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For those that are still having troubles finding a reason to like
.hack // SIGN after the first two disks. Can now rest assured that
a reason will be found with the four episodes that are packed into
the 3rd volume, that’s assuming you haven’t been owned
by it already.
With only four episodes to work with this time around, things
start off a tad bit slow by showing more of the game. And that
even Tsukasa needs to hang around people a bit more. Mimiru and
Bear invite him along to enter a dungeon that involves answering a
few questions. Things surprisingly go along well somewhat, knowing
the sensitive person that Tsukasa is and all. The main story later
picks up as a few scenes from the real world are shown, as a
parent and a doctor talk about a child that’s in a coma. Bear
later catches wind on this and goes to investigate. But that’s
nothing compared to the quest for the Key of the Twilight, a
legendary item, that supposedly can allow Tsukasa to log out. Bear
and Mimiru join him on this quest… Just there’s a catch, Tsukasa
doesn’t want to log out… he wants it for someone else. Crim and BT
want it as well. So does Sora. A major conflict between these
groups occurs, yep, things have gotten very interesting.
Needless to say, the story only gets really exciting after the
first episode on the disk. The new events unfold one after another
asking more questions, especially for those that played the PS2
games. Typically that group of people knows a bit more about
what’s going on in this series than others, but the last episode
left me with some questions… questions that I want answers for!
Needless to say, we have reached the point of no return of this
series, and the point were you run out to grab the next title.
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, though 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 is the same as the
last volume. With a few characters sounding a bit off and not
right and the lip-sync being off. Oh yes, then there’s the
Isolated Score, that lets you watch the series without any
dialogue, just the music… the music being something that’s owning
me right now.
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, but
improved from what we say on the last volumes. The extras also see
an improvement on this. The Character gallery returns, this time
proving two times more images than before. All while having them
set in a gallery that you can scroll through as you please with a
quick push of the arrow buttons on your controller. This is how
an image gallery should be!
Another feature is the continuation of the timeline from the last
volume, 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, it's still a good feature. Finally
we end it with a few Japanese commercial spots and Bandai promos.
Unlike the first release, we managed to get our hands on the
limited version of this, which contains the disk, and the
soundtrack to .hack // LIMINALITY. A move that confused a few
people since .hack // LIMINALITY is the OVA that comes with the
PS2 games. I suppose many expected this to come with the games or
something, which would have made more sense. Not all the gamers
playing with it have made the jump over to the anime just yet.
So far this volume has proven to be the best of the series thus
far; I’m hoping the next volume will take that title away… and
then maybe the next ones after that. This way I can just label the
whole series as spectacular. |
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