LogFAQs > #929758267

Oh, one other thing that just came to mind:

WhiskeyDisk posted...

a mediocre 60 hour rpg that was artificially split up into episodes in the PS2 era

It's kind of worth noting that each of the games was about a 20-hour game when I played them (almost exactly 20 hours, which is why I was amused enough to take note of it and still remember it years later). So as far as I'm concerned, it was an 80-hour RPG.

(Sure, you can probably rush through them in 15 hours or less each, but if so that's more on you than it is on the game. Some people can beat games like Fallout: New Vegas or Skyrim in about an hour if they want to, but that doesn't stop me from spending hundreds of hours in them.)

In comparison, KotOR (one of .hack's rough contemporaries) took about 20 hours to beat as a stand-alone game, and very few people complained that it wasn't long enough for the price. It told the story it wanted to tell in the time it needed to tell it, without any artificial grind or padding extending the playtime (*cough*Dragon Age: Inquisition*cough*) out of a sense that playtime as an objective measure is somehow more important than subjective quality of time.

KotOR (and Jade Empire later) alone was about as long as each individual .hack game (and that's just the original games - the GU games were closer to 30 hours each if I remember correctly). So even if the STORY was split across four games (or three games for GU), it's harder to say that any individual game felt like it shortchanged you as a player (at least in terms of time spent playing).

The idea that every RPG needs to be a 120+ hour slogfest or it's garbage is something that slowly evolved over time (and was something that was brought up as a discussion point for the Xenosaga games, if I remember correctly), and it's harder to hold older games to the same standard we hold modern games. I don't feel like Zelda II is less of a game because you can feasibly beat it in a single night even in Breath of the Wild has convinced some people that the best Zelda game is one that takes people 50+ hours to beat.

And while I can't speak to the exact technical requirements of the games (because I'm not and have never been a tech nerd who cares about that sort of thing), I'm not entirely sure if you COULD fit an 80-hour game with lots of in-engine cut scenes and full voice acting with mostly procedural maps/dungeons into a single disc (Final Fantasy VII couldn't do it a generation prior, and the Mass Effect games couldn't even do it a generation later). So it's possible the only reason they were breaking the games up in the first place was because they weren't going to be able to get them all onto a single disc, and decided if it was going to be a multi-disc release anyway, it might be interesting to release them separately (with added content). It would definitely be interesting to know just how much data each game was carrying around.

Though even if the games as a whole COULD have been fit on a single disc (or just a collection of discs released as a single product), it doesn't really change the fact that each individual game was still more or less comparable with the amount of content of other games of the same era, and even included recaps of prior games and mechanics for jumping in late even if you'd never played earlier games. So in theory a player who bought one and one alone wasn't necessarily getting 1/4th of a game.

In some ways, it felt like a cross between one game broken into four pieces and four separate sequels made in the same engine, telling an overarching story but still allowing for introduction/action/resolution in each part (similar to the Star Wars trilogy). Not quite either, but a little of both.

Again, a design like that rests heavily on getting the player invested in the setting, characters, and story - which I think .hack does.
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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
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