A Question/Confession: First .Hack series?

[Ringwraith10]

Bottom line: should I replay/finish the first .Hack series on PS2 first?

 

Here's the situation: I have long considered myself a huge fan of the .Hack franchise, perhaps erroneously. Long ago I played the first three .Hack games. Of course, the fourth game, Quarantine, was hard to find so I didn't play it at the same time. When I did finally pick up a copy of the fourth installment, I restarted the series. By this time the PS3 had been out for a while, and I was playing on my 60GB. Before I could get to the fourth game my PS3 died and my replacement was not backwards compatible. So I have not actually played the fourth game, and I never even started GU, which I owned but wanted to play in order. Now of course I have the HD re-release (I pre-ordered it because, as I said, I'm a "huge" .Hack fan!). I just haven't played it because I still feel like I need to complete the original series. So with all of this in mind: can I just jump into the GU series on PS4? Or should I try to hook up my old PS2 to my HD tv (I got rid of the SD tv I was holding onto for these types of occasions) and start the whole process over again?

 

 

Alternately, could anyone recommend a let's play on youtube of Quarantine? Maybe I should just watch a video of it. :/ I don't want one where the player is making fun of the game, though. I know the dialogue is bad -- but I love it anyway!

Edited August 16, 2018 by Ringwraith10

[ZombieKiryu0]

The events from the first series do reflect in GU, but most of it is explained throughout the story. It's really not required to play the first series. It'll definitely enhance your experience knowing everything that happened though. If you do decide to play the first series first, then props to you. After playing through the second game, I coundn't keep going. The gameplay pretty much never changes through the whole thing so I just looked up a movie of the last two games.

[ExHaseo]

The first games are incredibly painful to play. I recently tried playing them again and it was aggressively unfun. So I wouldn't recommend playing them again. You can easily jump into Last Recode, because there's not really much connection to the specifics of the first series, and is very easily understood if you've never played them. The biggest connection is Haseo himself, as the player is the same player as Sora from .hack//SIGN, but he has no memories of the events because he was too young. Last Recode also comes with the Terminal Disc, which fully explains the events of the first series.