to sum up my thoughts, this is essentially ace attorney but instead of court battles you solve puzzles by going on the internet.

what initially surprised me about project hacker is how engaging i found the overall characters. the cast isn't massive but you've got a wide range of fun and enjoyable characters to help give a lot of these investigations charm. the main character satoru and his childhood friend rina have a dynamic very similar to phoenix and maya, and their interactions were pretty much always smth i enjoyed reading. however the side characters i would argue is where the cast really shines. a lot of them aren't typical one note archetypes, theyre characters with conflicts, troubles and in some cases have motivations that arent necessarily entirely good/evil.

going on to the story, for the most part i really enjoyed it. each individual chapter (called programs) slowly builds off one another and in some cases directly references or builds off threads left in previous ones. this kinda structure makes the world feel a lot more cohesive than a more episodic structure which is what i expected to see going in. theres a few twists in the narrative that really took me by surprise at the direction they were choosing to take, and it culminates in a somewhat climactic finale.

i say somewhat because project hacker unfortunately suffers from "this will definitely sell enough to get a sequel" syndrome. a lot of plot threads and questions are left unanswered by the end, and since the game bombed tremendously and never got a western localisation (despite the fact at one point the trademark for it was filed) we'll probably never get those answered. its not a deal breaker but it is definitely smth i was left feeling a little disappointed by once i reached the credits.

probably the most unique aspect about this game is its gameplay. despite revolving around hacking, the gameplay doesnt really have much to do with it at all (at least in the traditional sense). instead most of the game focuses on using a built in internet browser to search the web for clues on locations, and in most cases, passwords. everyone in this game seems to not know shit about computer security so every password is smth that directly correlates to who they are as a person and their interests. i loved solving every single one of these. it surprising how accurately it manages to capture the feeling of internet sleuthing. while they start off fairly simple (eg. this person has a poster of x therefore going to the website about x should probably give me the answer i need), they slowly start to ramp up into using clues attained from a variety of different, seemingly unrelated sites. what's also really cool is that out of the maybe 50 different websites in the game, probably about half of them are never even used and exist purely for learning more about the world. my favourite of these is an anonymous chat messaging board akin to smth like 4chan where every chapter people will have random discussions about the events of the previous chapters, making the world fill a lot more lived in.

these all come to a head in a heavily game-ified hacking minigame of some sort. these were all pretty cool, however idk if it was just me but some of them can be really fucking hard. the last chapter especially saw me getting a game over multiple times before i finally managed to beat them.

last thing i want to touch on real quick is the music. at first i really wasnt feeling it at all. the majority of tracks in the opening chapter are like 2-4 bar loops with not much going on. and while this did persist throughout the game, i found a lot of the tracks to have this nice charm about them. in particular, the afformentioned hacking minigames have these cool 90s/early 2000s house beats that really get you in that zen mode.

if you can read jp i highly recommend checking this game out. its not gonna blow you away but its a fun little game that really deserves more attention