Are you saying that since the functionality and power of DD is alter by ones desires,
if Haseo wanted to,for example, back when he was trying to save Atoli in the makeshift AIDA Server Sakaki made with Moon Tree's @Home, when he DD her to get rid of AIDA,, he wanted to he could gotten rid of both Innis and AIDA at the same time, if wanted to ?
Possibly, though that would require Haseo being overcome Innis', the AIDA's, and Atoli's combined wills, which I don't think he could pull off.
I think this is also why berserk avatars are never shown explicitly using DD, because they are too frenzied to think about more finesse like DD and would rather just beat things to death.
Erm, berserk Avatars DO use Data Drain. Skeith uses it when he defeats Magus.
Also the reason Haseo simply collapses when Skeith is defeated is due to the physical and mental exhaustion, rather than Skeith having some sort of set HP limit.
No, it's because Skeith is Protect Broken, making him helpless against Data Drain.
Avatar battles are, in a sense, one person's mind against the other. Rebirth works in a similar fashion I think, which is why Haseo had his psyche shattered. He didn't seem too ill affected by Ovan's participation in the AIDA incident before Rebirth was set off, so why would he be after? It was Rebirth in itself that broke him.
The hell? If you don't think Haseo was effected before hand, you missed a lot of character development. He was affected, but he was too angry and pissed at Ovan, combined with Sakaki's bull, to give it much thought. After everyone is rescued though, is when he allows himself to feel despair.
In that thought, let me put forth this: Was Haseo speaking to Skeith, or his own subconscious in the video 'You Are Me' (the White Haseo)...
It was both. The Avatars and their Epitaph Users are mentally linked on a deep level.
But back to the Game Over issue, I believe the "Game Over" text is merely something put there to tell you, the player, you failed.
There is likely a 'game over' screen for The World, but I doubt it would look as cyberpunk as the screen in the .hack game.(since The World was a fantasy setting)
Keep in mind this Game Over screen is initiated by an overfilled Virus Meter; it's not a normal Game Over screen other players would ever see.
Also, while Another Birth is relatively accurate, it is a bit like XXXX, as it is non-canon.
No, it's not. Another Birth is 100% canonical.
Maha brings up another question... is the Guardian and Maha's powers really "Data Drain" or is it a different effect that has similar purpose and consequences...
more to the point, isn't their attack more of a 'Legacy Data Drain', the predecessor to actual data drain? (Also when I said Tsukasa was killed, I was considering Maha and her DD effect in that statement...)
It's the exact same Data Drain.
Helba created her own gate in SIGN, has a heavily modified PC, made a makeshift server, made a few fields, changed all of her stats, and can warp in and out of any area she wishes to directly... how is that not overriding the system in a significant way? Also Helba can speak to players in fields without being there, as though she were.
She was logged in when she did just about all of that, and none of which is something a logged-in Administrator can't do.
I don't remember ever seeing Helba seem to be in any danger. In fact she can crash a field simply to log everyone out of it, as she has done a few times. I could however be wrong about her not being in the game directly...
Kite says in the Corbenic fight that if he loses, everyone goes in a coma, and we're shown glimpses of everyone involved in the fight, including Helba.
Besides, if Helba had some special way to avoid entering a coma, she wouldn't keep it to herself. She'd probably share it and find a way to patch it into the game for all players to use, or something.
She does say, however, "It's nice to play the game normally for a change" once you call her to a field in the after-game. Granted that could mean many things, but I personally think she is logged into the game more in the sense of of an external bot program normally. Either that or, as some have suggested, Helba is a large group of people acting as a unit, so one is playing, while the others are doing various hacking operations... (I don't much care for that idea, as it sort of takes away the amazing part of Helba... rather than one genius hacker, Helba is just a lot of people... and if that were the case, then why would Helba need 'agents')
Or, much more simply and obviously, Helba means playing the game as a normal player instead of hacking the hell out of it in order to save both worlds.
I suppose no real conclusions can come until someone discovers exactly HOW Harald managed to drag analogue mind data into a digital environment using nothing more than standard VR headgear and a game controller...
We're told this in Liminality. When someone is really intent and absorbed into the game, you can't say if they're "in" it, or "out" of it. But when you cut the connection between mind and body, the mind is left on the "inside." Basically, magic.
Much like the question of how do characters do complex things like dancing or randomly deciding to get into a Spring of Myst nude rather than dropping items into it...(there's no way all of those actions can be done with just a controller... and they'd take too much time to program commands for each one and use keyboard input... We don't even really know how the characters can look in a certain direction or lean on their hands like Blackrose does in one scene... Or for that matter, just about ANYTHING Sora does in SIGN...)
Emoticons explain most of these, according to Albireo, along with the fact that the animes and game cutscenes extend the drama with actions and displays that can't actually happen and are not taking place within the game, but exist only for the user's benefit of Suspension of Disbelief.
Basically, we see things from Tsukasa's perspective at all times. To normal players like Kite, Blackrose, Haseo, Helba, etc., they're just seeing normal polygon PCs standing there, not doing much of anything unless they type in /clap or /smile or something to that effect. Boring as hell, so it's spiced up. Doesn't mean that's what's actually happening, and according to the characters, it's not.