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 Despite the fact the latest generation of consoles (Xbox360, PlayStation 3, and Wii) have been out for a few years, the PlayStation 2 refuses to back down. Every year since Sony launched the PS3, support has dwindled for the PS2, but it has become a sort of haven for niche, low-budget, or risky titles. RPG fans should know this already: both Atlus and Nippon Ichi Software have been the biggest supporters of the PS2 over the past year. Among other things, Atlus released Persona 4. NIS now gives us Ar Tonelico 2: Melody of Metafalica, the long-awaited sequel for fans of the first title, Ar Tonelico: Melody of Elemia. How does it stack up to other RPGs on the PS2? How does it stack up against other offerings by its developer, Gust/Banpresto (who have both been mostly dissolved into the NamcoBandai umbrella)? How does it compare to its predecessor? While it would certainly be clever for me to have a single word answer to all three of those questions, I'm afraid it's a bit more complicated than that. Actually, complicated is a great way to describe Ar Tonelico 2, a game that succeeds on many levels, but falls flat in an area crucial to the RPG genre.
It's easy to note a game's successes, since our minds seem hardwired to forget all the unpleasantness surrounding what we nostalgically recall to be the greatest game of all time (trust me, there's a lot wrong with all your favorite games). Fortunately for Gust and Ar Tonelico 2, they have a lot to be proud of. For those who don't know, Gust are the devs behind the Atelier Iris titles, Mana Khemia, and the Ar Tonelico games for the PS2. Just one look at any screenshot and this should be obvious -- they all have essentially the same graphics, presented differently. Whether this is a pro or a con is up to the individual, but it's a Gust touch -- you know exactly what you're getting into and how you'll feel. Even so, every title shines a little brighter than the last. With Ar Tonelico 2 being the latest, they've moved from having static 2-D environments to an interesting 2.5-D perspective. In dungeons, the environments are three dimensional, but the characters are two dimensional; it's complicated to describe, but simple in design. The environments are still static, despite being 3-D. The camera follows a little bit to remind you that yes, the dungeon is 3-D, but you navigate it like the Valkyrie Profile games, with the added ability to move into the background, changing little but the size of your character sprite.The sprites are okay; they don't do justice to the beautiful character portraits, but they have plenty of exciting attack animations and look great when they aren't being zoomed in on like they're extras in Cloverfield. Music is somewhere a lot of RPGs tend to blend together. In the Shin Megami Tensei universe, you'll have an overall hard rock feel, while their Persona spinoffs go for a trendy, poppy sound (well, 3 and 4). The Gust titles corner themselves as well: their Atelier games and Mana Khemia are all very cutesy, happy sounding games with lots of wind instruments and overall positive-sounding music. The Ar Tonelico titles have a very different sound. Along with a few of the happy, cutesy musical scores, there is a plethora of talent thrown into Ar Tonelico 2's music. Amazing lyrical scores dot the game, especially for boss battles and special attacks (Replakia, for example). The music for towns and dungeons all have a scent of sci-fi around them, perfectly putting your senses in the right place for the game's story. You might not get any of the songs stuck in your head, but that's not because they aren't very good; the songs are simply too complex to hum aloud. You need an entire chorus. I love the Ar Tonelico universe's music, so I have to give it my highest regard -- both games are really the only games in my library where I proudly own the soundtracks.  Graphics and music aside, the meat of the game is carved from two elements: Talking and Fighting. There's a lot of both. As far as talking is concerned, you play as Croix and over the course of the game you'll meet three Reyvateils (girls who sing "song" magic, basically) and each of them have "conversation topics" that can activate via certain situations in battle, certain conversations with each other or with friendly shop owners, or in response to an advancement in the game. These are almost always entertaining and serve to give you access to that Reyvateil's "cosmosphere", a place inside her mind where she guards her hidden secrets and feelings. Confronting these secrets and feelings with her inside the cosmosphere grants her stronger song magics. You also get new outfits for the Reyvateils here, each of which has unique stat boosts or limitations. Needless to say, you'll be in there a lot. In addition to the cosmosphere, you will gain access to something called the "infelsphere", a place where two of the Reyvateils (Luca and Cloche) go when they sleep to deepen their understanding of each other. Not only are these journeys very entertaining, they can also be pretty moving and revealing as far as learning more about the characters and how these two girls perceive them. You're rewarded with powerful "combo song magic" for progressing in the infelsphere. Over the course of the game, you'll also capture what are called "I.P.D." Reyvateils, which are girls who have gone wild, so to speak, and after capturing them, you take them for "Dive Therapy". One of your characters (Luca) has brief conversations with these I.P.D. infected girls in an attempt to calm them down. If successful, these girls become available as a type of support equipment for your characters, giving them more time to attack or additional elemental damage.  