.Hack Part 2 - Mutation

Loading a save from the previous disc is the first thing this game asks of you, and that request tells you almost everything about how Bandai and CyberConnect2 were thinking in 2002. Four retail releases, each about fifteen to twenty hours, each continuing a single story with your levels, gear and email intact. It was an unusual gamble at a time when episodic distribution meant nothing to a console audience, and the middle entries carried the heaviest burden: no opening hook, no ending, just the long stretch where a serial either earns its length or exposes it.

Mutation earns more of it than you might expect, mostly because the fiction sharpens. Kite is still hunting for a way to wake his comatose friend, still wielding the Twilight Bracelet that lets him Data Drain corrupted enemies into something killable, and the cost of using it is now something the game keeps reminding him about. New characters push in from the edges — Mia and Elk in particular give the party a strangeness that the earnest BlackRose does not — and the Phase you face at the end of the disc is a step up in both spectacle and menace. The desktop framing does the real work. You log in, you read the boards, you get mail from players who have no idea what is happening to the servers they inhabit.

The dungeon crawling underneath is where the seams show. Areas are generated from three keywords, which means an enormous number of fields and dungeons that all draw from the same small pool of corridors, chests and gate spawns. Combat is real-time party action with a pause-and-command wheel, competent and readable, but you will run the same clearing pattern dozens of times to farm virus cores for the next protected area. It is grind dressed as an MMO, and the honesty of the disguise is the only reason it works.

What has aged best is the atmosphere. The World is deliberately a little empty, a little slow, full of dead air and stray text from people who log off mid-conversation, and that emptiness reads now as a fairly accurate memory of what online games felt like before they were designed to never leave you alone. What has aged worst is the pacing, which assumes you own the other three discs and have nowhere else to be.

As a standalone purchase it is close to meaningless. As the second act of a strange, patient experiment in serialised console storytelling, it is the disc where the idea stops being a novelty and starts being a story.