.hack//Series Explanation

Just the anime or the whole thing? Since the franchise eventually adds so much crap that wasn't part of the original plan, & the retcons eventually became so frustrating that I stopped following the new stuff entirely, the whole story might be harder, but think I can probably explain the 1st half:

Obviously, huge spoilers follow:

.hack//AI Buster: A branch of the MMO's admins is dedicated to rogue AIs inexplicably created from the system, for reasons explained in .hack//SIGN. The story then launches into a player named Alberio being escorted by these AIs to find various items, which eventually turn out to be parts of her data. In a twist ending that isn't at all surprising, Alberio is the admin from the start of the story who tried to delete this AI, the AI having fragmented her data to avoid it. Despite trying to delete her again, when he sees her range of emotions, he changes his mind. The AI nonetheless decides it's pointless to keep fighting, & forces Alberio to delete her. As a footnote, Alberio starts a relationship with a web poet (no relation to Emma Wielant) who likes to pose as a new player to remain anonymous while researching her subjects.


.hack//AI Buster 2: The experience causes Alberio to become depressed & he starts working even longer hours (he was already arguably pushing himself too hard) to try to cope. Alberio hears the rumors about Tsukasa & heads out to investigate, both to see if there's an AI that needs deleted & because he knows there's more going on with the game that he's not being told. He almost encounters Tsukasa, but the Guardian interferes, breaks his spear, & almost sends him into a coma. The corporation pressures him to resign & take the blame for the recent problems in the game, which he is happy to go along with. His assistant, an unnamed character in the novel who mostly just asks him questions, eventually goes on to be the character of Kamui in .hack//Legend, but her character is mistranslated as male in the novels.


.hack//SIGN: Programmer & AI researcher Harald Hoerwick has a crush on poet Emma Wielant, but she dies in a car crash before he can say anything about it & before finishing her work, "Epitaph of Twilight." As a form of wish fulfillment, Harald decides to create an AI to serve as their "daughter," but he needs funding, so he hides the project in an online game, based on the Epitaph, & pitches it to CC Corp. He knows he can't finish it himself, so he creates a system that can collect emotional data from players & create a personality for the "child" based on that data. The system begins to see itself as a mother & takes on the name "Morganna." Morganna realizes that she will shut down after the AI is finished, effectively killing her, so she takes steps to ensure that she is constantly working on the AI, but never finishing it. Harald abandons his body & enters the game to stop this, but he is reduced to a shell of his former self after Morganna tries to delete him.

Switching gears, we have a girl (presumably high school age, possibly college) whose mother dies & father starts abusing her. To escape from reality, she logs into the game & creates an account where she is a male magic-user named Tsukasa. Since Aura won't be born without a proper range of emotion, Morganna downloads a program onto Tsukasa to trap her in the game so that she can increase her sense of despair. This puts the real world player into a coma. These facts start to be uncovered by the players that Tsukasa meets, so to avoid being found out, Morganna has Tsukasa's character killed, returning her to the game without the memory that she is a girl in real life.

But despite the setback, the party eventually pieces all of this together, & starts planning to awaken Aura & enable Tsukasa to awaken herself (& log out of the game), but it actually works the other way around: Once Tsukasa finds self-confidence, which she does through her newfound friends, the AI child awakens & she is able to log out. Morganna creates monsters to track the AI & bring her back under control. The player behind Bear, a middle-aged writer, offers to adopt Tsukasa, who also starts dating the player behind Subaru. The stage is set for the games, which feature a mostly new cast of characters trying to help the growing AI & also a new batch of coma victims, the result of Morganna trying to get rid of anyone who comes into contact with the AI & might be able to help her. One of the bonus episodes is a tie-in to the games, with both parties meeting up & celebrating defeating Morganna.


.hack//Games: Nothing against the games, but they basically retread .hack//SIGN. Kite's friend is put into a coma by Morganna after the AI child from Sign (Aura) gives him Morganna's power to alter data, the hacker Helba saves Kite from meeting the same fate, & so Aura gives the power to Kite instead--which takes the form of an item called the "Twilight Bracelet" whenever he installs it. Kite tracks down & eventually defeats all of Morganna's manifestations, & Aura is completed. All of the coma victims also wake up. In a twist, 1 of the 8 Phases is Kite's party member Mia (who was also Macha in Sign before having her memory recreated, hence why they both look like purple cats), & in 1 of the ending sidequests, Aura contacts Kite & informs him that he can bring Mia back by conquering the area where Morganna had imprisoned her data. She comes back with no memory, but Kite figures out that they can simply recreate her memory as Mia by re-enacting her experiences.


.hack//Liminality: Follows yet another group in the "real world," simultaneous with the game series. Tokuoka is a former employee at CC Corp who quit once he realized they were covering things up. He starts contacting a group of girls who knew players that ended up in comas. Meanwhile, we see some of the effects that Morganna has on the real world, since she disturbs the net, & by this point, most technology is run by computers. There's a minor tie-in with the games, where they break into CC Corp's servers, find a party battling the entity that keeps putting everyone into comas, & helps them by shifting them to a new server when theirs was about to crash.


.hack//Legend: This is where I think the series started to go downhill & I didn't follow anything after this, so I can't say much more. The series effectively finished with the games & the bonus anime episode, leaving this as an unnecessary addition, & after this, they decide to reboot the story with the excuse that the CC Corp servers caught on fire. Nonetheless, I'll describe it anyway. This story actually has 2 versions, because this is where .hack decided to start splitting into a bunch of different continuities:

Anime: Non-canon. Shugo & Reina are brother & sister, but they live apart, due to the separation of their parents. To help get them back together, Reina enters into a contest to be allowed to use chibi versions of the character models of the game series's leading man & lady. She wins, because the whole thing was set up by Aura to pick a new person to wear the Bracelet. She does this basically because a group of players & a rogue AI develop a morbid fascination with death & start recreating a lot of what Morganna did to see if they could make people die instead of just go into comas. In a twist ending, 1 of the players attempts to sacrifice herself to save the rogue AI from being deleted, but the AI chooses to push her away & be destroyed instead.

Manga: Canon. It starts the same way as the anime, but Aura's reason for rigging the contest is different. There was never any danger, she just wanted to help people & provide a learning experience for the "daughter" that she had created, setting her up as essentially the "good version" of Morganna. Kamui is an antagonist in this series, but eventually learns the error of her ways & becomes a good admin or something like that.

Bitch.