Leveling up is an easy matter to explain. Reyvateils and your Vanguard (front-line fighters) have different leveling systems. The Vanguard simply fight to gain experience on a rubber-band experience system (the more you level, the less enemies are worth), but the Reyvateils need to bathe with "grathnode crystals" to absorb their powers and become stronger. It's really just an excuse to watch the girls wander around a bath together in towels and strike up humorous conversation, but it's got a small level of strategy, too. Placing the crystals and other bath toys is important, since the girls will gain special abilities if they swim through a crystal. This means where you place everything needs a little thought. For example, one Reyvateil will sit and stare at a rubber duckie without moving at all, while placing a different toy will cause a different reaction. It sounds weird, but if you just roll with it, it makes sense. While you'll easily spend as much time doing these talking events as you will fighting, the battle system is not only worth describing, but it's worth accolades. As previously implied, you have two rows in battle: the front-line Vanguard and the rear-line Reyvateils. You have two characters in each row. Battles are intensely fast, split into an Attack and a Defense phase. After choosing your initial song magic to chant, the fight begins! In the Attack Phase, you have a fairly Valkyrie Profile-ish style of "attack as much as you can, sort of" battle mechanic. You have a set amount of time to attack, with several different modes of attack. By pressing a direction on the D-Pad or analog stick before making an attack, it will not just be a different attack, but will carry different effects. Pressing up and attack increases the "Harmonics" gauge, which increases the time you can attack for the Vanguard, but is also essential in activating the special Replakia skill. Replakia involves your rescued I.P.D. girls singing along with your Reyvateils, ideally increasing your magic power 100 times. Pressing left and attack increases the "Burst" gauge, which is the amount of charge stored for the song magic. Down and attack increases "Synch", which helps the Reyvateils sing together and charge faster as well as grant access to combo magic. Pressing right and then attack activates the "Cure" ability (or Care...?), which restores the Reyvateil's MP by a small amount. Increasing all of those gauges isn't vital, but it keeps you on your toes and doing so will increase the power of the Vanguard, eventually leading to their "Ex Skill", which is basically a super attack, complete with neat anime cutscenes that look like they borrowed from the world of Phantasy Star II (especially Cocona's special attack; something about wire-frame backgrounds just reminds me of PSII).  The defense phase is the meat of the game's difficulty. It is where the game separates the men from the boys; especially people with poor hand-eye coordination. You need to defend the Reyvateils from attack and this means timing your button presses to coincide with the enemies attack, as seen on your little guard gauge. It's very difficult to get a perfect every time, especially later in the game when attacks come at you fast and furious, but so long as you block even a little, you won't get hit for full-damage, which can cripple your Vanguard and Reyvateils in a single round. This defense mechanic is so simple in its execution, but so brilliant. I wish more games had this sort of set-up, although I would like to watch the enemy attack animations once in a while. The only other game I can think of with a similar guard mechanic is Super Mario RPG. Then again, I've played so many RPGs I tend to forget about a lot of them. Saturation kind of sucks like that. Summarizing the storyline of Ar Tonelico 2 is impossible to do without spoilers, plus the game asks you several times to make choices that directly effect what you'll do next. The game is split into "Phases", which act as the different arcs of the overall story. Each has their own major plot and conflict, but they all connect to one another over the course of the game. You start out on your quest to protect Lady Cloche, the Holy Maiden, and attempt to create/stop the paradise of Metafalica from being summoned. From there, all sorts of things happen that I really, really don't want to spoil. Why don't I want to spoil it? Because, to be honest, the story is really good. For some reason, I've loved the atmosphere, characters, and stories for both Ar Tonelico titles, rivaling some of my older favorites like Lufia II and Chrono Trigger. The game does you no favors in terms of updating you on events or situations your characters are in. This is actually my preferred method of storytelling. For example, you play the role of a Grand Bell Knight who is very smart, favored by the captain for his abilities and is incredibly