After being amused, confused, and enraged by .hack//G.U. Trilogy, I decided to find a “Let’s Play” of the .hack//G.U. games to figure out what the hell the movie is supposed to be about. I watch a lot of movies based on video games I’ve never played, and usually, they contain enough information for me to review their effectiveness as a standalone story. In this case though, I didn’t feel right beating on a movie based on a three games that supposedly had a “crazy good story.” .hack//G.U. Trilogy isn’t the worst movie I’ve ever seen, but it is the most frustrating to watch. It was badly paced; made little to no attempt to explain anything; painted the protagonist as a compulsive asshole and his love intrest as a needy, selfish, idiot; and left me wondering why anyone would think that the story was good. I felt I needed to at least attempt to understand it though. People like it for some reason, right? After finding that my hatred for .hack//G.U. Trilogy was rivaled only by my hatred of .hack//Roots, I went searching for Let’s Plays of the games. I’m through the first two and am pleasantly surprised to find that I like the story they tell much better. I still don’t like the movie (in fact, I think it’s even worse now), but at least I feel more justified in saying that.
Anyway, I found a very nice story walkthrough of the first two games that features all the cutscene in them as well as relevant transitions and gameplay between them. Best of all, there isn’t hours of leveling up and some guy talking over the top of everything about fan theories, lore, and other things that I don’t want to hear/want to find out for myself. Unfortunately, it appears that the uploader’s videos for the third game were flagged for copyright infringement. If I find a good story walkthrough for it out there, I’ll probably post that here as well.