A slight one year necro, but it only seems logical that I should post this here.
So, I'm most likely the only guy on the WBO that purchased .hack//Sekai no Mukou ni which came with .hack//Versus and am therefore the only one that can judge the game fairly. Coincidentally, I just finished the game :3
So, basically, 'Story Mode' is divided into five ranks of difficulty, Platinum Rank, the hardest, gold rank, silver rank, bronze rank and, finally, no rank XD You begin No Rank with just Sora (Who's, by far, the weakest character of the roster) then unlock Haseo and Sakuya. Once you've done every battle in No Rank, you'll unlock bronze rank and unlock more characters and so on. Rather simple but still enjoyable. I have no idea where 'Story' fits into this, Japanese not exactly being my strong point, but, occasionally, static will take a hold of your TV after a match and 9 will appear on-screen as if he's trapped in it and say something. Eventually, you'll make it to Platinum Rank and at the end of said rank, you'll face the cheappest boss ever: Dark-AIDA-Ovan. Okay, sometimes, you'll face an enemy that will be marked as 'UNKNOWN' which'll be some darkness-like palette-swap version of another character which are actually pretty cool. Those Unknown characters are cheap in themselves because their Exceed Gauge fills up almost twice as fast as the player's. Next, there's Ovan. In his normal form, he's ok. He has good long-ranged attacks and good short-ranged ones too but the good thing is that he's really slow because he walks all the time... No joke. However, his Exceed state unleashes his AIDA arm, making him super fast and able to deal some serious damage with cheap combos. Luckily, though, his Exceed state only lasts like 15 seconds or so. However, the last boss of story is Ovan... with the dark-palette swap... In CONSTANT Exceed mode. Needless to say, he is terribly hard and I was only able to defeat him by being just as cheap as he is. Blackrose has a move that can't be blocked and another that deals a lot of damage, so I just used a combination of the two to kill him. End of the game 8D
So yeah, good fighter. It
is just a bonus thing, but still fun.