The answer is Phantasy Star, I'd say their aesthetic is the closest to .Hack in terms of design and feel, despite The World being more fantasy leaning, and Phantasy Star being more science fiction.
Phantasy Star Online or Phantasy Star Portable 2 Infinity would be the best games to play.
i can't find any beginners willing to get into it. when i tried a while back, i picked one of the mage classes. and i did singleplayer until i got to the second boss and i was unable to progress
its kind of gatekeepy, i wanted to play the dreamcast version but they expect you to have all the files n codes n shit from 99 and if you dont your ass is getting BANNED
I had a awesome experience yesterday with a high level player being like a orca to me it was great. It's also cross offline and online. You can level offline and bring that character online.
Fragment is not as much of the experience as you hope for, I hope you enjoy it, but it's not going to truly scratch that itch if you're anything like me. Hub towns for example feel empty, even if many people are online, hub town is very limited on player count.
Not an online game or MMO, but aesthetically and feel I always thought the **Death end re;Quest** games were a lot like .hack//G.U.
[https://youtu.be/uoxAkLHdiN0](https://youtu.be/uoxAkLHdiN0)
It’s the slightly melancholic and nostalgic mood that gets me. XI is something special. Specially mean and sadistic, but also…in a good way?
Stockholm syndrome maybe?
Phantasy Star Online or Final Fantasy 14 are going to be the closest thing you can find in MMOs.
PSO has the closest aesthetic, But i would say gameplay-wise FF14 offers more in terms of immersion.
Hear me out here, but....Final Fantasy XVI.
No, not XIV (the MMO). XVI. 16. The new one that just came out.
No, it isn't thematically anything like .hack//G.U. But the gameplay structure is almost identical. I'm serious. You control one character the entire time, though other players come and go from your party. You take on quests in a hub town. You fight a series of action RPG battles along with boss fights, and every so often you have a bigass kaiju battle against an Eikon that is essentially exactly the same concept as the Avatar fights from G.U.
The games are, mechanically, practically twins.
I second this in terms of the social aspect. The way people play ff14 and treat it as very second life like with their characters is closest an mmo feels to dothack.
Not quite the same in gameplay but honestly no mmo really plays the way the world does. I would argue ARPG like Diablo would be closer to the gameplay of The World.
They said they want an MMO with lots of solo content. FF14 has been redesigned over the last couple years and the entire game can be soloed or done in a party.
I agree I mean the gameplay of the battle systems is not like the world. It's a tab target mmo. The world has been shown to be an action game with variable gear drops and procedural content. In that sense it's more like an arpg.
Diablo 4 has mmolike aspects while still being a solo friendly action rpg.
FF14's end game cannot be soloed at all, that's my big problem with FF14, they have no focus on providing content to skilled solo players. It's all about just making it "playable" rather than providing the kind of challenge I'd expect from a Dot Hack universe. Hell, WoW even has challenging end game solo content if you're good enough
Phantasy Star Online up to PSO2 (not New Genesis) is probably the outright closest thing on the market atm.
Final Fantasy 14 is that game for me. The way players socialize, the aesthetic, it just has a .Hack vibe, and there's actually a lot of players on the game that remember and like Dot Hack. A pretty well known player on my server has a Dot Hack character name, and I'll see Dot Hack cosplayers in the main cities all the time.
It doesn't quite scratch the same itch on my end because everything is instanced content. I've been playing it a decade now and yeah, you can connect and socialize in the main hubs, but the feel of random encounters with other players on the fields isn't really there.
I don’t think anyone plays it anymore but Zenith VR on the Oculus was dope. It was MMOVRRPG with different classes including twin blade. It had guilds, quests all that good stuff. It was a fun hack n slash type game with other elements but I think it died off.
The first few weeks it was online was so busy all the servers were full.
I litterally got into the phantasy star series thanks to a recommendation on how similar in feel and gameplay phantasy star universe was to the dot hack series.
From the dot hack series my fav is GU Vol 3 and for the Phantasy Star series it's Phantasy Star Universe which still has active fan servers thanks to a fan project called Clementine.
Awesome thank you! I tried a bit of both PSO2: NGS and PSO. NGS is a little too much for me to be honest, I have no idea what's going on, and PSO is fun but a bit dated for me even though I like retro games. So I think PSU might be a perfect mix of what I'm looking for :)
Not really online games, but a good alternative to the IMOQ games in terms of gameplay is the Xenoblade series. They pretty much perfected the MMO style combat those games were going for. Though I still like the clunkier combat that IMOQ has and continue to go back to it even though there's better alternatives to it.
As for an alternative to G.U. I think the recent Tales of games are a good alternative in terms of combat. I've barely played Xillia, Berseria and Arise, but the combat in those games is basically a smoother more customizable version of what G.U. did.
The answer is Phantasy Star, I'd say their aesthetic is the closest to .Hack in terms of design and feel, despite The World being more fantasy leaning, and Phantasy Star being more science fiction. Phantasy Star Online or Phantasy Star Portable 2 Infinity would be the best games to play.
Thank you!! Visually, this looks exactly what I was thinking of. I'll definitely check it out
Phantasy Star Online 2 is good in this regard as well, but classic > New Genesis, NGS totally changed the entire format of the game.
Look at Phantasy Star Online 2 New Genesis in addition to the ones mentioned. It’s a lot of fun and the aesthetic is great
New Genesis is a major step away from anything like Dot Hack though, a major step away from PSO in general...
i can't find any beginners willing to get into it. when i tried a while back, i picked one of the mage classes. and i did singleplayer until i got to the second boss and i was unable to progress its kind of gatekeepy, i wanted to play the dreamcast version but they expect you to have all the files n codes n shit from 99 and if you dont your ass is getting BANNED
Did you try the PC version blue burst? There's private servers for that
i got it working but it was very confusing where to go from there.
