If you aren’t already familiar with the dot hack series, you may want to take some aspirin before you try to wrap your head around the concept behind this series.

Dot hack is an anime game, based on a television show about real people in a video game world. So, if you followed that, it’s a game, about a show, about people…in a game. Are you still with me?

Now let’s complicate things. Dot hack G.U. Volume 2 is not a sequel; it’s a continuation of a series. This isn’t a second adventure, or an addition to a completed story… this is a continuation from the first dot hack game, .hack//G.U. Vol. 1: Rebirth. If you’ve played previous versions, you can copy over your saved game data and you’ll get to take your levels and items with you! If not, do not fear! You will start out with enough to get you going.

Dot hack G.U. V2 does an okay job filling you in on all the details from the previous version as far as the larger points of the story are concerned... but being a continuation of a previous story, it fails to fully fill in the plot gaps and relationships to each character. If you've played the first game, you'll be fine, if not, then you'll miss a lot.

Being that the relationships between characters aren't shown well, the first hour or two you're really left guessing what the heck is going on. Recaps may generally annoy people who have played the predecessor, they also help refresh the storyline and fill in new players as to what is going on! I really felt in the dark about a lot of what was happening.

The main character is named Haseo. Haseo is a player in an online game called “The World”. This title takes place in 2017, which is my first big problem with dot hack. I get that its supposed to be the not too distant future, but if “Back to the Future” taught us one thing, it's that nothing withstands the test of time when it comes to predicting the way the future will be. Being 2007 as I write this article, I am presented with a future that's less than ten years away. This is just a small complaint.

Anyway, in this futuristic world, Haseo and other players of “the World” log in and their conscious mind actually inhabits the bodies of their player characters. This is an interesting concept, and not too far from some people's mindset in current day MMORPGs. At the end of the previous game, something bad happened, and in this title all the players seem to be stuck in “The World”.

Gameplay is improved from Volume 1, but still suffers from the same redundancy and lack of creativity. The controls and camera angles are solid, which instantly puts this game above many, but I didn't find the necessary “fun factor” that I get from other RPGs.

Avatar battles are still a one trick pony and despite some improvements the battle system is still pretty weak. One of the most annoying aspects of this game is how much time you have to spend moving between the “real world” and the game world. Check your e-mail, go somewhere, go back, repeat. The redundancy made me feel like I should be getting paid by the hour to play.

While the concept and story aren't bad, the dialog isn't that great, and I didn't find the voice acting very compelling either (They sounded okay, but I didn't identify with what was going on!).

The overall concept of the game is very good, but I really didn't care about most of what actually happened in the game. For a game about an online game, there was too much focus on relationships between characters, and not enough about the actual online world itself. Basically, this was a little too much daytime soap and not enough butt kicking.