Early Beta Design for Macha the Temptress

[Erroneous]

Macha the Temptress is one of the Phases of Morganna, also called The Cursed Wave. The cutting room floor as many would call it, back on May 8th 2022 I discovered a different form of the character. Normally you do not encounter her normal form till .hack//Quarantine the last PS2 game of the original quadrilogy. Her design you see in this final game and all other marketing and supplement materials remains consistent. Even in light novels such as .hack//Another Birth in the appendix artworks.

There is however one form of hers we see differently, less cat-like and more human-like. This made it's first appearance in the 2002 PS2 Japanese video game .hack//Infection, and only on the Japanese version as other international releases corrected this version.

This model stored on the game disc as file 0000736-x61.ccs is the human-like version of Macha the Temptress. The US and PAL versions file number is changed to 0000790-x61.ccs and uses the cat-like version we get in the final game.

The purple hair tips, the purple hand gloves, the metallic chest armor, are all gone and the cat eyes and cat nose are now human shaped.

Unsure as to what the design choice to go from human-like to cat-like, maybe ties to her spoilers more closely is the best guess.

But here we have some of her animation.

And again but up close.

 

Compared to her final production form.

 

A black and white artist sketch of this version was first seen in the 2003 Comptiq magazine .hack//The World, and again later in the 2011 hard book edition of .hack//Archives 3 in color. With being credited by Hiroshi Matsuyama as the artist.

[Erroneous]

Back in August 2022, Discord user Three Pendants was able to force load the Macha the Temptress battle in .hack//Infection (because this model is only on the Japanese version of .hack//Infection). Least not forget she is not meant to be fought till the forth game .hack//Quarantine. Trying to load her in any other field not her stage will result in unexpected screen motion blur results and other oddities. But here she is loaded on her stage.