrible translation. I didn't even notice just how bad it was until I recently replayed it. It's borderline if not outright nonsense at times; and it's not like it's heavy on plot or anything, but even little things like a Digimon considering coming back to town with you spouting multiple lines of gibberish makes it feel more confusing than it all actually is.
Then they had the nuts to experiment with subsequent games, but yes, they obviously weren't of the same quality in the end. We got a nice uptick with Decode and arguably Next Order, but nothing reaching the same high as the original game. I'm pretty hopeful for Time Stranger, though. I can't believe it actually looks like they spent time and money on a Digimon game.

And of course the anime was completely fucked with that dub. That's another thing I didn't truly understand until just this year when I watched a little of the original Adventure in Japanese. As a kid I enjoyed the dub, but good lord I can't believe they decided that no one should ever shut the fuck UP.

>>11929391
I think what I like about //SIGN the most, other than its atmosphere and its soundtrack, is that it’s just about a bunch of regular people who use a game to escape from their real-life problems. It isn’t about power fantasies or getting a harem of girls. It’s about a father who can’t connect with his kid and uses another player as a surrogate son; it’s about a paraplegic girl who can only find some independence in the online landscape; about a woman who’s sick of her dead-end job; and about a character who comes from an abusive household. On top of that, you also have a pretty decent mystery that slowly unfolds over time, and some pretty neat sci-fi concepts, like an AI that gains self-awareness and is dealing with its own purpose and the inevitability of its own death. People compare it with SAO, but these two series are only similar on a very surface level

>>11929954
Yeah everything about .hack//Sign from its artstyle to plot just makes it depression: the anime