devoted to his work. How out of character would it seem when he and his captain are attacked by a rebel faction, for him to ask, "Captain, who are these people?" when he should know very well who they are? It would be awful and really irk me. Fortunately, the game offers you a nice catalog of terms, people, and events to read up on after each is mentioned over the course of the game. This not only provides a great backdrop to the world of Ar Tonelico 2, but it keeps the characters from looking like completely ignorant imbeciles who stumble into extraordinary situations. It also makes things that appeared insignificant carry a much heavier meaning once you learn what the characters were talking about and how it relates to the story at large. Somehow, it all glues together to make a powerful narrative that I thoroughly recommend, unlike some games that resort to "amnesiac" main characters (Final Fantasy VII, VIII, 90% of JRPGs) to excuse themselves from finding ways to explain a world where the characters actually know about where they live.  Here is where I talk about the game's main failure: the localization. Poor grammar, little voice acting (what is there is very good though), and the inability to form even a single sentence without an error in syntax during some scenes really drag the game down a notch for me. One event wasn't even translated out of Japanese; It's just one line (a character's name + honorific), but it can happen 100 times over the course of the game. Note how earlier I said the storyline and narrative are very powerful. This is even with the less-than-acceptable translation and localization -- imagine how great the story would have been should Ar Tonelico 2 have gotten the beautiful treatment Disgaea 3 or Atlus' Persona 4 got. I'm not hating on Nippon Ichi in the least, as they have popped out several stellar titles, but they dropped the ball on what could have been so much better and made it merely passable. Still, getting it in English at all is pretty fortunate for us, so we really have no right to complain. I know I didn't feel like learning Japanese just to play this. The voice acting is good, but its minimal. Apparently, a lot of the voiced scenes were cut in the English version (even the Japanese language track seems to be shortened, according to those who imported). Why? Was there really a space issue? Persona 4 was almost fully-voiced with far superior graphics (though both are very unique in style, it's hard to contest this without raw data), but they opted to have an English-only dub. While Nippon Ichi is known for having dual-language options, I wonder if it was ever on the table to go English-only, Japanese-only/no English dub, or cut back on the voiced scenes. It's a small issue and one non-importers won't notice, but if there could have been more scenes with voices to enhance emotional impact (a certain jail scene with Luca comes to mind -- powerful, realistic stuff there for guys who have ever been in a relationship based on lies), it should have been given attention. Aside from dialogue and voicing snafus, there are two game-crippling glitches that I dont' see how they were missed in testing phases. In two key boss battles, the game will, not may, freeze if a certain attack is activated. That sucks. Fortunately, you can avoid these glitches by beating the boss in a set number of turns, but really? This is a PS2 game; it can't be patched like a PS3 or 360 game. Hopefully this doesn't turn a lot of people off -- I guarantee you it's no major challenge to topple the bosses in the time before those attacks activate. Nippon Ichi really messed up by taking an excellent story, lots of voiced scenes, and I assume overlooking two game breaking freeze issues, and making a wonderful game only great.  I think that covers everything you'd ever want to know about this game. Unique, if mediocre, graphics. Excellent music. Amazing game mechanics. Very interesting story that asks you to connect the dots, but a regrettably amateur localization riddled with poor grammar, incomprehensible babble (especially in the "bonus" cosmosphere), and game-crippling glitches. Most reviews tend to focus on the game's rampant sexual innuendo -- I didn't. From what I presented in this review, I purposefully left that out because when people are told initially the game has sexual undertones (sometimes overtones), they'll look for sexual implications in every aspect of the review and the game. It ruined a few of the scenes for me which would otherwise have been very gripping, but when I thought "oh, sex" it turned the scene on its head, uh, so to speak. This game should have been a 9 if handled by a capable company like Atlus, but because it was marred so heavily in its translation and apparently not tested, I'm putting it down to a very good 8. On a personal level, it's much, much higher, but this isn't an MTV-RPG like the Final Fantasy games. It's definitely for the niche. PROS: - Wonderful music that sets the atmosphere.
- Fast-paced, exciting battle system.
- Excellent story, if sexual innuendo is taken in stride.
CONS: - Graphics won't appeal to everyone.
- Localization has spelling and grammar mistakes everywhere.
- Two glitches that will freeze the game, as far as I know.
Infinite-Bits Score: 8.0
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