rumor control

[auragleaf02]

here we can ask questions to all of dot hack and try to get hold of the truth there is. I am an obessed fan and have a great deal of information, though there is some i would like to know where it came from  

[auragleaf02]

from the information i have gather Zelkova is probably either aida, or npc, though i haven't heard that he could be a hacker, also there is no information of his human profile that is why most people think he is a npc  

[Darkly_Doomed]

I think that Zelkova is a new hacker. He isn't Helba. Honestly, Helba is a superb hacker who made huge changes to her character design without restraint. I think that if Helba was to create an account in The World R:2 she would just make her character look the same rather than having someone completely different.
Also, they don't act alike at all.
Zelkova doesn't seem to be an NPC. He has a huge amount of personality, and he probably just wanted to hide his information so that if someone did find out about him being a hacker it could be slightly more difficult to find him in real life.

My question: How come it really does seem like The World originated from Japan in all of the series despite Harald Hoerwick (not sure on the spelling of his name) seeming to be German? I mean, Fragment seemed to have had a lot of Japanese beta users, and CC Corp's base from which they ran The World was in Japan, so how come the poem Fragment was based on, and the name of the creator of Fragment, were German? I am confused...and that's not even mentioning the fact that NONE of the area words seemed German (though in fragment they were random letters and numbers...).  

[Ayekasong]

Darkly_Doomed

My question: How come it really does seem like The World originated from Japan in all of the series despite Harald Hoerwick (not sure on the spelling of his name) seeming to be German? I mean, Fragment seemed to have had a lot of Japanese beta users, and CC Corp's base from which they ran The World was in Japan, so how come the poem Fragment was based on, and the name of the creator of Fragment, were German? I am confused...and that's not even mentioning the fact that NONE of the area words seemed German (though in fragment they were random letters and numbers...).

My only explanation is that the people who created the series are from Japan. sweatdrop Kind of lame.

Anyway, as for Zelkova, I don't know what to think. He clearly has connections to the Netslum, and knows a good deal about Yata, who is confirmed to be a character from R:1. So I really don't know what to think.

I want to know who the hell Ovan is. No one really speculates on that and just dismisses the idea that he is a character from the past - but there are a lot of things said, specifically from Yata, that hint that Ovan might be from the past, too.

Such as when he freaks out and yells about how he loved The World more than Ovan. Or when Pi says something about them being "old friends." Maybe he's not from past .hack//stories, but I'd like to know what their connection is, because it is obviously something besides simply being epitaph users.

Also, why doesn't Haseo ever refer to his time in a coma? T.T Stupid plot holes!!!  

[BreathLessX]

I would love to know what the heck was up with Crim? I mean, so damn protective of Subaru. But that's more because my ability to concentrate is like...shot.  

[the crescent goddess]

haseo was in a coma!?  

[SpokenSoftly]

Ayekasong

Darkly_Doomed

My question: How come it really does seem like The World originated from Japan in all of the series despite Harald Hoerwick (not sure on the spelling of his name) seeming to be German? I mean, Fragment seemed to have had a lot of Japanese beta users, and CC Corp's base from which they ran The World was in Japan, so how come the poem Fragment was based on, and the name of the creator of Fragment, were German? I am confused...and that's not even mentioning the fact that NONE of the area words seemed German (though in fragment they were random letters and numbers...).

My only explanation is that the people who created the series are from Japan. sweatdrop Kind of lame.

Anyway, as for Zelkova, I don't know what to think. He clearly has connections to the Netslum, and knows a good deal about Yata, who is confirmed to be a character from R:1. So I really don't know what to think.

I want to know who the hell Ovan is. No one really speculates on that and just dismisses the idea that he is a character from the past - but there are a lot of things said, specifically from Yata, that hint that Ovan might be from the past, too.

Such as when he freaks out and yells about how he loved The World more than Ovan. Or when Pi says something about them being "old friends." Maybe he's not from past .hack//stories, but I'd like to know what their connection is, because it is obviously something besides simply being epitaph users.

Also, why doesn't Haseo ever refer to his time in a coma? T.T Stupid plot holes!!!

As revealed in the third GU game, Ovan was a developer at CCCorp who was one of the key developers of R:1 and who was apparently behind the mysterious fire that destroyed the first CCCorp HQ two years before the launch of R:2. He (that is, Ovan's real-life persona) escaped from the fire carrying (if the reoprts are accurate) almost an entire filing cabinet of papers on the Epitaph Users and the Dot Hackers. This is alluded to in his R:2 incarnation with the 'massive amount of data' stored in his left cannon-arm, though by canon he should have had that arm from the beginning and he doesn't appear to have it in some early flashbacks to his time with the Twilight Brigade.

He is, albeit indirectly, also the force behind the creation of AIDA, something that Yata's player was assigned to investigate, hence the 'old friends' reference. Ovan's actions may seem random but most of them are geared towards saving his little sister's consciousness, which is (so far as I can tell) the 'ghost girl' that is rumored to appear in Hulle Grantz Cathedral.

