Ar tonelico II: Melody of Metafalica

"A decent, but forgettable game/visual novel in the sea of jRPGs"

Introduction
Released in NA in 2009, Ar tonelico 2: Melody of Metafalica brings players back to the Ar tonelico universe following the previous title Ar tonelico: Melody of Elemia. Like the first title, Ar tonelico 2 was created by niche developer GUST and was localized/translated by NIS America. While most of the charm of the first game remains, a lot has also changed in this sequel.

Story: 5/10

Without ruining the story too much, the land that this game takes place on is falling apart and there is not enough room on the little remaining land. There is a certain hymn that can be sung to create more land, but the Goddess has forbidden anyone from singing it. As a result, the government wants to declare war against the Goddess.

What saves this from being just another cliche save the world RPG is that the "world" has a huge backstory and history to it already; one of the most complex and detailed for any game I've ever seen. The world that the Ar tonelico series takes place on has its own language, called the Hymmnos language as well.. The land that this game takes place on is actually a huge floating tower. Repeat after me, huge floating tower. Sweet. I like it. Reyvateils, another creation of this extremely detailed world are females with the ability to connect with the main tower of the land called Sol Marta. It is through this tower that they are able to convert their emotions into song magic. This is how they "sing" those spells that you'll use in combat.

You play as Croix, a rookie Grand Bell (aka the government) Knight who goes around containing Reyvateils that have gone berserk (I.P.D.s). What starts out as a routine I.P.D. containment mission will turn into something much much more for Croix. It's pretty predictable on what happens next, but I won't spoil it.

The game doesn't however focus on Croix. Yes, he is the character you will control throughout the game. Doesn't matter. The game will spend the majority of the time focusing on Luca, a childhood friend of Croix, and Cloche, the Holy Maiden. Everyone else will simply not get any decent amount of character development.

Croix starts out as a character who acts indifferently toward most things. He'll keep his cool and remain calm even when everyone else is freaking out and will do his best to follow his orders just like any good rookie Grand Bell Knight. As the story progresses, he becomes more and more emotionally hot-headed, as you would expect due to his relationship with Luca and Cloche getting deeper. (They are.... of course the focus of the whole game). He'll eventually start getting all protective of the Reyvateils much more than in the beginning, just like what you would expect from a Korean soap opera or something...

Luca will start out with a really happy and cheerful personality, but as you begin to unearth her inner thoughts, you'll see what she has to deal with every day and how she isn't as cheerful and happy as she first seems to be. Most people are hit or miss with Luca. Her deceptive outer personality versus her inner deep thoughts do make for an interesting bit of character development. Cloche starts out as a stuck up spoiled princess type. OBVIOUSLY, the only way she would develop would be for her to warm up to everyone and drop her haughty attitude. Her development in my opinion is not as interesting as Lucas, but her changing personality does make her likable. All the other character's development is not essential to the story or is just so inadequate that I just won't mention them.

This game does have SOME interesting plot twists, and certain events will really hit the player emotionally (at least it did for me). Sadly, those are the minority; most of the plot twists in this plot just simply don't infuse any emotion into the player because the player knows what's going to happen next based on past RPG experiences.

Gameplay: 5/10
Be forewarned now. This game is extremely heavy on text. Those looking for more action should probably steer clear of this game. There will be many times in that you can go for extremely long periods of time without going into battle once; you'll just be reading through the dialogue that the game happily supplies to you. (I think once I went an hour and a half of just shifting through dialogue).

A lot of time will be spent in this game running through dungeons. Go to town, witness an event, go to dungeon A. After finishing said dungeon, you'll witness another event, go back to town, witness yet another event, and get told to go to another dungeon. Occasionally you'll be told to backtrack to a previous dungeon to unlock a new part that you weren't able to access earlier. Sound familiar? Now... is this necessarily this game's fault? Not exactly, as almost all RPGs follow this model. Ar tonelico 2 does nothing to try to deviate from the standard RPG formula. This can be seen as a good thing or a bad thing, I'll leave it up to you.

