Last week I realized that squaring off against vocabulary chickens was pretty sad, so I pillaged the pre-played bin at EB Games and picked up a six dollar copy of “.hack//infection”.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with this game, it’s a Japanese RPG based on an interesting premise: it’s a simulated MMORPG in which events in the game world (creatively named “The World”) are somehow affecting people in the real world. After your good friend’s game character is killed by a mysterious computer glitch, your friend falls into a coma in the real world (”real” being a relative term) and you begin to explore the game zones in search of the data glitch that turned your pal into a rutabaga. Along the way you ally with other players (and their characters) whom you interact with both in “The World” as well as through e-mail and message boards in the real world, represented by a desk top-like interface where the game starts.

Overall it’s not a terribly impressive game; the graphics are passe by today’s standards, I turned the music off to save my sanity, and it’s not a very long game (I’m at 24 hours and facing the final boss) but it’s got some good things going for it. First, it’s a solid RPG with all of the dungeon crawling elements you’d expect and enjoy. Second, the storyline is clever and your ability to interact with the game world and the real world makes for some exciting twists. Finally, the game is a multi-media juggernaut. There are four parts to this game series (infection, mutation, outbreak, and quarantine) that tell one story, each comes with an anime DVD that tells another story, the entire game series is backed by a cartoon series (which appears on the Cartoon Network late at night) which is a third story, and there’s a conspiracy that links all three together which is pieced by clues in all three media forms. The Japanese are nothing if not overly clever.

If you like RPG’s in general (which I do), six bucks is a good price to pick up this classic hack and slash.

Turn on the Japanese subtitles for an extra challenge!

This game got a “Teen” rating for “sexual situations”, but I’m sure her statement, “it would be my pleasure to service you” was just a bad translation. Then again, these are the Japanese…