.hack

Games that Especially Deserve a Digital Re-release

I recently managed to finally get a game called Shadow Hearts on the PS2. I’ve been wanting to play this game for a while, but it’s been pretty difficult because it’s considered a rare game on the PS2 due to its limited release, and unlike several other games in this day and age, isn’t available on the PSN or any other digital game distributor. After years of hoping I’d find it–and if I did, that I’d find it at a decent price–it finally made its way into a favorite local game store of mine that I happened to have a gift card for. Due to its rarity and price though, I would’ve much rather have bought this game on a digital game distribution network like PSN or Steam, play it there, and then buy a physical copy if I ended up really liking it. Shadow Hearts is very much a hidden gem, and like many other underrated games, has managed to go under the radar of PSN and Steam for years. If its quality wasn’t enough to warrant putting it on a digital distribution network, then its rarity should. It’s very hard for new fans like myself to get into the franchise without emulation because the games are so hard to find–and because of their rarity, they’re usually pretty overpriced, too. Shadow Hearts is far from the only case of this happening to a game, though. There are many games right now that deserve to be put on PSN, Steam, Nintendo E-Shop, etc., especially as the modern market seems to heavily lean toward digital releases in the future. For some reason though, they simply aren’t there yet. Here are some other games such as Shadow Hearts that especially deserve to be made more accessible by being put on a digital distributor sooner rather than later.

 

The entire .hack franchise

thegeekclinic.wordpress.com

thegeekclinic.wordpress.com

I will sing the praises of .hack until the end of time. The .hack franchise–particularly the .hack//G.U. trilogy–is one of my favorite game series of all-time. This is why it breaks my heart all the more because this is such a difficult franchise for people to get into. There are two main series for .hack: The Infection quadrilogy and the G.U. trilogy. All of them are on the PS2. Each series had a pretty limited release, and the short of it is, they’re very expensive games. The first 3 games in the Infection series will cost you $20-$40 each depending on the condition, and then the final game, .hack//Quarantine, is worth about $150 if its in decent condition. Each game in the G.U. trilogy is worth between $60-$80 each depending on their condition. In total, you’d be spending at least $200 on the Infection series and $180 on the G.U. trilogy–$380 if you wanted them all. These games are amazing, but that’s just ridiculous. These games have a rather vocal cult following who all vehemently ask for an HD collection or digital re-release or some legal way of making these games more accessible. If nothing else, the G.U. trilogy turns 10 this year. What better way to celebrate than by breathing new life into an amazing franchise by bringing countless amounts of new fans into it?

 

Rule of Rose

via neogaf.com

via neogaf.com

If you thought $150 for a single .hack game sounded insane then strap in your seat belt because this game is undoubtedly the most expensive game on the PS2. Prices for Rule of Rose tend to run between $170-$350 depending on its condition. Why is it so expensive? First of all, it’s an Atlus game. Atlus games–especially at the time this came out (2006)–were pretty notorious for having low print runs despite generally being good games. Second, and there’s no way to sugar coat this so I’ll be plain about it, this game contains violent and sexual depictions of children akin to Lord of the Flies. Thankfully the sexual depictions are never explicit, but the implications are all there. It was banned in Italy and the UK,  made European politicians want a re-evaluation of the PEGI rating system, and even got mentioned at the French National Assembly because of the moral controversy it caused. It even appeared in The Times.

via hardcoregaming101.net

via hardcoregaming101.net

It’s pretty easy to see why it almost wasn’t released in the States. After almost a year of court battles, it received a very limited English release–even by Atlus standards. On top of that, despite all its controversy it didn’t sell particularly well and received only lukewarm reception. It’s pretty easy to see now why it’s so expensive, right? I completely understand why Atlus probably wants to forget about this game and not start more controversy, but it’s because it’s such a controversial game is why I wish it were more accessible. Just as Lord of the Flies received lots of controversy at its time, so has Rule of Rose–yet despite this, that’s why a lot of people read it: To see what was so controversial about it. Rule of Rose is no different. After all, it’s not every day politicians try to ban a game as hard as they did Rule of Rose. With a price tag as hefty as Rule of Rose’s, it’s out of the question for almost anyone to play it without emulation, and I’m sure there are plenty of willing players out there who would pay the standard $10-$15 on PSN to add it to their library and see what all the fuss was about.

