"Basically Haseo...YOU are Keanu Reeves!"

Namco Bandai's .hack saga has spanned many different mediums. From anime to mangas to video games to breakfast cereals to toilet paper to coloring books to…wait, those last few are actually from Spaceballs. Well anyway, another chapter in the ongoing .hack saga comes to a close with the release of .hack//GU Vol.3: Redemption, a solid action RPG that provides a satisfying conclusion for fans who have stuck with it.

REDEMMABLE STORY

Poor Haseo. I'm sure all he ever wanted to do was play the online game “The World” and have some fun doing quests, fighting monsters, and making friends. But no. His friend Shino gets player killed and put into a coma in real life, so of course he takes up arms and becomes a player killer killer to find Tri-Edge, the PK'er who put out Shino. When he finally finds him however, Tri-Edge uses a weird attack to reduce Haseo back to level one! This is of course where Vol. 1 started, and since that time Haseo has made new friends, lost some friends, awakened his avatar, joined project G.U., battled against the rouge AI AIDA, and found out that the true identity of Tri-Edge was someone he trusted completely. Things don't start out too good for Haseo and company at the beginning of Vol. 3 either. A resurrected enemy and a PK'er tournament end up being the least of his worries. However, Haseo must finally find the courage to fight, not just to save Shino and “The World”, but also the real world as well.

Now if you didn't understand any part of what I just typed above, well that wouldn't surprise me. The .hack//GU saga does have a great story, but playing Vol. 1 and Vol. 2 first is pretty much a requirement if you want any chance of knowing what's going on. If your thinking of trying a game in the GU saga, I suggest you stop reading a review for Vol. 3 and read one for Vol. 1 instead.

REDEEMABLE GAMEPLAY

Except for a few new additions, exploration and battle remain pretty much the same as the other two volumes. You start out from Haseo's desktop screen, which let's you read E-mails, check the news, read “The World's” community forums, watch cut-scenes you have already seen, and so forth. It does its job of mimicking a real computer desktop pretty well. When you log into “The World”, you head into a root town, which lets you shop for items, visit your guild headquarters, and form a party with two other players. When your ready to go to a dungeon area, you go to the chaos gate at the top of the root town, put together three words either randomly or taken from an e-mail or a forum, and warp to the area or dungeon it creates.

The areas in Vol. 3 are pretty much the same ones you've already seen in the previous volumes. Two news ones have been added: a forest area and the outer dungeons, which I will get to later. Using the easy-to-use .hack map system, you run around the areas looking for treasure chests, the entrance to the next floor in an area, and battling packs of monsters that lurk about.

The battle system in the GU games is fast-paced and fun. When you encounter enemies, you enter a small battle dome, which surrounds your party and the monsters. Your main combo attacks are done with the X button, while blocking is done by holding circle. You can open the menu by pressing triangle, which lets you use potions and other items for healing and powering up. At the beginning of Vol. 3, Haseo can use three different weapons: duel blades, a broadsword, and a scythe. Duel blades are fast attacks that do little damage, the broadsword is slow but does heavy damage and breaks through armor fast, and the scythe hits in a wide area and does damage somewhere in the middle of the other two weapons. I personally used the duel blades and scythe the most, and the broadsword only when it was necessary, but I'm sure everyone has their own preferences.

Pressing the R1 button during battle opens up the skill attack menu, which is a shortcut menu where you can assign a different skill attack to each of the PS2 controller face buttons. If you assign different weapon skill attacks to the shortcuts, then you can change your weapons during battle by choosing the right skill attack. The game will even tell you which weapon works best against an enemy by having that weapons skill attack blink in the shortcut menu. Pummeling an enemy enough with normal attacks will cause it to be surrounded by purple spinning circles, and doing a skill attack on that enemy during this time will activate a “rengeki”, which will increase the damage dealt.

You can also still use Awakenings. Rack up combos and pull off rengeki's to fill the morale gauge at the top right corner of the screen. Then when prompted, you can hit the square button to activate the awakening that you've chosen to perform in the menu. Besides the beast and demon awakenings, you get an all new awakening to perform: the avatar awakening. Requiring a full morale gauge and all 3 party members, this attack has Haseo using his avatar's data drain ability to inflict heavy damage on all enemies and extract virus cores from them. These cores can be used to power up the lost weapons that were introduced in Vol. 2. Also, unlike the first .hack saga a couple years back, using this attack won't corrupt Haseo and potentially end your game, so you can go nuts and get those virus cores. Your AI companions handle themselves well for the most part in battle, as they will attack with certain spells and skills against certain enemies and heal you when needed.

