#hackimoq

Longtime followers may be aware of our (implied) love for the .hack franchise. Its debut here on the blog dates back all the way to April of 2024, still in our first year and before we even made our shift to the 4 post a day format we've long since settled into. In the time since then we've posted content from almost every entry in the franchise, even extremely niche entries that never saw an official release in the west such as Versus and Fragment, and that's certainly not by accident. Having been on the ground floor of the series back throughout its original release window, .hack is an incredibly foundational series for me. And the story of its creation is a doozy.

To understand the incredible circumstances that birth the series, we travel all the way back to 1999 when small Bandai-affiliated development team Cyberconnect has come off their first two games: Tail Concerto and Silent Bomber. The games are liked well enough by critics, especially for a new development team, but they sell rather poorly contributing to Cyberconnect going into debt. Publisher Bandai and Cyberconnect go back and forth on ideas for the next project, finally settling on what would ultimately take shape as .hack.

Remarkably, the game will be part of a multimedia blitz that sees it branch out into several different formats simultaneously. There will be novels and even an anime that serves as essentially an introduction to the setting and storyline, and each of the game's four volumes will come with a bonus disc containing an anime OVA that also tells a parallel story. Even more astounding is that some top tier industry talent will eventually come to be involved with the project, with names like Kazunori Ito helming the story of the series and Yoshiyuki Sadamoto doing character designs. Things are looking up for Cyberconnect, tasked with developing the series' games, but before they can get too deeply into development they'll have to deal with a serious catastrophe.

Now in early 2000 with the team beginning to enter development, their company president Shinjiro Sugitani suddenly stops showing up to work. Disappearing for a time and leaving his roughly 20 employees completely in the dark, Sugitani eventually resurfaces with a bold declaration: the company will drastically shift focus, pivoting to the burgeoning mobile phone game market.

Finally seeing a real chance at success with the weight of their publisher thrown behind them more significantly than ever, Sugitani's Cyberconnect coworkers beg him to at least finish development of .hack's video game permutation before changing focus, not the least of which due to the debt they've incurred releasing two games that sold mediocre at best. Sugitani is unpersuaded, resulting in him leaving Cyberconnect.

Mercifully, this absurd saga at least comes to a head quickly. Now left without leadership and contracted to a huge project by a massive publisher, Cyberconnect holds an all-hands meeting to decide what to do about what would be a fatal blow in virtually any other circumstance. The team decides to stick the project out, reassembling under the name Cyberconnect2 which sees artist Hiroshi Matsuyama stepping up to fill the void in leadership.

Hiroshi Matsuyama, affectionately called Piroshi by his colleagues, is a passionate and charismatic artist who originally aspired to create manga for Shonen Jump before getting into the game industry. Well known for his incredible work ethic, Cyberconnect2 quickly coalesces around its new leader and sets nose to the grindstone, actually managing to get to the finish line on the game's first volume in 2002, releasing concurrently with Bee Train's //SIGN anime television series. As an aside, it is through some good-natured pestering from Piroshi that Ito and Sadamoto actually sign on to work for the series.

The story of just how perilously close Cyberconnect2 came to throwing in the towel is pretty remarkable, and what the team managed to produce under such circumstances is perhaps equally remarkable. Under the leadership of Piroshi, Cyberconnect2 would manage to complete production on all four volumes of the original tetralogy: Infection, Mutation, Outbreak and Quarantine (otherwise known as IMOQ). All the more remarkable is the quality of game the company is able to produce especially given their general inexperience up to this point, with only two games under their belt and a whopping zero of those games being RPGs.

Despite having no prior experience developing in the genre, .hack's IMOQ tetralogy are a series of episodic RPGs released over the course of about a year (between 2002 and 2003). Set in an ultra-popular MMORPG called 'The World' published by the in-universe CyberConnect Corporation (that even employs a graphic designer that moonlights as a regular player called Piros), the saga of IMOQ begins with the very first login of tetralogy protagonist, invited to begin the game by a classmate who happens to also be a famous high level player.

Things quickly take a turn for the worse as our duo bumps into two eerie figures in a low level dungeon, one of which makes quick work of our high level friend which seemingly puts him in a comatose state in real life. Resolving to get to the bottom of the mystery of his friend's coma, newbie player Kite plunges headlong into a world (no pun intended) of intertwined mystery and conspiracy that draw him inexorably deeper into the very heart of The World.

