Explain the differences between .hack and SAO to .hack newbies

[JugsOfHolyness]

1. Came out first

2. No harem

3. Still came out first

[SacrificAbominat]

Escrito originalmente por Bach:

Guys, can't we just enjoy both series?

There's no problem with enjoying both, but personally I'm not happy with how popular SAO has become when compared to .hack. .hack has always been kind of niche and SAO was very mainstream which made it the standard bearer for the genre. I don't like seeing so many people look at SAO and just dismiss the stuck in an MMO genre because both the anime and games were subjectively meh to bad.

Watching Log Horizon and experiencing .hack as I was growing up has made me see the potential of this genre, and that SAO cloud hanging over it really dampens newcomers opinions about the genre, which is a shame. The fact that some people say it's a good introductory series to anime in general doesn't help either.

Personally the only great thing that came out of SAO to me was the abriged series. Then again if you like both the anime and games of SAO that's fine.

[badspot]

Escrito originalmente por Clive:

DotHack is actually good.

[Mr. Hugh Mannity]

Y'all forgot to mention that .hack actually was a really good game, it's my top 5 games back on PS2. This and Shadow Collosus are the reason why I'm glad to be able to be alive today. Now if we can only get some Atlus games on the hype train then my life would be complete. Though from what I've heard, they've been hinting on some remake/remaster or some sort, just not sure what game.

[Flyers]

who care which come out first
i just know dot hack gu better than sao
Hack gu >>>SAO
MY AZURE KITE IS THE BEST

[Scyris]

Escrito originalmente por Bach:

Guys, can't we just enjoy both series?

I agree, they both have their merits, BTW the sao anime was crap, well nto crap, but it doesn't do it justice. You really need to read the light novels, like 75% of kirito's personality is completly lost in the anime due to it lacking his internal monologues. There is also Accel world, that takes place 20-25 years after sao in the same world, in fact iirc the tech they use in Accel world was actually devoloped by Kirito later on in his life. Or at least I heard someone mention that.

[Scyris]

Escrito originalmente por SacrificAbominat:

Escrito originalmente por Bach:

Guys, can't we just enjoy both series?

There's no problem with enjoying both, but personally I'm not happy with how popular SAO has become when compared to .hack. .hack has always been kind of niche and SAO was very mainstream which made it the standard bearer for the genre. I don't like seeing so many people look at SAO and just dismiss the stuck in an MMO genre because both the anime and games were subjectively meh to bad.

Watching Log Horizon and experiencing .hack as I was growing up has made me see the potential of this genre, and that SAO cloud hanging over it really dampens newcomers opinions about the genre, which is a shame. The fact that some people say it's a good introductory series to anime in general doesn't help either.

Personally the only great thing that came out of SAO to me was the abriged series. Then again if you like both the anime and games of SAO that's fine.

Same could be said about gaming in general, Gamers that started in the ps2/ps3 era have no idea what a good game is mostly. Thats when the shift to making everything for casuals, and focusing on graphics more than anything else all started. Really not happy with how they made GU super easy mode.

[Scyris]

Escrito originalmente por JugsOfHolyness®:

1. Came out first

2. No harem

3. Still came out first

Also, it does have a harem its just not as pronounced as SAO was.

[marv]

The key difference between .hack and SAO is .hack takes place in a stupid world where someone managed to kill someone else with a computer virus that can kill people who may not even suffer from epilepcy to have epileptic seizures and was executed for it. Pluto's Kiss, another huge hacking disaster, caused so much world wide chaos that it killed the original internet and brought rise to some linux based new net, ALTIMIT OS, where people played every iteration of The World. The World, which was intially some beta called Fragment, that was created by Harald Hoerwick, some weirdo programmer that became obsessed with some woman's dumb poem, The Ephitaph of Twilight; also created it to bring about the perfect A.I. - Aura. This AI girl is his creepy sapient fanfiction of the child he and Emma Wielant, the woman that wrote said poem Harald went nutso over, secretly had. Aura was supposed to be brought about by a system called Morganna, but she went insane when ALTIMIT took Fragment, forced it into a new game and caused the first problem in the original .hack games that Kite and Co fixed. And yet somehow, despite causing a bunch of people to die or go into comatoses, new World games are constantly made and shut down after each iteration goes HORRIBILY WRONG, no matter how many incidents occur by apparantly an insane cult of old french women that want to "stop human activity", because ALTIMIT Corp always finds a way to buy itself out of trouble!

