Dot Hack Suck

Least I got a debt card out of it

Okay, I buckled. I got the stupid card. I mean it was just sitting there on the hard drive. The game of the year in hundreds, thousands of magazines and it was just sitting there on our hard drive.

Six gigs of pure gaming perfection just waiting for me, calling to be used, shouting at the top of it's cyber lungs (which isn't very loud with our speakers actually, but it's the thought that counts I guess) to be played. How could I resist? It would be wrong of me to deny it wouldn't it? The geek police would come in and arrest me. I would be forced to give back all my membership cards, the free pictures of Angeilna Jolie, and my precious Babylon five tapes.

I couldn't let that happen. You must understand that. So I got the frellin' card. Does that make me a hypocrit? Maybe. A guy who spelt that word wrong probably? Most definately. But I got the card and started playing the game. The first 30 days were free. And it's a good thing because at the end of the that thirty days I discovered something astounding.

....This game kinda sucks.

Don't get me wrong the graphics were mind blowing, the....ummm....well the graphics were really good. The gameplay could have used a bit of fine tuning. A good example of this was how they overcame the battle problem. In all your normal RPG's put out by Square they have a seperate screen for battling monsters. You know how it is, you're walking along and the screen flashes, you get the weird chung-chung noise, and you move into the screen with just you and the monster. However, you can't do that in online games. My guess is that would take up too much memory and processing power to remember every single person's battle and remove them from the space other people could see them while fighting the monster. So what they did was that when you first attack a monster the screen doesn't change at all but you might as well be in a different world. Allow me to explain....

You're walking through the forest. You see a bunny. You want to kill the bunny. You click on the bunny and you get the little box with your options. You click attack and even if you're a good five steps away from the bunny you'll swing your sword and hit the bunny. Everyone else in the cyber world can see you and the bunny killing each other, hell they can even cure you as you fight and cheer you on. The thing is though is that when you start to lose if you click disenage and run away the bunny keeps hitting you. You can screens apart but to the overlord computer you're still right together in your own separate world. So you die. A lot.

This gets old pretty quick. That and the fact that the fights at first look like they should be of the action RPG variety (Your Kingdom Hearts, Dot Hack Signs, and Dark Clouds. When you walk up to the guy and hit him it means you hit him. When your sword misses the guy it means you missed.) When I first started playing I would move around during battles thinking it mattered. Then after my sword phased through the orc a few times with no damage I realized I could just stand there like a moron and it wouldn't change anything. Once you start a battle you can just walk away from the computer too. It has auto attack so you can go for a bathroom break and still fight to the death. It's kinda stupid. Where's the adreniline rush of moving around and evading attacks? Just hitting F2 and watching your guy do spells and attacks is no fun. I want to be in the game more! Not just the guy hitting buttons at the keyboard.

Then there was the story. I'm sure if I had bothered to look hard enough I would have found it, but from what I could tell it was lacking. There weren't any sort of cool recurring characters that eventually would join me on my quest. (like the black Ninja dude from FFVI or the simple joy of watching the Turks talk like in FFVII) They took all the fun out of RPG. It was just lone me wandering the countryside being killed by those god damn wabbits. Let me tell ya people by the end of a month you really wanted to just destory those suckers. We're talking driving to Square headquarters and smashing the servers that control wabbits levels of hatred. Bloody things....

The whole reason I play these games is to enjoy the witty banter of fictional characters while adventuring through an equally fictional world. I want multiple plots and subplots going on all at once then having them all come together at the end for some grand finale. Remember Final Fanasty VI? Each character pretty much had their own plot and arc going. Some even had two! The theif had his quest for redemption for being unable to save his girl from the empire back before you met him. He had some guru keep her in suspended animation to give him time to find the miracle cure to save her. Then he finally finds the esper to do it, and she comes back and tells him to stop focusing on the past and live.

The half esper half human girl who starts off with amnesia has to discover what love is as it related to her personal identity. The Doma guy who lost his family had to come to terms with his loss (In fact there's an entire dunegon where you go into his head and fight off his inner demons!) and he had to comically overcome his fear and misunderstanding of machines. The black ninja guy's plot you had to really look for. If you took him for lots of naps he had dreams that were like repressed memories of how he became this unfeeling ninja guy and at the end after the main boss is beaten and everyone's running out of the dunegon he yells out that he's going to start over and he runs off. There were ten characters like that! Each with their own unique personality and arc. It's the best game ever made by human hands! You can play it over and over and each time you see something new that enriches the characters and game a bit more. It wasn't about graphics or job skills you had or anything like that. It was about making you care about what happens in the game by drawing you in.

Final Fantasy online didn't have any of that. Everyone was clumped together and doing their own thing. Whenever I played I kept waiting for something to happen. A ninja man to be at a bar, or the guy with the airship hanging out in the inn. Something that would engage me in the game. It never happened though. I've played lot's of games by myself over the years, but Final Fantasy online was the only one where I felt alone.
-Mr.222 Feb 5, 2005