 

Any Fire Emblem game before Awakening

via youtube.com

via youtube.com

Many fans agree that Fire Emblem Awakening breathed new life into the Fire Emblem franchise once it released. A previously niche franchise with few fans in the States, the Fire Emblem games that came out prior to Awakening spiked in price once the popularity of Awakening started catching on in 2012–even more so when Super Smash Bro’s on the Wii U came out in 2014 featuring several Fire Emblem characters. Ever since, more and more fans have been clamoring for more accessible, budget-friendly ways to play the Fire Emblem games that were released before Awakening–and even ones that weren’t released in the States. This isn’t the first time Nintendo has ignored the cries of the devoted fan base of one of their beloved but outrageously expensive franchises, and it certainly won’t be the last. Nintendo seems to be adding a lot of notable games to the Virtual Console lately, so why not show some love to one of its older franchises that goes largely underappreciated by them? Between Awakening, Smash, and Fates, Fire Emblem is enjoying a well-earned streak of popularity right now: Strike the iron while it’s hot, Nintendo.

 

Skies of Arcadia

via heypoorplayer.com

via heypoorplayer.com

Oftentimes called one of the best JRPGs on the Dreamcast and Gamecube, it’s hard to believe that this game isn’t more available as it is. Whether it’s the original Dreamcast version or the enhanced Gamecube port, Skies of Arcadia is definitely one of the rarer games on both systems–but it’s far from forgotten, both by fans and by Sega. In fact, Sega gave cameos to the main characters of Skies of Arcadia in Valkyria Chronicles. Moreover, this game has a very devoted fan base keeping this game still frequently talked about to this day. Yet somehow, Sega still continues to bank on the shaky odds of success in producing new Sonic games rather than re-releasing one of their other most well-loved games that’s otherwise pretty difficult–not to mention pricey–to obtain. If Shenmue can get a sequel after all these years, then surely there must be hope for another wonderful Sega franchise that’s been forcibly overshadowed by Sonic.

 

Obviously, these aren’t the only games out there in desperate need of a digital re-release: Feel more than free to comment with other games that you think especially deserve a digital re-release and why. The common thread in the games I think most deserve to be made more accessible are that they’re hard to obtain physical copies of: They’re all rare, expensive, and generally at least 10 years old. If you have any other major reasons you’d like to see a certain game or a group of certain games getting  re-released for, be sure and let us know.

5 Games I’d Love to see Announced at E3 even though I Know I Won’t (or 5 Games that Deserve Sequels)

With E3 starting later today, everyone’s getting out their bingo charts and praying to the video game gods that their dream-game is finally confirmed or that they’ll see new footage of that super-cool game that was announced a while ago. (Including myself. C’mon, Mother 3!) Last year we received several amazing, unlikely announcements for such dream-games finally confirmed: Most notably the Final Fantasy VII Remake, Kingdom Hearts 3, and Shenmue 3. With those finally confirmed, gamers are finding more games to fantasize about announcements for, and I’m of no exception. Here are 5 games that I’d absolutely adore to see confirmed at E3, but as I’ll explain, I’m very aware how very unlikely it is. (Alternatively, think of this as a list of games that I think deserve sequels.)

The World Ends With You 2

Image courtesy of PopMatters

The World Ends With You is a very interesting case. It sold well and is generally considered to be one of the best games on the Nintendo DS. Without spoiling it, I’ll also say that the ending is very heavy sequel-bait because so much of the story is left unexplained or unclear. Moreover, it’s a Square Enix game that got to cross over with Kingdom Hearts 3D. You’d think it’s a no-brainer for a sequel, and yet here we are 9 years later and still no sequel. The closest we’ve had to a sequel (other than cameos for the main characters in Kingdom Hearts 3D) is an iOS and Android release of the game. Especially if the TWEWY characters are going to be important to the rest of the Kingdom Hearts story, there’s no reason to not make a sequel—especially since Square Enix seems to be really pushing the new Kingdom Hearts games, which is a blessing and a curse. The reason I don’t see this happening anytime soon is because Square Enix seems to really have its hands full between Kingdom Hearts and Final Fantasy VII. I’d love to be proved wrong and to hear this announced, but I certainly won’t get my hopes up until at least one of those projects are complete.

