After the battle at the upside-down castle, everyone but Tsukasa is returned to a regular field in 'The World'. Did Tsukasa die? What happened to him? Captured by a previously friendly unseen force, Tsukasa reappears with parts of his memorie, thoughts, and feelings "missing". Is this really Tsukasa or just a copy of the character’s data? The other characters have their own problems as well - Subaru discovers that the Silver Knight have been hiding messages from her with the latest request by the System Administrator threatening to end with disastrous results!

• As Seen on Cartoon Network!

Special Features & Extras
- Dolby Digital Stereo-Japanese/English
- Aspect Ratio - 16:9 Anamorphic (Widescreen)
- Interactive Menu
- Image Gallery
- Trailers
- Scene Select
- Color Screen Printed Disk
- Isolated Score Dolby Digital 5.1 Audio Track
- Isolated Score Audio Track
- Character Gallery
- Bandai Previews

Every so often, we get a nice series that ends up being 26 episodes, but only delivers… well, less than 26 episodes worth of story. The rest is turn into the dreaded “filler” episodes. .hack is offiacaly no exception to that rule as of right now. You can toss disk 4 of this into the filler disk section.

As mentioned above, the story for the most part has run into a brick wall, and is climbing up it… slowly, as we discover that the mystery that we revealed in the last volume. -- Doesn’t really get solved, or at least lead on a bit long to continue bringing us more interest. It seems after the strange events were we left our characters; all of them were booted out of the game, and had to reboot. But what about Tsuska? It seems some strange stuff happens to him… when he is booted from the game or dies, such as lost memories.  Things kind of slow down from here as we follow the plot of character development. We learn more about BT, the origins of her name, and just exactly how things between her and Sora turn out. Subaru also goes through some hard and tough times, and eventually ends up becoming much more closer to Tsuaka. But yeah, that’s about it here… just character development, and a slower that than normal story.

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 however, seem to be falling a bit behind now. The Character gallery returns, proving images, most of Grunties. 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! Ending things off with Japanese commercial spots and Bandai promos.

And there you have it, slow moving story, but more character devolvement, less that spectacular extras -- Leaves us with something we weren’t expecting. Thankfully the last volumes were just too sweet, which is why we’re still looking forward to the rest of this series. But for the most part, if you’re really feeling cheap, you could likely pass this whole volume up, and be able to peace together what happened in the next volume with no problems… but doing that is never fun… oh well.