A lot of the plot points in the .hack games match up with vrains, and it is interesting to see how things were treated with 15 years of technology between them.

There’s a different focus with vrains, because we gotta sell cards, but it is fun to look at “society that is immersed in a massive scale multi player game” from both those time periods. Especially because even as an alternate timeline, .hack’s world purposefully has all this surrounding material reminding you of what felt plausible or normal around 2002.