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After a bit of a slow down in the last disk, things start to pick
up here in this release. Which is good, because I was starting to
have some worries of were this series was headed before.
It appears that Tsukasa and Surbara have been getting much closer,
to the point where he takes her to different parts of The World
and shows her things she hasn’t really seen. He then chooses to
show her something else… that no one has seen. Aura and the area
she was resting in. This however turned out to be a bad idea as he
is punished for this and reduced to a less than amusing state, where
the simplest tasks become tough for him after the ordeal. And
that’s where he more or less stays for much of the volume… while
everyone else wonders what happened.
During this time, several other events happen, such as the
appearance of more data bugs, or what they call Monsters that
can’t be defeated. It’s then decided that the Key of the Twilight
is something that can’t be left unresolved, and once again a quest
to find out about it, is taken forth, this time with the aid of Helba who
makes a brief appearance in this.
There’s a lot of story going on this volume, in fact I found my
self watching it over about two or three times just to make sure I
got everything. Everything sort of comes at you as one big data
dump. And you’re expected to absorb all that and understand it all
at once. I suppose I shouldn’t really complain since that some
questions to this finally get answered, and that the story is
finally moving a long.
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 of the monsters this time. 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, sounds familiar? Well
it is, since this is basically what we got from the last volume…
What we have here is a huge improvement of the last volume in
terms of story, but more or less the exact same in terms off… well
everything else! With one more disk to go, I can hardly wait to
see the conclusion of this, since we were left in a bit of a cliff
hanger… But here’s the kicker… volume 6 doesn’t come out until
March. So we’re going to have to play the waiting game… but who
are we kidding? The waiting game sucks, time to play more the PS2
.hack titles. |
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