The basic outline of the plot probably conjures Sword Art Online in the minds of many readers familiar with the more modern waves of otaku culture, and that isn't terribly far off from what you can expect from the basic outline of .hack//IMOQ minus some of the more harem and power fantasy stylings of Sword Art Online.

Based heavily on early MMO innovators (particularly Phantasy Star Online and Final Fantasy XI), Cyberconnect2 manages to faithfully replicate and pay tribute to a lot of the sorts of systems you could expect from the time. Players will visit no shortage of areas, divvied up between fields and dungeons, in their quest to level up in The World (itself with a good bit of lore largely inspired by Celtic and German mythology), utilizing a clever 'keyword' system that allows players to combine three words to determine everything from an area's element to its suggested level and the sorts of treasures and monsters one might find there, allowing for an unexpected layer of player expression.

The biggest filtering aspect of IMOQ for newcomers, especially in the present day is unfortunately its gameplay. Having never developed an RPG before and being based on early MMOs, calling it antiquated would be an understatement. The general experience can be rather slow and cumbersome (in some areas intentionally so, such as navigation, which can be made less of a headache by using plentiful speed charms on yourself to increase the speed at which you run, or mounting up on a chocobo-analogue called a grunty), and it can even get surprisingly difficult particularly during boss fights.

Learning the ins and outs of the combat system is a must, including understanding the speed of animation cast times and when to use instant-cast items instead. Somewhere between realtime combat and being menu based, keen players will quickly learn to multitask between commanding their own character and issuing orders to party members. Although very particular, and easy to be filtered by, the gameplay of IMOQ can be pretty satisfying once you get a real grasp on it.

Between dungeon runs players will have ample opportunity to explore the game's several hub areas (called Root Towns) to shop for items and equipment or save their game. This being a simulated MMO, there are also a bevy of other players to interact with. It is through some of these pseudo multiplayer interactions with The World that the real genius of Cyberconnect2's work becomes clear in that it has a bunch of systems built up around the core gameplay that truly make it feel alive.

Random players have their own things going on, can be talked to and traded with. Message boards update as you progress through the game with all sorts of conversations useful and inane alike, with plenty of references big and small to some other Bandai properties like Digimon and Gundam. Similarly, you will be able to email back and forth with party members as you progress through the game, and there's even several optional party members to collect throughout the experience. Your pool of potential party members are also subject to being offline for various stretches of the game, which while unfortunately constricting combinations you might wish to go with and limiting engagement with certain characters you might come to like, does indeed add a lot to the vibe of IMOQ providing a simulated MMO experience.

To that point, another layer of the extremely impressive worldbuilding is a news feed (featuring in-universe ads for Cyberconnect2's earlier works) that updates throughout the game with a big array of stories from bigfoot hunts in fictional Oregon towns to plot happenings.

.hack//IMOQ is a perfectly fine game with a gameplay loop long out of fashion but still plenty engaging if you're willing to look past some pain points (virus core hunting is a real chore every time we give the games another run), but as a full-bodied 'experience' it's really a stroke of genius. Extremely thorough commitment to worldbuilding allows a PS2 simulation of an MMO to feel truly alive.

Utilization of the artwork of Yoshiyuki Sadamoto for character designs helps create the illusion of a massively popular game that you have a level of familiarity with in-built, and there's plenty of cool visuals courtesy of Piroshi and team at Cyberconnect2 too. Chikayo Fukuda's work on the soundtrack is unique and instantly recognizable, with tons of memorable earworm tracks even after more than two decades. The massive web of mystery and conspiracy crafted by Kazunori Ito set in the backdrop of a smaller, more intimate and sincere internet now decades gone is gripping from start to finish, with questions it doesn't answer often just as interesting as the ones it does.

Given the absolutely massive scope of the project with several convergent plotlines and oodles of characters it's also a series one can easily spend a lot of time in and find lots of things to love about, and in this way it was a really key piece of media for me as someone obsessed with language, history and culture. There's simply so many potential avenues for storytelling here, and you better believe it was a dominant fixture for me in the days of forum roleplaying.

