Afterword

Translated by

Falions

 

I remember the year being 2008.

I was asked to help create a new game entry in the .hack series that encompassed the entire series’ plot. In other words: .hack//Link.

I had a meeting with the project leader and the lead planner where I was briefed on the main characters: Tokio Kuryuu, and the antagonists who opposed him: Schicksal. After that I received illustrations of these main characters from Kikuya Megane.

That was the first time Flugel and I met.

My first impression was that of a mischievous little comedian, the kind of guy who tells a lot of jokes. It was in that same moment that I had already begun to see his deeply complicated backstory unfold before my eyes.

After that I spent my days writing the main scenario for the game. Of course, most of my time was spent writing and empathizing with the game’s main character Tokio, with Flugel being his antithesis, the last boss that must be struck down.

It took about six months to complete.

Naturally, that wasn’t the end of it. After the main scenario was finished we began work on the sub-scenarios.

Up to that point I had written everything from Tokio’s perspective, but for the sub-scenarios we had the freedom to put other characters at the center of the story. One such character was Flugel.

And I realized then that the scope of .hack//Link was not large enough to bring his character to terms with himself.

In the earlier stages of the project we had planned to explain and deal with his back story as one of these sub-scenarios, but we quickly realized this would be impossible. The size of these scenarios was simply too small, and the details of his past were too dark to include in a game like this.

In the end, all I could do for him within the game was to mutter something open-ended about his job in response to Tokio’s innocent question about what he does for a living.

This sense of unfulfillment became the driving force behind the conceptualization of .hack//bullet.

Even before I decided to write .hack//bullet, I had been toying with the idea of planning a .hack project with a hard-boiled theme. The genre has largely failed to adapt to the 21^st century, even if it had become a literary classic. However, by applying the setting of the internet to that kind of story, I saw the possibility for a new kind of permutation in the genre—this was what I approached .hack//bullet with.

A hard-boiled novel is a novel in which the protagonist is hard-boiled because they’re holding onto something deep within them that maintains that nature (please keep this definition in mind).

The characters in .hack are all enduring something.

Elementary school kids, junior high students, high school-aged teenagers, university students, office workers, freelancers, novelists, housewives, graphic designers, debuggers, system administrators, and so on are all holding on to and enduring something while they play the online game The World, where they act out and role play their ideal forms.

In the game, real life becomes irrelevant. The PC they control becomes a vessel with a mind of its own that obscures the user’s pain, suffering, and grief from the real world while they’re logged in. For them, “role play” means exchanging that thing they’re holding on to deep inside for something else entirely.

The antagonist of this story, Yuri Kaczynski Seto, also known as Drain, holds something intensely painful deep inside. He’s self-righteous, sacrificing those around him without care in the name of his own ideology, and something of a hedonist—but he cannot escape that perpetual endurance of his own pain. Rather, Seto actively embraces his pain and glorifies the act of endurance. He always says “I was chosen, this is a trial, I will overcome it,” doesn’t he?

On the other hand, what about Flugel, or Ryuuji Sogabe?

Although the story is written in third person, it’s essentially no different than if it were written in first person, as the story only unfolds from within his own subjective perspective.

However, as the story went on, I specifically made sure to diminish the role of that subjectivity as a means to an end.

If you’ve read the novel all the way through, then the end I’m talking about is probably quite obvious to you, but some people like to read afterwords as if they were forewords for some reason, so I won’t describe it here.

I think more than any other .hack character, Sogabe is the one who endures the most personal pain and therefore is the most hard-boiled, which is why he is the protagonist of this story. It’s not something I was conscious of while writing it, but I realized that .hack//bullet is a story about a contest of endurance between Ryuuji Sogabe and Yuri Seto—who can endure the most pain?

What exactly does one gain by enduring pain? Salvation? Destruction? Silence? Perhaps silence is salvation—perhaps the opposite.

Of course, this is only my opinion. An author’s delusion in the afterword of a work, and perhaps my own misreading of the plot. When the novel was still being written, I was only trying my best to shape it into a classically hard-boiled tale about a man bringing justice to evil, balanced with a back-and-forth of flirtation with a beautiful woman. Above all else, I hope it was entertaining.

There are many people who helped me during the serialization of .hack//bullet and encouraged its creation.

Mr. Tsukita of Bandai Namco Entertainment, Inc.

Mr. Matsuyama, the president of CyberConnect2, Inc.

All the artists who contributed their illustrations.

The mangaka Kikuya Megane.

And everyone else who helped me along the way.

Finally, I would like to thank Ryuuji Sogabe. It’s been more than ten years since we first met during the production of .hack//Link. I never dreamed that I would have to put up with such a depressing man for so damn long.

And by depressing, I mean it was depressing for myself, the writer, too. I would be busy writing the plot and suddenly he—Ryuuji—would tell me “This part’s way too boring,” or “I wouldn’t do something like that”–annoying things like this.

As the projects I was working on at the time* began to overlap with the deadlines for .hack//bullet, I would often feel like simply scrapping the entire thing and forgetting about the annoying old man named Ryuuji Sogabe. I was often so disgusted with him that I found myself sympathizing with the information dealer who had his @HOME destroyed in the story.

However, I know in my heart of hearts that it was because I was attached to this character that I was able to continue writing to the end. He and I finished this story while carrying each other over the finish line.

With this, the past of Ryuuji Sogabe has finally been put to rest. What comes next is the story of the future. Just what kind of role will Ryuuji play in the future of .hack’s chronology? I want to continue watching over him with great expectations.

Thanks for putting up with me all these years.

Ryuuji, I’m sick of playing with you!

Yano Masayuki, 2021

Game scenario writer. Former CC2 staff, now working as a freelancer.

Written works:

• .hack//G.U.
• .hack//Link
• .hack//Versus
• Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure: All-Star Battle
• Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure: Eyes of Heaven
• .hack//bullet
• New Novel .hack

*As Yano was also the scenario writer of .hack//Versus, he was also writing it around the same time Bullet first began its serialization. While the novel was originally planned to be finished within six months (probably with it being fully written in advance), it took five years, finally ending in February of 2017. This chapter was written for the official ebook release, which you can support by buying here. (An easy way of supporting .hack in 2021, especially considering you’re reading this for free!)