The Case For Remaking .hack//IMOQ

Years before there was Log Horizon, Sword Art Online, or even Stay Alive, .hack told compelling stories set against the backdrop of MMORPG players being trapped in a game—or in some cases, being made comatose because of the game. And while the first entry into the multimedia epic that .hack would become was the .hack//Sign anime, the .hack games nonetheless make up the franchise's core. And the first .hack games—which are either a quadrilogy or a tetralogy depending on who you ask—were .hack//Infection, .hack//Mutation, .hack//Outbreak, and .hack//Quarantine, henceforth referred to as IMOQ.

Originally released between 2002–03 (2003–04 and 2004 for the US and Europe respectively), IMOQ takes place in an MMORPG called The World during the magnificent, far-off year of 2010. A player called Kite seeks to unravel the mystery behind an unusual encounter in The World that left his character with a new color palette and special power, and his friend—an avid player of The World—being put into a coma. With the help of his growing list of friends and allies, Kite learns the secrets of The World and discovers that there's more to this game than what meets the eye.

For better or for worse, IMOQ was a single, cohesive game that spanned the course of four discs. But unlike similarly formatted games (EX: Final Fantasy VII), each of the four segments—the four discs—that comprised IMOQ were each given their individual release (which included DVDs with a corresponding episode of .hack//Liminality), and therefore came out over several months, and were each full price. In the US, for example, this meant that while they were being released, each of the four discs could be anywhere from $20–$50 each (but usually closer to the latter) depending on where you bought them and how soon after that disc's release it was. To play the game in full, therefore, could cost as “little" as $80, or as much as $200 ($133.49 and $325.07 respectively when adjusted for inflation in 2023) depending on things like how long you were willing/able to wait after each disc's release, or from where you were buying them. Either way, even at their absolute cheapest, to play IMOQ in its entirety would still cost you substantially more than it would to play just about any other game on the PS2.

Upon its release, IMOQ received mostly positive reviews: broadly speaking, players were fascinated by the story and its setting, less than thrilled about repetitive gameplay, and balked at the lack of tangible, technical differences between discs despite each one having to be bought separately—and by extension of that, the hefty cost incurred from playing the game in full. Yet despite the financial burden IMOQ was already leaving its players, .hack nonetheless developed a respectable degree of popularity over the years; several new anime, manga, and light novels were made, and it had a short-lived card game, and eventually, a few new games (and sister materials like additional anime, manga, etc) were made: .hack//G.U., .hack//Link, .hack//Versus, and arguably Guilty Dragon: The Sin Dragon and the Eight Curses (all but the first of which were only officially released in Japan).

Today, despite there not having been any major new pieces of .hack media in many years, it nonetheless maintains a bit of a cult following; you can, for example, see .hack fans aplenty crawl out of the woodwork every time there's news even tangentially related to .hack. These fans will arrive to talk and evangelize about .hack, but also to ask developers CyberConnect2 (henceforth CC2) and/or publishers Bandai Namco when/if they're ever going to rerelease IMOQ—it's been 20 years, after all. Recently, CC2 vice president Taichiro Miyazaki addressed that question to NoisyPixel, saying: “We're very passionate about the .Hack series, and bringing back the original quadrilogy and even remaking those is something I'd like to do. However, although this is our original IP its license is held by Bandai Namco Entertainment, and without their green light we can't do anything. So at this time, we urge the readers to fire away all the requests to them so that we can get the green light from them to work on those titles."

This isn't the first time that someone within CC2 has discussed the idea of revisiting .hack. CC2 CEO Hiroshi Matsuyama has talked about .hack a number of times in his Q&A videos. All the same, Miyazaki's response reinvigorated .hack fans, who still feel passionately about the IMOQ games despite Bandai Namco's seeming indifference toward them. Which is why—as one of the aforementioned .hack fans who finds a way to materialize themselves into any room where a conversation even sort of related to .hack takes place—I'd like to stand atop my soap box and talk about why so many fans so desperately want this 20-year-old JRPG to be made more widely available. It boils down to three bullet points:

If in 2023—20 years after their release—you want to play the IMOQ games in English without pirating them, you'll need at least $400 and a working PS2. And don't think you're completely immune to this if you buy PAL copies (and if necessary, a corresponding PS2), because you'll still probably need at least £150. Indeed, the IMOQ games are infamous for their inaccessibility thanks largely to the massive price tag of .hack//Quarantine (and in recent years, the less massive, but still significant price tag of .hack//Outbreak), and their all still being stuck on the PS2 even in 2023. Just one of these elements is often enough to brand a game as impractical to obtain (let alone play), but to suffer from both is just salt in the wound.

