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Remaking The World
Via GameSetWatch, an Edge Online article about rebooting the .hack series of RPGs. From the article: "Most RPGs work like this: a princess is kidnapped, or in danger. A brave young man comes to the rescue and fights off some great evil. We wanted something different. We wanted a duality between the user and character, between real and virtual worlds. With that, you can play between both those worlds, both realities. You enjoy the virtual world for its environment and story, but then you have the real world interacting with and affecting the virtual world."
To sum up, both the game and the anime are about a fictional MMORPG called "The World". The anime is mainly about a person who is somehow trapped in the game and can't log out, and the game is about a player who is investigating why some players of the game are rendered comatose while playing. So, in the game you are role-playing a character who is role-playing in an MMORPG. The game itself is sort of a virtual MMO, with all the other "PC's" being computer-controlled.
It's actually a kind of neat concept, and a fun enough game, though the endless repetative dungeon-crawling takes its toll.
psmylie's dictionary: Godzillion (noun) Any number large enough to destroy Tokyo
And it's not exactly a revolutionary concept - it seems like pretty much every stage play written in the past 20 years has at least one scene with audience participation, "breaking the fourth wall," or something of the kind.
For that matter, Final Fantasy Tactics: Advance does almost the exact same thing. (You play as a kid sucked into a video game.)
And, of course, there was an entire huge four-novel series ("Otherland," written by Tad Williams) with pretty much the exact same plot years ago, even down to the "kids playing an MMO fall into mysterious comas" aspect.
Personally, the framework strikes me as kind of cutesy and ineffective in a video game context, because the writers have to strive to make us care about TWO levels of characters when it's hard enough to make us care about one.
Oooh no, this came as a really big surprise. We were actually stunned and asked to double and triple check the figures. I always thought that, in the US, people liked simple stories like in Hollywood movies.
Screw Hollywood, they've been out of touch with what their audiences want for years. Where are my 'bad/lukewarm endings' in movies? Why the hell does the one girl always live when ten other guys die? Why does Hollywood even put guys in action movies if they're all going to simply die before the end?
Same with video games. Why does one hero/heroine always manage to save the world single-handedly? What about the hundreds of other NPCs? Why doesn't anyone (important) DIE and STAY DEAD? Storylines in movies and video games are just plain boring as hell these days. Where are my Alfred Hitchcock style storylines where the hero FAILS to stop the evil plot and merely succeeds in simply killing the villain?
though the endless repetative dungeon-crawling takes its toll.
So, kind of like a real MMORPG then?