As for Haseo's coma, he was the original character behind Sora, the amazingly OPd character from R:1 who had all his stats maxed, could kick anyone's a**, and made very sure they knew this fact. He was Data Drained by Skeith and spent a short time in a coma before awakening when Skeith was destroyed by the Dot Hackers at the end of the fourth game in the original series.

the really sad thing is that Ryou Misaki (Haseo's player) is in fourth grade when the original game series takes place, making him around nine or ten years old. This is a tad confusing, since apparently only three to four years pass between R:1 and R:2 yet Misaki ages seven years in that time. In a supreme irony Misaki gained Skeith (the original Terror of Death that erased his memories of having played R:1) as his Avatar in R:2.

Various sources conflict on how long the coma was, but the general range is between six months to two years, however long passed between the end of .HACK SIGN and the end of Quarantine, the last of the original quartet of games.

Zelkova states twice during the third game of the GU trilogy (once during a cutscene and once if you converse with him after the end of the game while in the Netslum) that he is a hacker who prefers to hide his identity. It is also hinted at in cutscenes and in field-dialogue that he may be variously:

The CEO of CC Corp (Given his seemingly endless knowledge of The World and the fact that even though he supposedly was trapped in Moon Tree's @Home when it was shut down he's still seen wandering around The World)
An undercover SysAdmin (Same reasons as above)
A little kid (in the Japanese there is a hiragana character used by Pi while she is addressing Zelkova that can be translated as "Little kiddie Zelkova")
A girl (The same character in the same cutscene can also be translated as "Little girl Zelkova")
An AI (Given his seeming invulnerability and disturbingly accurate statements)
A sociopath (My own little pet theory, and probably the most likely. He shows very little empathy for anyone, and it could be argued that he's less sympathetic than Ovan, since Ovan in the end is trying to save his sister and Zelkova's just... working.)
(Zelkova's Japanese speech is so ambiguously masculine/feminine and so difficult to properly pin down that he could be very nearly anyone or anything. One of the biggest challenges that was faced during the translation of his character was how to treat some of his dialogue and how to treat the dialogue of the characters addressing him)

Most of the stuff about Ovan is taken from memory about what is revealed after the end of the third GU game, so it may be a bit inaccurate. sweatdrop  

[Ayekasong]

Are you sure Ovan was behind the fire? I thought that Jyotaro Amagi was the one who set fire to the CCCorp building, and that Jun Bansyoya, Pi's brother, was the one who tried to recover the data. After re-watching all of the cutscenes and newsbreaks for the third game, I couldn't find anything to confirm or deny that Ovan was behind the fire.

I did find information that said Masato Indou (Ovan) was once a Network Administration Bureau Investigator, though. And Jun Bansyoya does discuss the appearance of Ovan in "Guide to an Uprising."

I'm not totally convinced that Yata and Ovan's only connection is because of Ovan's infection. Yata's whole speech about how AIDA "chose" Ovan, even though Yata loved the world more seems to imply a deeper connection. But it is an interesting point, for sure.  

[SpokenSoftly]

...what?

Probably best to get this out now:

First, I wrote the first part of that after a loooooong night of cram studying just before I fell asleep at my computer. I think my little brother might have sneaked into my room and typed the rest, pretty much everything from the third paragraph on. I just rediscovered this.

Sorry if this sounds a little weird, but it happens to me a lot. I'm taking all AP classes this semester and I stay up five hours or more past when I ought to be getting to bed on a regular basis.  

[yokaiy]

Seven years did properly pass between R:1 and R:2, you probably mistook the time gap for the time gap between IMOQ and LotT, since three or four years went by from when Kite stopped playing and Shugo started playing.

Haseo never mentions his coma because, quite frankly, he has forgotten in. It is revealed in ROOTS that he has absolutely no recollection of ever playing either version of The World, which I personally believe to be an aftereffect of the deletion of his PC. In order to harvest and obtain all of the Phases for Project GU -- which ultimately leads to the creation of AIDA and the fire -- CCCorp had to delete both Mia and Sora, who's characters were tied to Macha and Skeith respectively, these two being the first Epitaph Users back in R:1. Mia was completely destroyed, since she was only an AI, but what do you think would happen if Ryou, who was intimately attached to his character and Skeith, as seen in Carl's story (I believe which is called ZERO?), were to suddenly lose this huge part of himself? I doubt he would get away unscathed. Since one's mind is the one connected to the game, it makes sense that it would be his mind that suffered from this attack, and honestly I think he's lucky that the only thing he ended up with was faulty memory. Of course, /why/ he lost his memory is still speculation, but a vague bit of amnesia has been confirmed.