While the US release of .hack//Quarantine isn't on average the single most expensive game on the PS2 (a title which Rule of Rose and Kuon tend to fight each other over) a glance at its sold listings on eBay—many of the most recent of which at the time of writing are in the neighborhood of $300, although the most expensive one that isn't graded/sealed is listed as having sold for $340 in September—is enough to make even the most eager of prospective .hack players reconsider. Worse yet, these numbers are nothing unusual for .hack//Quarantine. If anything these numbers suggest that its price is cooling down somewhat. PriceCharting has documented complete in-box copies to be sold at an average price as high as $385.71 in May 2021. A screenshot (pictured below) of recently sold listings on eBay US and UK (sorted by most expensive first) taken by me in May 2022 for another article shows the game selling for $384.99–$399.99 and £155.01–£259.99. In summary, even if .hack//Quarantine's price appears to be going down somewhat, it's still well beyond what most people—especially people who want to play the game but haven't—are willing and able to pay for a single video game in general, let alone one that only makes up a quarter of a cohesive game. This is absurd.

Unlike many other PS2 games which have since become particularly rare and/or expensive, there's not a singular, specific catalyst that led to .hack//Quarantine's price swelling—much less the interesting stories that games like Rule of Rose (which was banned in the UK) or the US release of Shadow Hearts (a widely overlooked turn-based JRPG with the profound misfortune of coming out only a week before a heavily marketed turn-based JRPG: Final Fantasy X) have. Rather, it was seemingly a combination of little things: it was never exactly budget-friendly to begin with. It left many of its contemporary players with financial exhaustion that frustrated many of them since there weren't any technical improvements between discs despite needing to be purchased separately—by extension, this caused fewer people to play the later two games, which itself almost certainly caused fewer copies of the later two games to be made. Renewed interest in IMOQ happening after the .hack//G.U. games' releases in 2006–07—too late for new copies of IMOQ (but especially the elusive .hack//Quarantine) to be produced, but early enough for collectors and resellers to quickly catch on to the fact that it was one of the more sought after games on the PS2. The fact that even after all these years, it's still stuck on the PS2 if you want to play it via official means. And the cherry on top: a pandemic-fueled spike in retro game prices (footnote: I regret to inform you that we've reached the point where most PS2 games qualify as retro).

But while the issue of pricing is an obstacle exclusive to English language players (as Japanese copies of .hack//Quarantine remain pretty affordable), the matter of IMOQ still being stuck on the PS2 is a more universal dilemma. There are several PS2-era games—even several JRPGs—that haven't been remade, ported, or otherwise made readily available to obtain via official means since their initial release. Yet generally (not always, mind you, but generally), exploring why these games are still stuck on the old-enough-to-legally-drink-alcohol-in-the-US console reveals some kind of reason as to why that is—usually something to do with complicated licensing and/or rights issues (EX: Shadow Hearts, Xenosaga).

Yet perplexingly, IMOQ suffers no such known issues. It was developed by CC2, and published by Bandai. And while Bandai has since merged with Namco, both CC2 and Bandai Namco are nonetheless still around. Some official .hack merchandise still get made from time to time, and their logos are always there. Per CC2 vice president Taichiro Miyazaki in his previously discussed quote, “However, although this is our original IP its license is held by Bandai Namco Entertainment, and without their green light we can't do anything." So in the absence of any apparent red tape, it's hard to understand why six years after the release of Last Recode, Bandai Namco still hasn't similarly allowed for a rerelease of the IMOQ games.

As of the time of writing, .hack isn't dead, per se, but it's not exactly alive the way it used to be either. There have been a few web novels in recent years, and the franchise's 20th anniversary (which started being celebrated last year) has prompted several new .hack events and products, but there haven't been any new, major pieces of .hack media to come out in quite some time (the most recent of which would be .hack//G.U. Last Recode, which included a completely new segment of .hack//G.U., in 2017. If you don't want to count Last Recode because it's mostly a port, then the next contenders are arguably .hack//Versus and .hack//Beyond the World, which both came out in 2012). Yet despite the lack of substantial content, there are still plenty of pockets of .hack fans out there, several of whom would love nothing more than to welcome new fans into their beloved franchise, ideally by way of fresh, official content.

