.Hack//Infection is the first of a 4 games series
developed and published by Bandai. This Action/RPG game by itself would stand
little of a chance among all the popular RPG's but with the upcoming releases of
.Hack//Mutation, .Hack//Outbreak and .Hack//Quarantine the "dot hack" series
promise a lot.

    The game takes place in a game. A little confusing but you
get used to it after some time. You will be even more surprised to find out that
the environment of the game is set to be that of an MMORPG, however you don't to
go on-line to play it. As weird as it gets this is an on-line game that you play
completely off-line. However the environment is so well prepared that you will
actually believe you are on-line. First of all you start off at your desktop.
Here is where you can check your e-mail, news, change your wallpaper, the music
that plays while you are in the desktop, well in other words the OS is not
windows! Most importantly in the desktop you can launch the game. Once launched
you get to the log-in screen where you will have 2 options. Start playing or
read the message boards. This already adds up for an on-line feeling. To make it
even better, the characters are so well programmed that they will talk to you
differently every time, it will take a long time until they start repeating one
thing over and over. There are a lot of characters. You can trade with each of
them. Trading is vital in the game. An On-Line game played off-line, innovative
isn't it? The game is called "The World"!



    The mystery of the game starts after your friend, called
"Orca" (in the world) invites you to join him in the game. You accept, register
and login to the delta server. You find him in the town and he takes you through
a well done tutorial which will explain all the basics to you. This tutorial
takes place in a Level 1 Field, thus meaning that a Level 1 user should have no
trouble in passing the level. However the middle of the tutorial they both find
a ghostly looking girl, floating. She is being chased by a gigantic monster,
certainly not level 1. Orca gets a bad feeling about it but you continue. Then
you find yourself outside, in some place, and the girl gives Orca a book. This
book is very powerful, and as she said it can lead either to destruction, or
salvation. The girl then disappears and the monster appears. Orca in a desperate
attempt to defend you starts fighting him. All his attacks miss, he is stunned.
The powerful monster will attack him, and do a data drain (probably the most
powerful attack in the game). Orca then disappears and the monster does too. You
take the book and leave. In the real world, you find your friend in a coma.
Because you want to know why that happened you keep playing the game. The
adventure begins.



    Once you login to the game again you will find the server
with problems. After you read your email and message board posts the server will
be kind of fixed. Once you log-in you will start of in a town. You will be in
the Delta server. All the servers are alike. There is a town where you can buy
stuff (weapons, spells, etc...). In the town you can also store your items and
save the game. There is also a portal which wraps you to a field according to
the keywords you set. You get keywords by reading message board posts and
talking to people. An example would be "Bursting - Discovered - Aqua Field".
According to the keywords you set you will get different level enemies. After
you set the keywords it tells you the level and you choose if you would like to
go in or not. The keyword system is very good indeed. You will have a lot of
options, a lot of fields to go to, and a lot of dungeons to pass. All the
keyword combinations make the game very long, you will enjoy it. After you
select the keywords you will go to the field. In the field you can basically do
anything you want. You can go inside the dungeon, which is what you come there
for or you can explore the field finding a lot of goodies and monsters to
battle. Once you are inside the dungeon you will have to clear all the rooms to
be victorious. You do so and you can leave tranquilly. In each dungeon you will
find really a lot of items, you can sell them in town or trade them. You will
get rich with just the items of 2 dungeons!



    The whole idea of .Hack//Infection is to go trough the
dungeons and gain experience. Go levels up. You will have people join your
party; you do so by collecting their addresses and calling them to go together
with you. You have to read the message boards to find out what’s going on and
new keywords that will take you to the parts you need to go in order to find out
what happened to your friend. In around 20 hours you will find yourself in the
end of the story of .Hack//Infection. However its just the end of this game, not
of the series. After you have completed it you will still be able to play
through the dungeons and gain levels up. Find more weapons and get rich. All of
this is valuable since future series seem to let you import your old character
data, this way your hours of play won’t be a waste. With only two towns in the
game, .Hack//Infection may seem as short, however there is a lot to do, and
hopefully future releases will clear what the heck is really going on. 

    Now let’s take a look into the technical aspects of the
game. Let’s start off with the controls. In my point of view the controls are
really badly planned. All you do in the game is press X to attack. You use the
triangle to choose among many options, including skills, items, key items, your
party and other stuff. You use the square button to command your party members.
The circle button is used to cancel or go back. L1 and R1 are for view changes.
You can rotate the view. The right analog stick does the same. The R2 and L2
buttons are really useless. Because you have to choose your skill attacks by
pressing triangle and stuff the battles are kind of long. It would be much
better if there could be some shortcuts. There aren’t any so the controls aren’t
really good.

    The sound is not great either, it’s simple. There are
different themes for each dungeon and field. This is a plus since it won’t get
you bored. However no theme will ever get so cool that you would like to listen
to it again and again even though you aren’t playing the game.  The graphics are
nice. All are very detailed. There are a lot of fields, each different. Well
there isn’t much to talk about here, its more or less like the graphics of any
other good RPG.



    At the end I did enjoy .Hack//Infection; however I think it
would be better if all the series came together. Or perhaps if the game could
really be on-line playable!  However Kazunori Ito must know what he is doing.
Ito succeeded with Ghost in the Shell, so he will most likely do so with “dot
Hack”. Let’s await for the future releases and see what happens!