.Hack Part 1 - Infection

The most distinctive thing about this game is not its combat or its dungeons but the desktop you see between them. Before any fighting, you are looking at a faux computer operating system with a wallpaper, a mail program, a news page, and a message board, and all of it belongs to the fictional world of the story. Those menus are where the game really lives, and they make the whole thing feel like a person's private machine rather than a console menu.

The fiction is that you are a player of The World, a hugely popular online game, and that something has gone wrong with it. A friend falls into a coma after an encounter in-game, and the plot grows from the question of why. Everything about the setup was designed to look like an MMO while being entirely offline. Your party members are scripted computer characters who are meant to be treated as other players, and they chat, trade, and send you mail. It is a clever illusion, and on the PS2 it was an unusual one in a period when online play was still new to many console owners.

The actual play is simple. You gather a party, enter fields generated from combinations of three keywords, and fight through monsters in real time with a modest command system for your allies. Dungeon layouts are sparse and repetitive, and the same few environments return again and again. Combat is functional rather than deep, and you spend a lot of time pressing the same attack button. The reward loop of loot, levels, and new areas is what keeps you moving, and it works better than the visuals suggest.

It also ends mid-story. This is the first of four discs, and the plot is left open, so the game feels incomplete on its own. If you play it today, you should see it as the opening chapter of a longer work. Judged alone, it is thin. Judged as a setup, it has a strong mood and a premise that still feels distinct.

The real achievement is the atmosphere. The music, the voice cast, and the dull glow of that fake desktop make the world feel lived-in, even when the dungeons do not. Few games of the era committed so completely to pretending to be something else.