Is that the PS2 game they split into four parts and put an OVA DVD in each one, and charged $50 for each? If so, I only played the first one, and it was not hard. But, I only played a quarter of the full game.

For anyone who hasn’t heard of .hack, it was an anime series that famously inspired Sword Art Online (first a book series, then an anime, and later it had games of its own). .hack was an original animation, meaning it wasn’t based on a manga or light novel, like most anime. It itself was an amalgamation of existing MMORPG tropes, based around a loner who couldn’t log out of the system. But SAO copied .hack wholesale, though SAO fans argue that the author of the SAO books, Reki Kawahara, merely started writing the SAO books while .hack was airing and didn’t actually watch it, despite being a Japanese citizen and professing to love both anime and RPGs. But of course he never watched a show that merged him, and all the exact similarities between his books and that anime are entirely coincidental. In fact, the writers of .hack may have read his stories and used them to steer the direction of their show! /s (if the sarcasm wasn’t obvious).

I mean, don’t get me wrong. SAO is way better than .hack. The books, the anime, and the movies. (The games are trash, though. I got one on sale for like ten bucks and feel like I got ripped off.) There are over 2 dozen books in the main series, to say nothing of the spinoffs, and the first 17-18 of those books have been made into audiobooks, featuring the lead voice actors from the anime. Someone optioned the series to make a Hollywood movie of it, but nothing’s ever been announced and that option may have expired by now.