I did it. I beat the first volume of .hack GU. Though I am pleased with this accomplishment, I will be holding off on Volume 2. And that’s because I burned myself out.

I actually beat the game a few weeks back. I managed to finish all of the side quests but didn’t unlock all of the wallpapers. I remembered that you have to complete the Epitaph fights to truly beat the game 100%

The plot did hold up. I beat Kuhn in the arena, thought I killed him but he pulled the old “lol just kidding.” I forgot how Kuhn plays dead and I legitimately hated Haseo for a good minute.

I also beat Endrance. Once again I was over-leveled for the fight, but not for the Epitaph portion. I don’t know what was going on but I had such a difficult time dodging the attacks and got data drained around 3 times (did not lose the fight though).

The rest of the story goes from 0-90 with Ovan coming back into the picture, talking about Shino to Atoli and us having to rescue her. Ovan was such an asshole.

Lastly, we beat Tri Edge and he exploded like the Shikon Jewel. I forgot how exhausting the Azure fight was. The data drain portion made me so mad because once again, dodging things are my weakness. I promise to get better at those fights when I get to Volume 2.

One thing I forgot about the .hack games are the terrible cliffhanger endings. I don’t remember how Volume 2 ends and I’m okay with that for the time being. As for Volume 1, watching Atoli get multi-hand-stabbed in the stomach was heart breaking.

After I beat the main story I continued with the various side quests. I was also sad that Atoli was unable to join me.

The PK quest was simple as I found an area that I could continuously return to and get those 50 kills. Killing all of the monsters and finding most of the items proved a little difficult.

One thing different from this play-through was that I did not have the help of a computer when I played this 10 years ago (we owned a Compaq and it was garbage). 

The Bikman quest was awful. It took a good 2 hours of gameplay to find that last person in the Lumina Cloth area. I hate Chamnosuke with a damn passion, and I really wish I ran into him during the PK quest.

So what’s next after .hack? The answer is…another JRPG. If you weren’t following E3 then you probably missed the (long awaited) announcement of the re-release of Tales of Vesperia. So I’ll be revisiting some of those games before Vesperia comes out. So look forward to that!

As always, thanks again for reading and have a great day!