Witch Chat - .hack//Gay Undertones

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offtopic / .hack//Gay Undertones

each game does add new features

17:21

and new combat styles

gonna guess it was not fun

.hack had to be one of the first games to attempt an episodic cycle like that even if it was way too early for that to be viable

yeah

did it come out before or after xenosaga?

around the same time

17:23

Xenosaga though took years between games and clearly had no overlapping dev cycle

17:23

.hack did

nod

17:23

i only ever played the first one myself, but i was fascinated by it

Well I hope you enjoyed the thread up until this point!

kind of same, except I was not even that fascinated by it

Fascinating is probably a good way to describe the game

(i also never got far in it because i was not very good at it~)

lol

17:23

yeah it was just kind of not a very fun jrpg to play

17:23

maybe the second game fixed that?

17:23

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Xenosaga?

i think rko means .hack; that's what I meant

17:24

(xenosaga i also only played episode 1, but i did beat that one, i just never picked up the later ones)

.hack//gu is playable, is the best I can really say about it

17:25

from that perspective

yeah, i do remember it being something of a slog even to me tbh :P

The remake makes it a lot less annoying, at least

but yeah, more games need to have an in-universe forum that updates over time even if it doesn't make sense

I do really love all the weird fucked up imagery of the ending stuff

17:28

we got a lot more where that came from

17:29

anyways please look forward to .hack//GU Vol 2. I'm gonna take a few days off to do other stuff and finish up some post-game stuff and then I'll start on it

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Idran

i think rko means .hack; that's what I meant

no I meant xenosaga

17:33

I never got into .hack at all

The second Xenosaga game is notoriously unfun to play

17:33

It's a very bad game by a lot of measures

17:33

But you do fight the space pope

17:34

so who can say if it is bad or not

see I might've gone through with it if I'd known that

Xenosaga Vol 3 is the only one that's actually fun to play and they have to resolve so much it's own it's one of the more interesting video game experiences (edited)

archaeo

white void, what look like the lockers for...a railway station of some sort?

also I've seen public lockers of this time in Yakuza before, so I think they are just a thing in japanese cities

Shaiapouf

But you do fight the space pope

spope

ah okay

archaeo

.hack is a show/game about how big dudes? not so bad

well there IS a character who's a middle-aged man named Bear

00:52

dis guy

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oh yea bear

is he not good

01:08

is there a thing with tattoos in this game or is just the character designer

It's just how characters look

he ends up adopting the aforementioned lesbian

Oh I forgot that

02:22

How nice

peak Dad Energy

02:23

even before becoming anyone's actual dad he's The Dad

He actually does have an adult son who also plays The World

02:35

He is kind of a deadbeat

02:36

Bear is like...he's a grown ass man who during the course of playing a video game in his spare time discovers an extremely troubled teen

02:37

And starts to work on what he can do to help her

I'll probably start Vol 2 tomorrow but I have a mini-update first, with a bit of unfinished story business

21:04

first off, there are a couple postgame news Items.

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21:04

This one I'm sharing because I feel like this is an issue in japan at least from a few years ago, as a japanese mystery novel I read was also about the idea of methane harvesting

21:05

Honestly seems like a really bad idea given green house emissions but I'm no scientist.

21:06

more importantly we have a new episode of Online Jack, where the weird Youtuber tries to figure out what is going on

21:07

Last we heard he joined up with a teacher to check on a student who had not shown up to class and

21:08

we found the kid in a room with lots of spooky electronic shit, the words AIDA flashing across his desktop screen, and one name on his lips

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21:08

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I like how he even has douchebag youtuber facial air

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21:09

Gonna harrass the staff at the hospital I guess

"Doll Syndrome"

21:09

you can just say coma

21:09

it's okay

It's a little unclear if Doll Syndrome is just going into a coma or not

21:10

the kid has apparently vanished

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21:10

and in his room

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21:10

end scene

21:12

that's actually hall for Vol 1. However, there is something else. If you bought Rebirth when it first came out it came out with a DVD called a TERMINAL DISK

wooooooooooow spooky

3spooky5me

that combover guy's hair is really, exceptionally bad

That guy is like

or whatever it is the artist was going for there

THE ONE PROFESSOR NOBODY BELIEVES WHO KNOWS THE TRUTH

21:13

that kinda guy

21:13

you know

21:13

anyways the Terminal Disk when you put the DVD into your PS4 looks like this

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21:14

It's not an ARG but it's something I guess arg adjacent

21:15

the premise is that this is the digital Diary of a AI programmer who works at CC corp--Jun Bansyoya

21:15

no I should restate

21:15

"AI psychologist"

21:15

and he was the lead developer on "Project GU"