Sword Art Online was originally a book series turned media franchise that was written by Reki Kawahara, who while playing an online game was player killed by some dude and started to imagine that this guy must be so ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ cool for being good at video games. And thus Kazuto "Kirito" Kirigaya was born and his continuing saga of somehow seducing every woman character he meets, because anyone who plays a girl character is totally a hottie girl, guys; causing them all to fall madly in love with Kirito and his amazing video gamer skills fighting with TWO SWORDS. OH MY GOD. Kirito also lives in a stupid and insane world where VR technology not only is actually good, but its so advanced that you can somehow get stuck in a game OR EVEN KILL YOU BY MATERIALIZING BULLETS/ELECTRONIC DEATH PULSES INTO PEOPLE. And yet, despite the inital incident which caused people to go into a several year coma and others to actually die in real life, because they died in the game; society seems to be okay with more and more VR potential death traps and horrible murder mysteries coming about because Kirito likes video games. Also there was a girl who had AIDS.

[sorenvalen]

marv wish do you like better fomr your discirtion you like soa better both a stupid in there own right but hacks games story is usselly better writin then there shows to tell the thurth i hate swrod art online games expically hollow relaztion i am so suck of the wow being the only kind of contol button set up it hurt i like only one soa game lost song because i dont have to always on ps4 flick off the bar with 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 kinda set up in most mmos to use a pre set abilty hollow relazton does not exist on a computer but if would be easyer to use on a computer another thing to point out hollow relazation as a expansive wqwrold but to walk fomr one end of a map to another to get to a enw aera takes 30 mins without fighting mobs and most aera are very long but very little room to move around a baisc jungl aera is like as small as a cordoor in other maps a long winding passage you can walk form one end to the other 30 mins but the actull size is small

hack gu is going to porlby need a contoler to use think about it naruto who uses the useless keyboard contols on it nobody that can cyber connect 2 makes naruto so i expect useless contol another explam dark souls 1 does anyone use a keybaord nope it is even hard with a ps3 contoll to asign buttons right

if you want usefull pc conroll bethdsa has that covered but there conrolers suck

[Emerje]

Escrito originalmente por marv:

Sword Art Online was originally a book series turned media franchise that was written by Reki Kawahara, who while playing an online game was player killed by some dude and started to imagine that this guy must be so ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ cool for being good at video games. And thus Kazuto "Kirito" Kirigaya was born and his continuing saga of somehow seducing every woman character he meets, because anyone who plays a girl character is totally a hottie girl, guys; causing them all to fall madly in love with Kirito and his amazing video gamer skills fighting with TWO SWORDS. OH MY GOD. Kirito also lives in a stupid and insane world where VR technology not only is actually good, but its so advanced that you can somehow get stuck in a game OR EVEN KILL YOU BY MATERIALIZING BULLETS/ELECTRONIC DEATH PULSES INTO PEOPLE. And yet, despite the inital incident which caused people to go into a several year coma and others to actually die in real life, because they died in the game; society seems to be okay with more and more VR potential death traps and horrible murder mysteries coming about because Kirito likes video games. Also there was a girl who had AIDS.

Your .hack summary was more or less correct, but you made a lot of errors here. The girls in the SAO games (Aincrad arc) are going to be attractive in real life since their own faces and measurements were forced into the game. There were less attractive girls in the game like Argo (though I think she's cute) they just don't get the same amount of screen time (Argo does more in the light novels). Lisbeth and Shino are both supposed to be average in looks in the real world. But it goes both ways, Kirito is reasonably good looking and heroic so girls are going to be more attracted to him. And remember, for them it's no longer about playing a game, it's about survival, girls tend to like living.

