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.hack is based on the idea of you playing a character who is playing an MMORPG, which is an interesting concept. Unfortunately, it successfully captures the tedium and annoying qualities of most MMO's along the way.
The game starts out with your character signing up for an MMORPG called "The World". If you are not familiar with what an MMORPG is, it stands for Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game. Take a look at Everquest or World of Warcraft if you need an example. You then log in to "The World" and meet up with one of your "real life" friends, who proceeds to explain some of the overly complex interactions for the game world. You go on an introductory "newbie" dungeon crawl and the story really gets started during that adventure.
As it happens, something has gone wrong with "The World" and now it is affecting people in "real life". It is then up to you to work out what is going on and save "The World" and everyone else in the process.
This is where the concept starts to break down. First of all, you are tasked with figuring out how to play "The World". This happens primarily through things going on in it and by dropping out of it and reading your email and, of all things, message boards. Reading message boards, as a component of playing a video game, is both sick and wrong. If you are a fan (read troll) of message boards, especially those related to games in general and MMO's in particular, then enjoy this ridiculous tedium. For the rest of us or the unindoctrinated, game message boards are a place for pointless flame wars, endless complaining, and generally nonsensical babbling by people who have absolutely nothing of any value to contribute. At all. To anything. But I digress...
The whole concept is first ruined by the message board reading and email aspect. It gets worse when you get into "The World" and actually have to put up with other "players" who speak out of character and break the fiction of "The World" at every turn. Granted, this is absolutely realistic as it relates to the way MMO's exist in the real world, but this reflection of reality is one that we could do without. Furthermore, you get all the boring level-grinding and dungeon-crawling and grouping requirements, just like a real MMO. Yay. If you have not been brow-beaten to death by the level grinding in a real MMO like EQ or WoW, pick up this game and get more of the same treatment from a single-player fake MMO. What's worse, the areas I visited were mostly unpopulated, missing both other "players" and any baddies to fight. This is comically unrealistic, since the "news" is reporting that "The World" is boasting 20 million users and has something like five servers.
The bottom line here is that this game is a rental, at best. The complex fake MMO world of .hack, which successfully captures all the bad aspects of a real MMORPG, is one that we can do without. Much like this game in general.
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