As for Zelkova, personally I support the claim that he and Helba are one in the same, although it has been speculated that Kaede may be her instead, and Zelky just an AI/hacker/random kid/ etc. I don't really have much to back it up with, except for that Zelkova seems to know too much about the original R:1. Things that one can't just find out digging through the scarce remains of it's data. It also seems very like her to take up a position that would allow her to gather a lot of data -- the best way of doing this in R:2 would be through a guild. And who has possibly the largest guild in all of the game? Zelkova with Moon Tree. It also seems very like her to keep friends close, but enemies closer. I get the feeling Zelkova knew that Sakaki was a threat from the beginning, honestly. His connection to the Net Slum also puts him up as a candidate for being Helba -- I doubt the Net Slum is the sort of thing she would just hand over to someone, eventhough it was never really hers -- but it is probably the weakest claim for the argument. His connection to the Net Slum could affiliate him with any of the .hackers, really, not just Helba.

The one thing I want to know is what happened to Kite after the bracelet broke in IMOQ. Both he and Cubia were howling in pain when it was breaking, and I don't think that the game is kind enough to let him just get up and walk away after that sort of thing. Do you think his real life self took any damage from it? It seemed to embed itself to his character in a very parasitic way, but his connection to his character -- unlike Sora's or another coma victims -- was never really expressed. Could he have been so deeply tied to his character's condition that his arm was rendered useless IRL? Or perhaps at least wounded? And would this wound or whatever have fixed itself upon him receiving the second bracelet? Of course, there's no way to know given the information released, so I can only guess at Kite's well-being. The only way to really figure it out would be to go to someone who works for the game creators.  

[Darkly_Doomed]

BreathLessX

I would love to know what the heck was up with Crim? I mean, so damn protective of Subaru. But that's more because my ability to concentrate is like...shot.

Crim met Subaru when she was still being all oblivious to everything surrounding her. She walked The World in a daze, hardly caring. It's that type of lonely character that Crim can't really resist helping. And, in my opinion, it seems like as he broke her shell and made her see everything differently, he started to fall for her. Clearly she doesn't feel the same way, but you can see it in the series in how he wants what's best for her, and wants to make sure she's happy, along with the strong desire to protect her and the mention of having met her offline. Just what I think.
On the matter of Ovan, if it's any clue I think that they said in Redemption that he was in Germany (this was after he had revived Aina and gotten rid of Aida). Haseo had indeed lost his memory of playing The World after waking from his coma. I think that other people who had gone comatose had had memory issues as well (like how Silver Knight was killed by the Guardian. I think his memory was slightly hazy after waking up from being unconscious, and Bordeaux seemed to have problems with that as well.). I'm gonna guess that because of how enraged Morganna was, it being Skeith's first data drain, and the length of the coma led to the memory loss. Since it was the first time Skeith had data drained someone, that probably formed a bit of a connection between him and Skeith, leading to Skeith becoming his avatar.
I still don't think Zelkova is Helba. Look at it this way. Zelkova acts like a kid and seems to have quite different ways of playing than Helba did. And just as I typed that sentence, I started to see why Helba would become someone like Zelkova when playing again. The reasoning for that would be that Helba, tired of not really playing, would want to give the game a chance. So they would create a character with minimal hacks on it so that playing normally could be possible. But, after a while, Helba would tire of playing just that way. Using Moon Tree as a mask, Helba would be able to carry out the normal way of playing and be able to hack without being noticed. That wouldn't explain Kaede though, and the extreme personality change, along with voice change, doesn't seem to fit. Perhaps Zelkova has some family relation to Helba. It's tough to tell.
Since I never beat ANY of the IMOQ games, anything I say about them will be total guesses. If Kite was pretty much completely destroyed, then that would kind of explain Aura's need to create Azure Kite from memory (twisted memory, eh?) Hm. Mayhaps one of the other series has a timeline that would indicate another coma victim or something of the sort.
On the topic of Fragment: I just recently read //Another Birth, and it seemed to explain this. Fragment was created in Germany by Harald, CC Corp caught wind of it, and bought it all from him. The black box that formed the core of the game was preserved though (mainly because no one could crack into it), and this started everything with Morganna and Aura. That's the idea I got from it.
With Ovan and Yata, they either played together in R:1 or they just played together in R:2 before they realized everything with avatars and AIDA and such. I mean, who's to say that their relationship formed in R:1?

All opinions, really. But I base it on what I see in the series.  

[yokaiy]

On the Zelkova/Helba comment, and the drastic change of voice, it's been hinted and implied that there is a voice-changing technology going around, this being why a male player like Asta doesn't sound like a guy when playing as a female character, and so on. So that can explain why, if it is Helba, she suddenly sounds like a little boy. But this is speculation, I highly doubt CCCorp will ever reveal whether or not Zelkova is Helba, or if we're all completely wrong and Helba came back as... I dunno... Gabi. : V (He was the first I thought of, don't take that seriously.)