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Bandai returns with another injection of 5 episodes of this
largely poplar series, which officially owns me. – Despite the
fact that this release plays slower than the last release. But
after watching it, playing with its features, just to watch it
again, it proves to still be an amusing bit to go through.
We last left Tsukasa who has been taken captive by the Crimson
Knights for questioning. During this time, we learn that Lady
Subaru has some concern for Tsukasa and his situation, after
talking with him for the first time. In fact we see this all the
way through much of the disk. Needless to say, Tsukasa is later
rescued (And don’t be complaining about me spoiling you, we all
knew this had to happen for the story to advance.) and then
disappears for awhile, just to return and is given the task of
looking after another player’s Grunty. This doesn’t exactly go
according to plan. As a result Tsukasa learns a valuable lesson.
All while this goes on, Mimiru meets a new friend, who goes by the
name A-20, and learns not to give up on Tsukasa. Avoiding anymore
spoilers, more or less the whole disk focuses more on the other
characters of this. We get to know some of their intentions, and
how much this whole fiasco has gotten them involved. As well as
learn that the mystery behind Tsukasa’s power is planned. Someone
out there wants these events to happen. While this disk wasn’t as
exciting as the last one, or the PS2 game for that matter, it
still provides to be an amusing bit to watch.
Visually, this disc is almost flawless, with the exception of a
few aliasing issues (not much.) other than that, it’s great video.
The audio is pretty nice as well, those we only took in the
Japanese track this time around. The sound seems to play clear, no
problems. We would imagine that the English dub was is the same as
the last volume. With a few characters sounding a bit off and not
right and the lip-sync being off.
The menu design is simple; it has easy access to things with the
Chaos Gate spinning in the background. However, that’s the only
nice looking part. The other menus are still and simple. The
extras are a bit better on this. We have the Character gallery,
which provides… well not enough pictures for me to view.
A timeline explaining some of the events that lead up to the whole
.hack saga. However I wouldn’t recommend going through these, if
you’ve already went through the PS2 game -- Since the game
explains all these at one point, in fact the game does a better
job at explaining them. Oh well, its still a good feature. Finally
we end it with a few Japanese commercial spots and Bandai promos.
Unlike the last release, we managed to get our hands on the
limited version of this, which contains the disk, and the second
soundtrack to .hack // SIGN. It’s not much, but still a nice
little thing to have, too bad the packaging is just so big.
Really, was all that cardboard and what not really needed to hold
the DVD and CD?
Overall this is a solid release, which seems to fall short a bit
in comparison to the last one in terms of story. Hopefully things
will pick right up with the next release. Still a recommended
title. |
Version 2.0