 

Silent Hills

Image courtesy of express.co.uk

There’s no suffering like the suffering of Silent Hill fans in recent years. It’s been a long time since Silent Hill has had a good game released, but Silent Hills (also known as P.T.) was ready to change that: Silent Hills was ready to bring life back into this dying cash cow of a franchise. Fans and new players alike were hopeful: I mean, why wouldn’t they be? Guillermo del Toro and Hideo Kojima were going to be working on it. There in lied the problem, though. Months later, Hideo Kojima left Konami, and Silent Hills left with him a cancelled game with no word on what was going to happen to it. To add insult to injury it was removed from the PlayStation store as well. In its spirit, an indie game called Allison Road hoped to fill the void that Silent Hills left behind, but only last week was cancelled. As far as we know, Silent Hills, despite its large following, is a dead project right now. Of the games on this list, I’ll admit that this one, while still unlikely in the near future, is still the most probable game of being announced on this list because it’s so recent and still so talked about—even by developers. The largest problem here though is Konami, who doesn’t seem very willing to want to reboot Silent Hill at all—let alone the right way.

Image courtesy of YouTube and Konami not knowing how to reboot a well-loved series. Metal Gear fans learned this hard lesson recently, too.

 

 

Final Fantasy VI Remake

Image courtesy of Neoseeker

Now that VII has been confirmed for getting a remake, why not make the next fan favorite of the older Final Fantasy games? I played this game for the first time last year, and while I was thoroughly impressed enough to call it my second favorite Final Fantasy game, there was one thing I couldn’t stop thinking while I was playing it: This game would be absolutely astonishing in 3D. The environments, the characters, the combat, it’s all begging to see the light of beautiful HD graphics. I want to see Kefka’s face twist and writhe as he laughs maniacally, I want to see a more animated transformation for Terra, I want to see the opera scene as cinematically as possible—and I know I’m not the only one, as Final Fantasy VI is generally considered to be arguably the best 2D Final Fantasy game, as well as one of the best Final Fantasy games of all time. Kefka, in particular, is still usually called the best Final Fantasy villain since he’s the only villain to have actually succeeded in his evil plans. If Square Enix took a temporary break from making new Final Fantasy games after XV is complete to remake some of the older Final Fantasy games as they are with VII, I’d be perfectly fine with that.

 

A New .hack// Series (that will get an English release)

Image courtesy of lukalovesgames.blogspot.com

I will proclaim my overwhelming love of .hack until I die: The .hack games, particularly the G.U. Trilogy, are some of the finest JRPGs to have graced gamers. Despite this, we don’t really see much love for them here in the West. The last time a .hack game was released here were the G.U. games—not to say Japan got much more, they got .hack//Link (basically a spin-off game on the PSP, nothing horrendously important), a crossover campaign with a mobile Sword Art Online game, and a fighting game that wasn’t entirely well-received. Kite, BlackRose,and Haseo are all playable characters in the Project X Zone games, and that’s as close as the States have got in the last few years. Especially with G.U. Celebrating its 10th birthday this year, I think it’s about time CyberConnect2 or Bandai Namco or someone—anyone—announced a new .hack series. Especially with the implications we received in the .hack//Quantum anime and the End of the World movie that came out a few years ago, there’s plenty of ways to write a new storyline for a new, main series set of .hack games to be released both in English and in Japanese. At the very least, I’ll settle for an HD edition of either .hack series—something to make them more accessible, not to mention cheaper. Please, it’s been so long, we’re starving for new .hack content.

 

Portal 3/Half Life 3

Image courtesy of  halflife3confirmed.tumblr.com/

Do I honestly need to explain these?

The Most Expensive Games I Own

Being a huge fan of the Persona franchise, I got really excited a few days ago when Atlus gave us a more solid American release date for Persona 5 and opened preorders for the special edition called the Take Your Heart edition. Alone, Persona 5 will cost $60 on PS4, whereas the Take Your Heart Edition is $90. Given all the merchandise it comes with and how much I love Persona, an extra $30 seems like a good price to me. That’s why I decided to preorder the Take Your Heart edition. Telling a good friend of mine who’s not into gaming that I was planning on spending $90 on a video game (even if it comes with a lot of merchandise) was interesting though: She couldn’t seem to fathom why anyone would spend more than $30, let alone $90 on a video game. And that got me thinking: What’s the most expensive game I own?

