A game within a game.
The story progresses to 8 months later. You have been training hard and you are a really, really high level. You are now known all over the online game as Haseo the "Terror of Death". You are the most famous PKKer. A PKKer is a Player Killer Killer. They kill player killers who try to kill players. Wow, after all this MMO conversation I really feel like my tongue is buzzing with up to date computer language...LOL...
You meet up with Tri-Edge again and you get PKed. You start over and your whole computer system reboots. You check your messages to find out they are not there and you quickly log on to see what is going on. Turns out, you got PKed and you are now level one. You meet Silabus and Gaspard while you are walking around town and they think you are a Noob and they try to help you out. You try everything to convince those morons that you are not a noob and that you are in fact the "Terror of Death". But that ordeal won't last long as those two eventually figure it out at the beginning but I'll leave that for you to see. Now you travel around this online game called "The World" in search for answers as to what happened to Shino. You'll meet many eccentric characters and you'll become friends with some or mortal enemies with others. The story is good and it deserves full points.
The gameplay gets a 10 but the controls sadly do not. The bad part about the controls is the camera angle. I don't know about you but for me, every time I move the camera during battle to position my characters in the middle it always ends up positioning them either all the way to the left or to the right. I lose a lot of health that way until the controls finally do what I tell them to do. The gameplay definitely deserves a 10 because it's so easy to get used to. As I mentioned previously about the tutorial in the beginning, that'll only take about 6-10 minutes and it really is simple. But what's even better is the features which I will discuss next.
The previous four installments of .Hack were very good but this game beats all four of them combined in my opinion. First you've got the new Rengeki. If you have played the original 4 games then you will find this to be very similar. Of course if you've played the last 4 games and you liked it, you probably won't be reading this right now or any other reviews. In the previous games they had this same feature although it was called Data Drain. When you obtained a special bracelet you were able to Data Drain. When you fought monsters you would have to fight them until they become enveloped in a greenish like mist and you would perform the Data Drain. You would extract information and use it to unlock special bonuses. Use it too much and it's game over. In the previous games, you couldn't really beat a boss until you first Data Drained them. In .Hack G.U., you can use this unlimited times as long as you have enough SP. You need SP to perform special attacks called a skill trigger which I will talk about later. Rengeki is performed the same way. Attack until big colored ball shows up, Activate Skill Trigger and boom. It really is effective and since for your Skill Trigger you have four different slots, you can easily set up four different attacks to use.
Skill Triggers which I have slightly mentioned above is a weaker version of Rengeki. If you have enough SP you can simply press R1 and press either triangle, X, [], or O to use an attack. It's as simple as that. Be careful when using it because after you use it a small purple bar shows up and you can't use items or Skill Trigger until it fills up. So I don't recommend you do Rengeki or ST when your health is low. The bar fills up fast so you really don't have to worry.
You can also activate this cool new feature called an Awakening. There are two different types you can choose from and I think there will be more in the next installments but I'm not really sure. To use an Awakening, you need to build up your Morale Gauge. To build up your Gauge, you need to do Skill Triggers or Rengeki to build it up. When the gauge is full, all you have to press is [] and any other things they tell you too. The great part about Awakenings is that right after you use them you can attack the enemies and then you will be able to do a Rengeki. Plus these things do massive damage!!!
You can be in a guild. If you have played the previous games, (See how the games are connected? I keep making a bunch of references to the previous games) you can unlock special things by Data Draining. In the newest game, you have a grunty inside your guild and you can talk to them. You select Book of 1000 and if you accomplish all of the things required then you will get some bonus features. When you beat the game you can choose to convert your file to the second game and you will have all the bonus features unlocked!!!