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.hack//MUTATION (part 2)

Mutation (the title of the second .hack episode) is a full-priced product, but it's a continuation rather than a conventional sequel--it uses most of the same graphics, sounds, and gameplay elements as Infection, the first installment, and it picks up right where that game left off. Mutation does loosely attempt to summarize the first game if, by some chance, someone decided to play it without playing through the original first. But Mutation was clearly designed for those who did finish Infection, as it allows them to import their character data into the new game and continue with Kite's adventures. In Infection, Kite started off as a first-level newbie character, though he could reach approximately level 30 by the end of that game. Even if you don't import your data, Kite will still start at a high level here and will grow to about level 50 before the conclusion of Mutation. This second game offers another 15 to 20 hours of gameplay, like the first.

If Infection was guilty of being overly repetitive, then Mutation is even guiltier--in short, it's a lot more of the same. It has only one small new town (though the two towns from Infection are also accessible), a handful of new environments, several throwaway new characters, and some new enemies and items. The minigame from Infection, in which you raised piglike creatures called grunties by feeding them various types of food, has also been expanded on slightly. As if to make up for the relative lack of substance, Mutation, like Infection, also comes packaged with an anime DVD that shows the unusual world of .hack from another angle. At any rate, considering that two more such games are apparently coming soon, you'll probably come to the conclusion by the end of Mutation that the concept of .hack would have been much better served by a single excitingly paced game rather than four potentially uneventful installments. The gameplay here just isn't nearly interesting enough to carry four games in nine months, though on its own merits, the gameplay isn't bad.

You'll always control Kite directly, though he can travel with up to two companions at a time. You'll have many to choose from, but with the exception of those who belong to the magic-wielding wavemaster class, they're all roughly the same in practice. The game is easy to play. You view the action from a third-person perspective, and you use the left analog stick to move your character around, the right stick to control the camera, and the R1 button to quickly reset the camera at your back. Should an enemy move offscreen in the middle of a battle, a convenient indicator along the edge of the screen will point you toward it, and there's always a minimap to keep you from getting lost. Some convoluted interface screens and an infuriating limit on the number of items you can carry bog down the pace of the game, but that's exactly as it was in Infection.

The gameplay again essentially boils down to traveling to a series of randomly generated battlefields, each of which features a randomly generated dungeon that is filled with monsters and treasure chests. Though there are a number of different "skins" for the battlefields and dungeons, and though the makeup of these areas is always somewhat different, they all become effectively identical after a while. Even the plot-critical areas of the game feel like they were randomly slapped together--because they were. In between slogging through battlefields and dungeons, you return to town to buy or trade for new equipment, especially healing items.

>Screenshots

Scoring: 8/10