I immediately thought of .hack//Quarantine. I absolutely love the .hack// games, and at Anime Boston this past year, I finally bought a copy for $150. That’s about the average price it goes for because it was released in such small quantities. Given how great its condition was, I’d say it was actually a really good price. Ones in condition this good that still have the DVD, manual, etc. generally go for closer to $200. In hindsight, what happened was like something out of a movie:

quarantine

The face of bad decisions

It was Sunday, the last day of the con. I was with a group of friends (the same group of friends who write articles for this site, in fact) and the dealer’s room was only going to be open for another 15 minutes so we were doing a last minute sweep. There was a wheel-spinning game set up, and some of my friends wanted to try it. To do so, however, they had to wait in a line, and I noticed one of my favorite local game stores had a booth next door. It was taking my friends a bit longer than I thought to wait in line, so to pass the time, I decided to check out the gaming booth. Dead center of their booth when I got there was none other than .hack//Quarantine: Perhaps not quite my holy grail of rare games (that would be Earthbound) but probably the next best thing—the holy reliable water bottle that you bring everyday to school and/or work. I’d been saving up money for a year to finally buy this game at PAX a few months later, but here it was right in front of me now. Looking at me. Taunting me. I knew I wanted it, and the owners of the booth knew I wanted it, too.

“There was someone else eyeing it down earlier who said he was gonna’ come back for it once the dealer’s room started to close down,” one of the employees told me, “But he was being really rude and annoying so I really don’t want him to have it. If you wanted to buy it now, I’d let you.” The dealer’s room was closing in less than 10 minutes at this point: I had to make a decision and I had to make it fast, and in a fit of passion for wanting to complete my .hack// collection, I responded to her with the utmost joy and the utmost knowledge that I’d heavily regret what I was doing the minute it came time to go grocery shopping, “Fuck me up, fam.” And so for a mere $150 I took home .hack//Quarantine with less than 5 minutes to spare. To be honest, knowing that I own this game that I’ve wanted so much for so many years is still a little surreal.

In terms of money, .hack//Quarantine is easily the most expensive game I own. (The second and third most being .hack//G.U. Games, ironically enough.) But there are other ways in which a game can be expensive. Dictionary.com defines “expensive” as, “entailing great expense; very high-priced; costly.” Nothing is said about money. So what other games have been expensive for me? And how? What did they cost me? For my first example I’m going to take you to the very beginning of my gaming “career.”

My family got our first gaming console in 2001: The PS2. My Godparents got it for us for Christmas with a game called Okage Shadow King. I’d never touched a video game before this one, and playing it was one of the hardest things ever: A turn-based JRPG doesn’t make a good first video game for a 7-year-old like myself at the time. It was confusing. It was hard. Nothing made sense to me. I couldn’t even read some of the words—let alone understand them. I constantly asked my dad—who, at the time, had recently got his PhD—to help me and not even he knew what to do. It was a sign that this game had to go.

Image courtesy of Wikipedia

Being so inexperienced with video games (and a dumb 7-year-old) I started to think that maybe all video games were this way. Maybe video games were just much less fun than I thought they’d be. Maybe it’s just not my thing. When we finally got a few new games for the PS2—all of which were racing and BMX games—I was a little hesitant to play them because I thought they’d be like Okage again. After watching my dad play and have fun with it a few times though, I began to realize that these games were different: These games were fun.

Regardless, I got so angry with Okage Shadow King that it almost ruined video games as a whole for me. I was ready (or as ready as someone as young as I was can be) to never play video games again if it was going to be that irritating. (And look at me now: JRPGs are my favorite genre. If that’s not irony I don’t know what is.) Okage Shadow King was expensive in the sense that it almost cost me my love of gaming—which I would ultimately discover months later once we got Jak & Daxter.

Here’s another one: Time. Which game has been the most expensive in consuming the precious hours of my life? In one save file, Pokemon Ruby. It was the first GameBoy game that I had and more importantly, the first game I had that was mine. Not a game that I shared with my siblings and my dad on the PS2 but just mine. Like any other child in the early 2000’s, Pokemon consumed my life. Starting the video games only made it more apparent. I found it really hard to put it down—it was (it still is) an incredible game. And the graphics were so nice. And the new Pokemon were so great. I caught every Pokemon in the dex fair and square with no cheats whatsoever except for Feebas and Milotic which still haunt me to this day. Regardless, as of right now, my save file in Pokemon Ruby has 363 hours into it. That’s the longest continuous save file I have.