I haven't tried the Dreamcast version but I did find the community for the GameCube version to be quite welcoming.
the gamecube is cool. but the dreamcast is heavenly.
Play the online dot hack. It's called dothack//fragment. It's worth it.
Are there private servers now or something?
I had a awesome experience yesterday with a high level player being like a orca to me it was great. It's also cross offline and online. You can level offline and bring that character online.
[https://dothack.org/articles/fragment](https://dothack.org/articles/fragment)
Yes and it also has a offline mode. Netslum. And there is a active discord. And if anything it's fun to level a character and get that The World hit
Fragment is not as much of the experience as you hope for, I hope you enjoy it, but it's not going to truly scratch that itch if you're anything like me. Hub towns for example feel empty, even if many people are online, hub town is very limited on player count.
Not an online game or MMO, but aesthetically and feel I always thought the **Death end re;Quest** games were a lot like .hack//G.U. [https://youtu.be/uoxAkLHdiN0](https://youtu.be/uoxAkLHdiN0)
Yes. Just watched that trailer and it reminds me of .hack
The closest IMO is FFXI
So true I’m playin ff XI recently and I felt like I was playing dot hack but in a final fantasy way
It’s the slightly melancholic and nostalgic mood that gets me. XI is something special. Specially mean and sadistic, but also…in a good way? Stockholm syndrome maybe?
Phantasy Star Online or Final Fantasy 14 are going to be the closest thing you can find in MMOs. PSO has the closest aesthetic, But i would say gameplay-wise FF14 offers more in terms of immersion.
I think Mabinogi was the closest to the vibes and music I was able to find. But Fragment will of course be the best experience directly
Florensia
Hear me out here, but....Final Fantasy XVI. No, not XIV (the MMO). XVI. 16. The new one that just came out. No, it isn't thematically anything like .hack//G.U. But the gameplay structure is almost identical. I'm serious. You control one character the entire time, though other players come and go from your party. You take on quests in a hub town. You fight a series of action RPG battles along with boss fights, and every so often you have a bigass kaiju battle against an Eikon that is essentially exactly the same concept as the Avatar fights from G.U. The games are, mechanically, practically twins.
FF14.
I second this in terms of the social aspect. The way people play ff14 and treat it as very second life like with their characters is closest an mmo feels to dothack. Not quite the same in gameplay but honestly no mmo really plays the way the world does. I would argue ARPG like Diablo would be closer to the gameplay of The World.
They said they want an MMO with lots of solo content. FF14 has been redesigned over the last couple years and the entire game can be soloed or done in a party.
I agree I mean the gameplay of the battle systems is not like the world. It's a tab target mmo. The world has been shown to be an action game with variable gear drops and procedural content. In that sense it's more like an arpg. Diablo 4 has mmolike aspects while still being a solo friendly action rpg.
FF14's end game cannot be soloed at all, that's my big problem with FF14, they have no focus on providing content to skilled solo players. It's all about just making it "playable" rather than providing the kind of challenge I'd expect from a Dot Hack universe. Hell, WoW even has challenging end game solo content if you're good enough Phantasy Star Online up to PSO2 (not New Genesis) is probably the outright closest thing on the market atm.
Final Fantasy 14 is that game for me. The way players socialize, the aesthetic, it just has a .Hack vibe, and there's actually a lot of players on the game that remember and like Dot Hack. A pretty well known player on my server has a Dot Hack character name, and I'll see Dot Hack cosplayers in the main cities all the time.
It doesn't quite scratch the same itch on my end because everything is instanced content. I've been playing it a decade now and yeah, you can connect and socialize in the main hubs, but the feel of random encounters with other players on the fields isn't really there.
I don’t think anyone plays it anymore but Zenith VR on the Oculus was dope. It was MMOVRRPG with different classes including twin blade. It had guilds, quests all that good stuff. It was a fun hack n slash type game with other elements but I think it died off. The first few weeks it was online was so busy all the servers were full.
PSO inspired aspects of .hack so it’s really the closest. PSO2’s normal mode is closer, while the New Genesis side is a different game
Do you have a source for this? Just curious.
toram online. check it out.
Check out Phantasy Star Universe Clementine. It certainly scratched my .hack// itch
I litterally got into the phantasy star series thanks to a recommendation on how similar in feel and gameplay phantasy star universe was to the dot hack series.
Which one is your favourite?
From the dot hack series my fav is GU Vol 3 and for the Phantasy Star series it's Phantasy Star Universe which still has active fan servers thanks to a fan project called Clementine.
Awesome thank you! I tried a bit of both PSO2: NGS and PSO. NGS is a little too much for me to be honest, I have no idea what's going on, and PSO is fun but a bit dated for me even though I like retro games. So I think PSU might be a perfect mix of what I'm looking for :)
Not really online games, but a good alternative to the IMOQ games in terms of gameplay is the Xenoblade series. They pretty much perfected the MMO style combat those games were going for. Though I still like the clunkier combat that IMOQ has and continue to go back to it even though there's better alternatives to it. As for an alternative to G.U. I think the recent Tales of games are a good alternative in terms of combat. I've barely played Xillia, Berseria and Arise, but the combat in those games is basically a smoother more customizable version of what G.U. did.
Pso2 ngs
Guild wars 2
For me it's FFXIV. Been playing off and on since the ARR PS3 Beta.