What's Wrong With "The World"

by Kris Schnee

The ".hack" franchise is a clever new multimedia enterprise tying together games, books, and anime, and at its center is a bad idea called "The World." The story of .hack revolves around The World, a fictional online RPG created in the early 21st century, yet The World's design lags decades behind real RPGs and detracts from the plot and gameplay of the (real) video games.

In the two .hack games now available (".hack//Infection" and ".hack//Mutation"), heroes Kite and BlackRose live ordinary lives as students in Japan while playing The World. The games take place completely in The World, so the actual player of .hack//Infection controls a fictional person playing a video game. The anime DVDs that come with the games, collectively called .hack//Liminality, cover what's happening in "real" Japan during the games.

Despite the mind-bending multiple levels of reality in .hack, the gameplay shows no originality. Most of the time Kite and friends go through the standard dungeon-crawl: Buy potions and equipment in town. Enter an empty grassland/snow field/whatever filled with monsters to kill. Find a dungeon entrance. Explore a series of randomly-connected rectangular rooms and kill monsters. Get the treasure. Return to town and repeat. The cycle gets old quickly, especially since random dungeons are monotonous and require no thought to explore.

Real MMORPGs have gone far beyond The World in complexity; see for instance the inter-city wars and base-building in "Shadowbane" or the fealty system of "Acheron's Call." So have even the largest single-player RPGs ("Morrowind") and tabletop RPGs ("Blue Planet" and "World Tree"). The future of gaming -- the direction of innovation -- lies with these games, not in a return to "Dungeons & Dragons."

The dungeon-crawl theme of The World isn't the only thing primitive about its design. Characters are limited to D&D stereotypes like sword fighters, axe fighters, and staff-wielding mages. Though the .hack games are only supposed to be a simulation of The World, and not the real future RPG, there's no sign that any character development takes place outside the usual stat boosts characters gain with experience. Compare the fixed classes of The World with a game like Final Fantasy Tactics, where you could build a gun-wielding priest with black magic, or even with Grandia where each character could master multiple weapons and focus on various magic types. The dungeons don't exist for any story-related reason; that is, they're not supposed to be the ruins of an ancient civilization or dens of monsters which attack the towns. Because there's no plot behind the dungeons, there's no architectural theme beyond color schemes and decorations (eg. clockwork versus lava in the bottomless pits), and one is the same as another. They exist for the sole purpose of killing monsters and taking their stuff, a tradition that's been made fun of in recent games like "Munchkin" and "Progress Quest."

Another problem is the emptiness of The World. The .hack games' towns are tiny and hold nothing but shops selling adventuring gear. Where is the Scarlet Knights' headquarters seen in the anime series .hack//SIGN? Where are the gondolas plying the canals of Mac Anu? In the fields and dungeons there's equally little to do, since the "buildings" and dungeon furniture can't be interacted with in any way. No knocking over the torches, no dodging the guillotine blades, no pulling down the tapestries. Even in .hack//SIGN, probably the only interaction someone has with The World besides dungeon-crawling is Tsukasa brushing away a beetle. The World has more in common with twentieth-century RPGs than with the future of gaming.

The story is the redeeming feature of .hack. Very briefly, it involves people who've fallen comatose in the real world and become trapped in The World, where they investigate a virus that's corrupting everyone's favorite game and threatening to destroy the computer-dependent real world. It's the "metagaming" aspect that makes .hack interesting: characters who might be AIs, dungeons overflowing with Matrixy static and system glitches, and the players' temptation to find each other in the real world. .hack//SIGN focuses very little on dungeon-crawling because it's not interesting. It's cliche and involves no plot or character development. But to discover the rest of the real plot, players must slog through the dungeon-crawl part of the .hack games.

What would make the .hack franchise really memorable would be a redesign of The World. The random dungeon-crawling could be replaced with adventuring areas that exist for an in-game reason (mines, castles, ruins), and with gameplay that arises from interaction between characters or between characters and The World -- you know, role-playing. Guilds, kingdoms, wars, revolutions, colonies, archaeology, and trade are all adventure fodder. Ideally The World would be so immersive that a tree could be climbed, carved into, cut down, or made into a swing, because such interaction opens up potential for new kinds of stories. The anime series wouldn't have to gloss over how characters spend their time. Instead of being a throwback, the game at the center of .hack could become an example of the real future of RPGs.

Kris Schnee loves the music from .hack//SIGN, anyway, and once wrote a bad story eerily similar to that series.