Image courtesy of expertshop

Overall, I’ve probably put more time into Jak & Daxter, though. As I just mentioned, it was the game that got me into gaming. After we got it, my sister and I would do nothing but play it all day every day for months. We’d restart it, do all of our favorites tasks over, and we’d do this day in and day out starting more save files than we could count because we got through them so quickly. To this day, Jak & Daxter still remains a permanent fixture in my PS2 library which I still replay every so often. I can still 100% it no problem—in fact, these days I can beat it faster than I ever could’ve before. There’s no way for me to know how much time I’ve put into this game total, but seeing as how I’ve been playing it continuously for more than 10 years, I’m pretty confident that I’ve put more time into it overall than in my Pokemon Ruby save file.

Here’s one final (and more recent) example of another way a game has been expensive for me: There’s a game that cost me my Wii. Here’s the story: I’ve been a huge fan of One Piece for 11 years now. Back in my early One Piece fan days, its North American rights were owned by 4Kids. Some will recall it was a mess of censorship. When they got the rights to the show, they had no idea how dark it would eventually get. They omitted the entire Whiskey Peak arc, which made it really hard for them to transition into Alabasta, which was also heavily censored. It was a mess of continuity errors, contradictions, and of course, rubber knives.

This only made it a bigger deal when Funimation took the rights to One Piece out of 4Kids dying hands in 2007. Fans everywhere rejoiced—myself included. Around the same time they started showing trailers for the dub, they announced that they were bringing One Piece: Unlimited Adventure for the Wii to the United States to celebrate. This would be not only the first One Piece game to come out in the U.S. in 2 years, but honestly, the first really good One Piece to come out in the United States in general. (Although admittedly, I did sink a lot of time into Grand Adventure.) This would be the first real exposure to the Funimation dub most of us would have since the DVDs were coming out around the same time. This was a huge deal. My sister and I got a Wii for Christmas in 2007 (note: Unlimited Adventure came out January 2008) so I was beyond thrilled. Finally, a One Piece game with good voice acting and more adventure. And you know what? It lived up to the hype. I absolutely love Unlimited Adventure. I played it day in, day out. My sister didn’t really stop me since the only other game we had on it was Wii Sports and by the time I got Unlimited Adventure, we’d already got our time out of it. I got to a point where I wouldn’t even bother taking it out of the Wii when I finished playing it because I knew I’d be back to it soon. Being only a recent Wii-owner, I didn’t realize that was a problem.

Image courtesy of covershut

One day, I believe it would’ve been in March or April of that year, I tried to take the disc out. It wouldn’t come out. Maybe I didn’t push the button hard enough? I kept trying and trying, but the disc wouldn’t come out. I asked my parents for help, but nobody could get the disc out. As I learned the hard way, this was just a thing that happens to Wiis that you forget to remove your game from for more than a few days: They just won’t come out anymore. The ejector stops working. To repair it would cost more than the game itself. To get a new console was out of the question. Unlimited Adventure was stuck in there. Our Wii had just turned into an Unlimited Adventure machine. Being the only One Piece fan in my house, that didn’t sit too well with anybody else—especially my sister who never got a chance to play any good games on the Wii. It’s still there to this day, though I haven’t booted it up in years. It recently came to my attention that because it didn’t sell horribly well, Unlimited Adventure is a semi-rare game, which only makes this more disappointing. Even now, to repair my Wii would cost me more than it would for me to go out and buy a used Wii at most retailers.

After this happened I seemed to notice more and more Wii games I wanted to play: Okami, Muramasa, No More Heroes, Mad World, Punch Out, etc. I still haven’t played any of them on the Wii (though I did get to play the PS2 version of Okami and the PS3 port of No More Heroes.) Muramasa in particular mocks me to this day. All these games that I could never play all because I thought it’d save time leaving Unlimited Adventure in the Wii. Unlimited Adventure cost me my Wii and in turn, the opportunity to play other great games on the Wii. I’m sure I was grounded when this happened, too, if that counts for anything.