To say nothing of the numerous pre-established fans that it would thrill, a rerelease of IMOQ would be a golden opportunity for a variety of potential new fans who want to get into the series: older anime/JRPG fans who remember the older titles like .hack//Sign and always wanted to try the JRPGs but couldn't (probably due to their price). Fans of G.U. and/or Last Recode. People who've been at least somewhat interested in .hack and want to get into the games in a way that's at least similar to how many of the original fans did. Other JRPG fans just looking for a new series to sink their teeth into—especially one that's not only fairly well known but one that's been so widely inaccessible for so long. Game collectors who are curious about if IMOQ is good enough to warrant the high prices it commands. The list goes on.

I don't want to overstate things and make it sound like I think a rerelease of IMOQ could be a major mainstream success that'll give Bandai Namco and CC2 alike several bazillions of dollars. But I do think that the planets have aligned in such a way where a rerelease of IMOQ has a sizable potential audience—one that has a lot of potential to be bigger than (or at minimum, on par with) Last Recode's if CC2 and Bandai Namco can stick the landing.

In any case, if CC2/Bandai Namco were interested in reviving .hack (EX: with some new games, anime, manga, etc) it's hard to imagine a better way to drum up interest than a new, major release—especially one that has so much potential to appeal to both new and old fans. The universe of .hack (The World, if you will) is still brimming with so much potential. The beauty of a multimedia franchise like .hack with different protagonists playing different versions of the same game, is that it already lends itself to creating more stories within its universe. After all, if IPs like The World Ends with You, Armored Core, or even Shugo Chara! can make a comeback, why not .hack?

Make no mistake: beggars can't be choosers and when it comes to IMOQ, I'll happily take anything that Bandai Namco is willing to offer, whether it's a full-blown remake or the most barebones port. That being said, arguably more than most of the other yet-unported games of its time, the IMOQ games seem primed for getting completely remade from the ground up. The sheer volume of quality of life changes between IMOQ and the G.U. games alone is staggering; if that was how different two .hack games could feel in less than five years, imagine 20.

When I say “IMOQ is great" it's a statement that comes with a few asterisks. In particular, even at the time of its release, repetitive gameplay was among the more recurring criticisms IMOQ attracted. And if it already felt repetitive to players then, imagine how much worse it feels to players now—especially ones who've played the much more technically polished .hack//G.U. games (and doubly so if you've played .hack//G.U. Last Recode, which added further quality updates). In case it's not obvious, allow me to say it plainly: I love IMOQ, but I'm not going to pretend as though it's not a clunky and inconvenient mess at times. From the quality of life aspects like increased menu navigation and not being able to see which of your potential party members are online, to combat that lacks much depth, it's easy to pick up any IMOQ game and instantly feel like it's missing some key ingredients.

It's difficult to guess how many new players would be willing to tolerate IMOQ's shortcomings to reach the areas where IMOQ has always shone its brightest: storytelling, characters, settings, immersion, lore, and so on. I fear that addressing these criticisms—the clunkiness—in a way that's meaningful would be far too much work for a simple port; ergo, a remake would be better in the long run since it's a better way to go about handling them, while also having the added benefits of things like better graphics (graphics unbelievable, you could say) and ample opportunity to add new material.

As optimistic as I want to feel about the possibility of an IMOQ rerelease (whether as a remake or a port), the recent Last Recollection debacle has taught plenty of .hack fans (including myself) the hard way that expectations should be kept in check. What happened was, in 2022 Bandai Namco trademarked the phrase “Last Recollection" which, many .hack fans noticed, sounds very close to Last Recode. And especially with the franchise's 20th anniversary only months away at that point, many fans and onlookers alike felt confident that this was probably it: surely this had to be the highly requested IMOQ rerelease—after all, what else could it possibly be? But the anniversary announcements came and went without any news about an IMOQ rerelease. And as time soon revealed, ultimately—and as though in an act of pure, unfiltered irony—that trademark was meant for, of all things, a Sword Art Online game that came out in October 2023. In any case, both CC2 and fans alike seem interested in revisiting The World, so despite everything, hope for an IMOQ rerelease isn't completely gone as of yet.