If you're like me and love getting lost in a work that you can study and get real encyclopedic knowledge of, .hack is absolutely the series for you. It's such a perfect setting to tell so many different kinds of stories on a micro or macro level. Its detailed timeline, tomes of history and more characters than you can shake a stick at was really instrumental and foundational for the kinds of media I get really engaged in, with one other such example on the same platform being Koei's Warriors/Musou franchise. As an aside, the whole of the .hack franchise has plenty of natural, thoughtfully-handled queer characters in it which is also pretty excellent.

I would be remiss not to mention a factor I'm not sure I've ever really seen discussed, namely the particulars of the voice acting. IMOQ is chock full of big name actors from the era like Brianne Siddall, Mona Marshall, Kirk Thornton and Wendee Lee, and they do as good a job as you can probably expect with the material with a surprisingly high amount of voiced dialogue. It can often verge into Silent Hill-esque delivery however, coming across with a weird ephemeral eerie quality to it, and that's always been fascinating to me.

The World is played with virtual reality headsets, and an early newsfeed article notes the existence of a text-to-speech technology 'so advanced it can even translate silence to ellipses'. There is no mention of microphones or voice chat, and in extended media such as .hack//SIGN we never have a confirmed case of in-game voice chat beyond what can be ascribed to the aforementioned text-to-speech program. And then there's the matter of Kite's classmate, a fellow middle schooler, being voiced by the gravelly-voiced Kirk Thornton.

The power of imagination and interpretation is strong in IMOQ, and it's important to remember just what a 'frog in a well'-type world we used to live in even in the early aughts. It was pretty uncommon to know the face or voice of who was writing the words on your screen if they weren't from your immediate area, and the subtle but ample clues that Kite (and thus the player) is merely interpreting the voices of his party members when he hears them is reinforced by two other key details. We very clearly play the same game he does, with fluid human animation nowhere in sight save for plot-relevant story cutscenes. In The World characters simply do not move with the fluidity and detail that we see them move in IMOQ's cutscenes. And then, as I alluded to earlier, there's the matter of characters' voices not lining up with other details we might come to know about them such as the ages or genders of their players.

The highly interpretive nature of the game isn't something I see many people talk about, but it's something very evident to those who lived through the era and it's something that makes the all-pervasive element of mystery and conspiracy all the stronger. How can you be sure that you really know who's on the other end of the screen? How can you be sure that who you're talking to is even a human being? These questions are very easy to completely overlook, but it's something I'd love for readers to keep in mind when they experience (or even re-experience) IMOQ. It's an added element of the game's worldbuilding that's extremely subtle but adds a ton to the overall atmosphere once you realize it and put yourself in the mindset of someone on a PC in 2002 as opposed to 2026.

.hack//IMOQ was Cyberconnect's first RPG and their first certified homerun. They would go on to have a long and celebrated portfolio of games, returning to the .hack franchise with a new trilogy (and story for another time //GU) in the later half of the decade and be most well known for their work on the Sony-exclusive Naruto fighting games where they brought their signature visual and kinetic style to bear and frankly raising the bar for the kinds of action and choreography particularly of shonen anime only recently beginning to be met with the likes of Jujutsu Kaisen. What they managed to accomplish and the circumstances they pulled themselves back from to accomplish it is absolutely amazing, and there's few developers I trust more to make a fantastic game than Cyberconnect2.

The vast interconnected story of .hack is all the richer the more of it you're looking to experience. Watching //SIGN will enrich your playthrough of IMOQ quite a bit, as will keeping up with the four-episode OVA Liminality as you finish volumes of the game. There's nothing like stepping into an area you've seen another character from another entry in the series in, or even catching a familiar face as a cameo. Sticking with the games themselves all the way through is also rewarding, with a collection mechanic (through tasks like completing trades, fully clearing areas and defeating portions of the bestiary) rewarding customization options for your in-game desktop.

Even if you're not willing to invest into the series through engaging with side media, taken on it's own IMOQ is still a fantastic game and an even better 'experience' you would do well to try and see if is for you. And if you find it a little too archaic, don't worry, we'll try and sell you on the more modern //GU in a later spotlight. Suffice it to say we also have high hopes for the upcoming //ZERO, and I'm sure that's a challenge Piroshi and team are excited to meet.