21:15

he states that the journal is an accurate confession of events as he knows them

Online Jack needs to be less Online

whomst amongst ourselves

when you turn it on the first time you have these four data files. These files, in total, are basically an hour long summary of the events of the first games

sure, reasonable

21:16

what do you discover when you find all of Ansem's secret underwear tho

I didn't bother watching because I remember the game well enough

lol dang

21:17

shaia flexin

HOWEVER

21:17

once you have clear data from REBIRTH

21:17

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21:17

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21:17

more files are unlocked

21:17

not they are not unlocked chronologically

21:18

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21:18

I'll start with report 6

oh so it's like, that Lain PS1 game

21:18

kinda

I'll just watch and try to summarize what he is describing

21:21

After the end of the first .hack games, the AI Aura became something of a god of The World and, honestly, of the internet more generally. This lead to something of a golden age for the world and I guess like, Networking generally. This lasted from 2010 to 2014 (Remember, current date is 2017) However, in 2014, Aura vanished. It is unclear why. But CC corp, realizing the loss of Aura was causing problems, took measures to restore her

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21:21

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21:21

This, was project GU

21:21

A plan to recreate a digital god, and control it

oh okay that seems

21:22

really iffy

I too find a digital god to be uh

also wasn't Aura produced by that other AI

easily controllable

Meduca

Morgana?

sure

Morganna

Morgana Meduca

Morgana Meduca

Yeah CC corp are generally very stupid

21:22

this tracks

I mean

21:22

yeah no that's super realistic

yeah no I completely buy this part

Morgana become meguka

like Mark Zuckerberg won't try to revive a dead AI god

21:23

like he's not already doing that

21:23

fuck

Mark Zuckerberg would try to become an AI god

Zucko's Basilisk (edited)

anyways part of this was a salvage plan. By which they intended to salvage the code that remained from the 8 phases of Morgana (skeith, magus, etc)

21:24

They intended to control morganna by putting the parts of morganna into character data that could be controlled

21:24

they actually use Skeith attaching itself to Sora's Character data at as the model by which this idea began

I see, I see

remember that Sora's player is Haseo now

man haseo sure has had a bad time with video games I'm not gonna lie

21:25

like bro have you ever considered getting hella laid

of course, not all the phases were just floating data

21:25

Mia was there too

21:25

we can imagine what happened to her when CC corp was able to "salvage" macha's data from her.

yikes

21:26

between this and a bit of content cyouni shared from a previous trails games

21:26

I think it's possible that the anime jrpg industry has ideas that are too potent

21:26

and frankly pretty skuzzy

21:26

Do Better

Jun mentions the lead programmer on the project, a 19 year old wunderkind named Jyotaro Amgai, and then starts talking about how Kuhn's character data was the prototype for Epitaph Users

21:27

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21:29

basically they could create the characters but the morganna code would basically reject players who it didn't like

21:29

It's clear (I mean, look at Endrance) that the phases themselves feel affinity for and attack to certain users for psychological or emotional reasons

21:29

They in fact tried to find Haseo at this point but his parents didn't let him game for years after the whole coma thing

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21:30

at this point is actually shows Mia's rebirth at the end of .hack, how rude

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21:31

after which it spells out what happened to Mia ("We were able to extract the data after destroying the cat character")

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21:31

so yeah they did it knowingly and intentionally to create Endrance's character data

21:33

the plan was, once all 8 epitaph users were found, they would, together, be able to activate the Restore Aura code, as they would collectively have the abilities of morganna, guided by human will

21:33

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21:33

that's where Report 6 ends

21:34

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21:34

the first lines of report 10 are "AS A RESULT OF PROJECT GU's FAILURE, AND THE HUGE FIRE THAT ACCOMPANIED IT"

21:34

lmao

21:35

now that's a comedy beat

lol

21:36

so wait hold on

yes?

they were just gonna turn these fucked up kids into gods?

yes.

because it would make the internet run better

yes.

The Ones Who Log Into Omelas

and make them lots and lots of money

21:36

presumably

thaaaaat's capitalism!

CC corp in this universe is, I believe, a subsidary of like, microsoft if apple didn't exist

21:37

and if microsoft had like, a government enforced monopoly on networking

21:38

anyways Jun says something oblique about how he "couldn't win against Amagi or Harold Heorwick" but at this point what exactly happened during GU is unclear

as a side note as to what rko is referring to I shared Paradise

I suspected

21:39

to be fair I think they just coldly killed Mia

gotta turn these kids into gods for the internet

21:40

now am I referring to trails or hack

21:40

good question

From here Jun just kind of talks about the last day of the original version of The World, which is actually eerily reminiscent to like, people talking about the last day of FF14 1.0 (edited)

so was the internet running on top of Morgana or just The World v1

morgana is the world v1

21:42

they are synonymous

21:42

That was the whole problem

21:43

Morgana was a system designed to do machine learning on persons who play the game and feed it into an ultimate ai god

21:43

that was the core of the world

21:44

Morganna is largely excised outside of epitaph users from r2. However, some of the black box data, ominously, remains, because CC Corp is extremely incompetent.

which programmers amongst us

anyways, the 10th video ends with Jun encountering a wandering AI fragment, who explains to him what happened to Aura

21:45

"Aura is... Aura is... Integrated into The World." "Aura, threw away individuality and became a 'God', then threw away being a 'God' and distanced herself from cause and effect, returning to inactivity. That is why, I too shall return to the wind."

I legitimately do not remember what happened in sign

one can only imagine what aura felt during her years of activity as an extremely human figure, emotionally, yet with godlike digital power and expectations

21:47

and why she decided to simply...become one with it all

now my meduca joke seems not so funny

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