Summary
Anime is a medium that is propelled forward by its tendency to draw inspiration not only fromthe rich cultural bases of other kinds of media, but also from its culture of celebrating itself by encouraging the new to constantly draw from the old. Many stories, especially in anime, are reinterpretations of older stories or tropes, and when it comes to isekai, a niche emerged in which characters find themselves trapped in fully immersive video games.
At this point,Sword Art Onlineis synonymous with this particular tropein anime,but various other hit titleshave alsoexplored this in their own unique ways; however, none have explored it quite in the way that the.hack//franchise did. Before there wasSword Art Online, there was.hack//– here’s how it codified the “trapped in a video game” trope in anime back in the early 2000s.
What is the.hack//Franchise?
A 2000s Classic Sci-Fi With An Interesting Perspective
The.hack//(“dot hack”) franchise is a series of anime and games set in an alternate history following a technological disaster that befell the world in 2005, and strange events that took place within the fully-immersive, massively multiplayer virtual reality online role-playing game known as “The World”. The franchise, created by CyberConnect 2 and Bandai Entertainment, launched with Project.hack//, which began with the.hack//SIGNanime series which premiered in April 2002, and the.hack//InfectionPlayStation 2 game which was released in June that year. Project developers included Koichi Mashimo from studio Bee Train, Kazunori Itō from Catfish and Yoshiyuki Sadamotofrom the now-defunct Gainax.
The .hack// Anime Project
Introducing.hack//SIGN
.hack//SIGNwas produced by staff at Bee Train and Bandai Visual, directed by Kōichi Mashimo, with scripts by Kazunori Itō and character designs by Yoshiyuki Sadamoto. It ran for 26 episodes from April to September 2002 and followed a “Wavemaster” named Tsukasa,a player in the MMORPG “The World”, who mysteriously wakes up in a dungeon with no recollection of who he is or how he got there. To make things worse, Tsukasa is unable to log out of the game, so he embarks on a quest to find out the truth. It is a character-driven story that moves slowly and can be confusing, but its exploration of psychological themes and the strength of its setting and characters has made it a cult classic..hack//SIGNis set in the year 2009, in the aftermath of a computer virus called Pluto’s Kiss inciting a major internet shutdown, with near-cataclysmic consequences leading to stringent restrictions on cyberspace as a whole. After two years, free access to the internet returns paired with the release of the virtual reality MMORPG, “The World”, the first online game ever released since the virus’s impact, developed for the Altimit Operating System; the only one immune to computer viruses.
“The World” is a gamewith a fantasy settingin which players can assume different classes and go exploring by themselves or form parties with other players and earn XP by clearing dungeons. Despite this setting, the anime is not moved forward by fight scenes, but the dialogue and character development, as well as the mystery inherent to the series are what carry its charm. Through slowly revealing secrets about “The World” and the characters, the true endgame of.hack//SIGNbecomes apparent. The rumoured existence of a legendary object called the Key of the Twilight, which can supposedly bypass the game’s system as a kind of omnipotent cheat, becomes Tsukasa’s only hope of logging out, but the quest also reveals the mysterious Morganna Mode Gone, an AI system created to feed personality data into an AI called Aura, which is dormant and buried deep in the code of the game, placed there by the game’s creator who wished to create the ultimate Artificial Intelligence.
The Many .hack// Games
A Four-Game Series
The series begins with.hack//,released on the PlayStation 2, which is set after the events of.hack//SIGNand follows the player characters Kite and BlackRose, who are trying to investigate why some players, including Kite’s friend Orca and BlackRose’s brother Kazu, have become comatose after playing the game. The series is described as “a game within a game”, and in this first installment, players control Kite but can also “log out” from the game to a desktop with various features. This game was released with four volumes:.hack//Infection, .hack//Mutation, .hack//Outbreak and .hack//Quarantine. In addition to the four PlayStation 2 games, there was the MMORPG.hack//frägment, which was the first massively multiplayer.hack//game; as well as the TCG .hack//Enemy, which ran from 2003 to 2005.
Subsequent .hack// Anime Installments
Titles Set After the Events of .hack//SIGN
After.hack//SIGN, the anime continued with the anime adaptation of.hack//Legend of the Twilight, the.hack//manga created by Tatsuya Hamazaki with art by Rei Izumi. The series followed twins Shugo and Rena who won chibi avatars of Kite and BlackRose, legendary players of “The World”. After Shugo receives the Twilight Bracelet from an ethereal girl, he and his sister set out to figure out the mystery behind the Twilight Bracelet. In this story, several people are rendered comatose after having their character’s HP fall to zero in unlikely encounters with powerful monsters.
Despite these individuals being hospitalized, they still appear to be online. A DVD OVA boxset titled.hack//Liminalitywas included with the PS2 game and focused on the real world rather than the events that take place within “The World”. Currently, the .hack// property is in its second phase, dubbed “.hack Conglomerate”, which has had its own set of anime releases, including.hack//Roots, the last .hack// title to be licensed by Bandai Entertainment. This installment was followed by the.hack//G.U.trilogy,a CGI film adaptationof the video games of the same name, and.hack//The Movie,released in January 2012.
Impact of the .hack// Franchise
A Unique Exploration of Futuristic Technology and Gaming
With its rise in the early 2000s, a time that was uniquely affected by the advent of the internet and coming in the aftermath of almost half a century of speculative fiction and science fiction that grappled with the possible consequences of humanity’s technological expansion, particularly with the age of computers and the internet..hack//SIGNwas especially concerned withthe nexus between technology, identity and interpersonal relationships, but is unique to titles likeSword Art OnlineorLog Horizon, which appear to have taken various kinds of inspiration from the franchise beyond the depiction of characters being trapped in a video game.Its narrative, while fully rooted in the in-universe game, managed to make the liminal portrayals of characters' offline lives an interesting journey that created something very memorable when it came together with the infinite mysteries brought on by the core setting. Any fan of gaming or speculative science fiction should definitely engage with some kind of.hack//media in their lifetime.