There are no bullets, that was all in theory from Gun Gale Online's Death Gun murders. The headset killed people through microwaves that fried the brain, but after SAO ended the hardware was changed and it was no longer possible. There have been no other death traps in the series (unless we get one in Alicazation, I'm only on volume 11) and the only murder mystery is Death Gun which was actual real world murder using the game as a stage, not a cause of death. Kirito keeps getting involved in these things because he got the attention of the government by freeing everyone from SAO, plus he has a small sense of responsibility for releasing the World Seed to the public making all of the VR games (like GGO) possible.

That said, I like both franchises a lot, though I do lean a lot more towards .hack. I've got just about everything that's been released in English (games, manga, anime, light novels) and now I'm going back through and buying it all over again in Japanese (about half way there).

[alj.wow]

They aren't really alike at all. .hack treats the internet like magic, while SAO tries it's hardest to follow solid science and mostly sticks to internally consistent logic. While SAO does have it's moments of fancy, .hack repeatedly uses "black box programming" magic to work. It consistently uses a literally Deus Ex Machina to propagate a plot.

[YuGames]

Well, if we want to accuse SAO of copying .//Hack, we may as well point the fact that .//Hack itself was greatly inspired in a Japanese MMORPG called Phantasy Star Online, based on a very old RPG series called Phantasy Star, which one day was more famous than Final Fantasy.

Heck, the battle system of .//Hack is incredibly similar to it and the battle system of Hack G.U is almost identical to Phantasy Star Universe, the sequel of Phantasy Star Online.

Not only that, but the "mini dungeons" that the game´s action happens in is very similar to the randomized mini-dungeons/scenarios that are classic to Phantasy Star Online.

Even some of the classes of the original ..//Hack (and their basic costumes) and many of the weapons seem to be homages to weaponry from the Phantasy Star series.

Heck, if you want to play a modern MMORPG with a ridiculous amount of customizaton and a very advanced version of the ..//hack g-u gameplay, you can play Phantasy Star Online 2 translated to english even today.

[Beautiful Ham Sandwich]

Seriously, we could write essays on SAO, it was an entry level anime that introduced people to the medium. Gigguk on Youtube explains it well, it was an anime that basically had a lot of polarizing ideas behind it. It came out around the time VR was really becoming an idea, many people were only then getting into anime and hadn't watched other anime series with much more structured characters, ESPECIALLY Kirito being such a bad and flaccid character, but people latched onto him because he was basically a power fantasy. People could put themselves in Kirito's place because of how much of a bland character he was, which also helped with my next point, romance. Most anime people had seen at that point were shounen, like Naruto, or One Piece. They do NOT do romance well. It didn't take SAO hundreds of episodes for it's romance like they did, and that appealed to many.

All in all, .hack isn't flawless, but SAO has far more flaws than it. What made SAO far more popular was the things I mentioned, and it's release date of it's anime. At the time of it's release, anime was more accepted than how accepted video games were at .hack's initial release.

[DishSoap]

Escrito originalmente por Scyris:

You really need to read the light novels

Two years worth...

[Thine Very Own, Nemesis~]

.hack has a more interesting story focusing more on the psychology of the players that play it as well as the mysteries of the game the world (the in game MMo that you are playing)

Sword art online has a very broken up story that focuses on how awesome it's main character is and doesn't really bother with anything else not to mention in my opinion the abridged series was significantly better than the actual series when it came to character develoupment

I suggest watching the animes before playing this game although i have to admit they didn't age too well especially roots (which is the prequil of this story)

Start with //Sign then watch Bits of the Infection games(mostly the start and some bits in the middle and maybe the ending) then watch //Roots avoid Legend of the twilight bracelet unless you absolutly need more .hack as that show was really aquired... in it's tastes afterwards .hack GU Last Recode should cover allot of it

you can also watch some of the OVA's there are 4 of them i believe that take place in the "real world" during the events of .hack //Infection games

if after everything you still want more of this type of Genre i highly reccomend Log Horizon as it explores more of the concept of NPCs Players adapting to characters Item lore ect fantastic series