Speaking of avatars, the avatar battles make a welcome return. These play very similar to Konami's Zone Of The Enders games. You control Haseo's avatar in a data space-like environment and battle an enemy with shots and weapon slashes while avoiding there own attacks. After draining their life bar, you get a chance to perform a data drain and take them out for good. Avatar battles are a nice diversion from regular exploring and combat, although you only get to do them on certain occasions, like bosses. Luckily, you can replay previous avatar battles by going to the serpent of lore in the raven guild house.

Besides the basics, Haseo gets a couple new abilities in Vol. 3. The first one he gets early on is called area hacking. When walking through a dungeon or area, you may come across screen noise in certain parts of it, caused by damage being done by the rouge AI AIDA. Pressing R1 when this happens will cause an anomaly to appear, which usually holds some good items. At other times during story quests, these anomalies warp you to a outer dungeon, the other new area in Vol. 3 that looks like it was ripped straight from the movie Tron. Try not to stare at them too long, them may cause headaches :P

Halfway through the game, Haseo also gets an upgrade to his Xth form. This gives him a makeover with a white costume, and an all new weapon: duel guns! You use X to fire the guns, and do damage depending on how far away you are from the target. You can also perform a double trigger by pressing the R1 button after a skill attack, which adds in a small gun attack. You can also dash by double-tapping the circle button. Haseo's avatar also gets upgraded attacks, including lock-on homing lasers. Cool beans all around.

As much as I enjoyed the battle system in .hack, it's not without faults. For one, I wish you could hot key items like you could with skills. It's a pain having to open up the menu in the middle of a battle and select items everytime I need to use them. It breaks up the flow of the battle and is annoying. The camera can also zoom in pretty close to Haseo during battles that are close to walls and such. Also, as much as I like the battle system and fighting, it can get repetitive. More than a few times I found myself avoiding monsters and escaping some battles just to get to the end of a dungeon. There are also the quests that are used as filler between story missions. Basically one of your friends will invite you to do a quest from the quest shop in a root town. Problem is that these quests are EXACTLY the same as the quests in do in volumes 1 and 2. Couldn't have been that hard to come up with fresh quests, but no, I have to yet another Birkman quest just so I can hand out flyers…. again. Boring.

REDEEMABLE GRAPHICS

Pretty much every area with the exception of the new root town and the aforementioned new areas are recycled from the previous volumes. You'll be running down pretty bland rock, grass, and wood corridors for the bulk of the game. At least it's colorful, and character models are attractive. The spell and skill effects are pretty neat, as are the trippy avatar battles. Cut-scenes that are pre-rendered have a slick cel-shading look to them and are cool to watch. In-game cut-scenes though basically just have the characters standing around and talking, occasionally zooming in for a fully animated facial expression. Kinda reminds me of the first Kingdom Hearts.

REDEEMABLE SOUND

Like the graphics, a lot of the music in Vol. 3 is recycled from the previous two. Every dungeon type has it's own theme music that just plays over and over again, with the same battle music everytime you get in a battle. It's not all bad though, as boss themes have nice techno beats to them. Cut-scenes also have very nice and soothing music set to them. The ending theme in particular was music to my ears. Voice acting for the most part is hit or miss, so it's basically just like your typical anime dub. There are definitely same pretty hammy lines, though.

REDEEM YOURSELF

After finishing the main quest, which took me about 25 hours, you get the mandatory extra .hack quests to do. The big one is a 100 floor dungeon called the forest of pain. You can also participate freely in arena battles, go hunting for PK'ers, complete the book of 1000, to the bike challenges, and all that good stuff. You can easily tack on an extra 10-15 hours if you wanted to complete the game 100%. After that, however, there is little reason to go back to .hack//GU, unless you miss logging out and checking your e-mail, or something.

So in closing, I liked the .hack//GU saga, much more than the previous saga. They are solid RPG's with a fun, if not flawed battle system, a great story, and interesting characters. Hopefully Namco Bandai can address some of these nagging problems in the inevitable next .hack saga. Until then, all I can do is present GU saga hero Haseo with this life size, gold plated statue of Keanu Reeves. You've earned it, buddy!

KEWL
+Great story
+Fun battle system
+Xth form is pretty cool
+Avatar battles FTW!
+Nice cast of characters
+Nice extras after completing main quest
+Slick pre-rendered cut-scenes and character designs
+Nice music for the most part

LAME
-Vol.1 and vol. 2 are pretty much required to play first to make any sense of the story
-Filler quests are still exactly the same from the previous volumes
-Battles can get repetitive
-Repetitive dungeon and battle music
-Pain to use items in the middle of a battle
-Mostly bland and recycled graphics
-Camera can get wonky in tight areas

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 09/25/07

Game Release: .hack//G.U. vol. 3//Redemption (US, 09/10/07)