You'd be surprised at how many people enjoyed the first .hack game series. I know many forum goers (myself included) & even credible game journalists who were fans. The story was interesting in that mysterious way, the worldview of an MMORPG gone wrong was fascinating, the music was quite good and the gameplay was addicting and fun. Art wasn't bad either. It had problems and the gameplay was repetitive, but it was a cool experience to go through. The whole multimedia storytelling idea of games+ovas+anime to tell one big story was fairly cool and almost a precursor to the ARGs and this type of game/anime/manga pairing you get these days.
The 2nd series was very nice graphically, and it wasn't a huge step down from the original, but it was basically the same sort of thing as series one but without the fresh "this hasn't been done before" feeling and so it feels a lot weaker. The plot also wasn't as good, although it wasn't terrible either.
I played through both and enjoyed both, though I wouldn't recommend either to most people since I don't think they hold up (they were C-gameplay to begin with 5-8 years ago, I shudder to think how they hold up now) and the whole multi-game format means you have to put it the effort to get anything out of it.
I'd love for CyberConnect2 to give it another run on PS3/X360 hardware instead of NARUTO/NARUTO/NARUTO
But I don't think Namco feels there is enough money potential to give budget for a full length new .hack franchise.