Looking back at the first game of the series, Ar tonelico used a traditional turn based battle system that was somewhat bland and overused. Ar tonelico 2 changes this system and splits combat into two phases: an attack phase and a defense phase. The attack phase is when your vanguards, or characters that defend your Reyvateils (casters), are allowed to openly attack your enemies without fear of retaliation. With a combination of the directional pad and either the X or square button, your vanguards can do up to 3 different attacks and 1 support move to help your Reyvateils recover magic (MP). On the caster's side, this is when you can choose which song, essentially spell, that they will use. Red magic deals some form of damage while blue magic is a support spell. The % charge determines how powerful the spell is when it is released.

(Note that in Ar tonelico 2, you control two Reyvateils and two vanguards now instead of one Reyvateil and 3 vanguards as in the first)

During the defense phase, your enemies will attempt to attack your Reyvateils, and you must use your vanguards to block these attacks by hitting either X or square right when a timer bar reaches a certain point. The Reyvateils start out extremely fragile so early game it is very important to try and get timing down to try and block as many attacks as possible. A "Perfect" block will block 100% of the damage for both vanguard and Reyvateil as well as provide a significant boost in the % charge of any spell that the Reyvateils are casting. On the other end of the spectrum, a "Terrible" will mean that both the vanguard and Reyvateil take damage; there is a slight penalty to % charge if the Reyvateil gets hit full force during battle.

During the attack phase, players must try to maximize the emotion gauge in the bottom right hand of the screen that represent the emotions of the Reyvateils that you are guarding. Maxing them will give a bonus to your fighting abilities as the battle continues. For example, maxing Harmonics at the beginning of battle will allow your vanguards to use upgraded level attacks provided they are the required level. Maxing enough of these emotions (10 to be exact) will allow your vanguard characters to perform a super attack. This is basically a flashy spell effect with some anime clips attached to them.

Replakia, introduced later in the game, is a system where you can add a multiplier to your % charge increase rate. The multiplier is dependent on how many I.P.D.s you have found, contained, cured, and that have joined the Cloche Fan Club. It's hard to explain... the game will do a mediocre job in explaining it to you.

Finally, IPDs can be equipped to your characters after you cure them (this will be explained in game, I don't feel the need to). These girls (IPDs are... well all Reyvateils and they are all girls) provide bonuses to your characters. Bonuses come in all flavors, such as adding a chance to inflict a status ailment, or increasing the timing window on guarding making it easier.

Don't get me wrong now, this battle system was much better than Ar tonelico's previous battle system, but still does not offer any challenge. The attack phase was just a button mash a majority of the time. With the exception of one character and the support move, all of the "attacks" did relatively the same thing and come out to around the same DPS. The defense stage made this game way too easy. Even if someone was terrible at getting perfect guards, it is really easy to still get "Great guards" which still reduces 75% of the damage to the vanguard. Random encounters will play out the same way. Charge up a song, level up harmonics to unlock higher level attacks, max out any other attribute (doesn't really matter after a while), defend getting mostly greats/perfects, rinse repeat until desired % gauge is reached and launch the spell to kill every monster. With the exception of bosses, 99% of the random encounters I beat by the 3rd attack phase using the same spell and attacks.

Replakia is overkill to an already unbalanced and extremely easy system. You won't need to use it on boss battles unless you are really underleveled. If you do use it, you can easily kill bosses in about 2-3 attack phases after activating it. There is no cost to using it every battle, and the only requirement is to have Harmonics for Cloche maxed out (obviously Cloche needs to be in your party). For normal encounters, the mobs will probably already be dead before you need to use it. This system is just extremely flawed in implementation and what it does to game difficulty.

Remember when I mentioned you could equip the IPDs you cure to your vanguards? Well, this system is called Girl Power, and it further breaks whatever difficulty this game has. Once getting access to any IPD with Guard++ or higher, you basically become immortal. It increases the timing window enough that perfect guards become extremely easy to get. Recall that getting a perfect guard blocks 100% of the damage to both vanguard and reyvateil as well as preventing status afflictions. Other notable IPD skills would be the Instant Kill series. With Instant Kill++++ equipped to Cocona, a vanguard, I could solo every normal encounter in the last dungeon of this game without any spells or using the other vanguard; each battle ended in less than 5 seconds.

(Random tidbit: 99.9% of the time you will never ever find yourself in trouble due to a status affliction. They are all very very useless and you will rarely ever notice any difference when you are afflicted by the status effects in this game)

So if you are looking for a challenge... don't get this game. This game gives you so many resources and methods to blaze through the game without any difficulty. The game just seems to want you to be able to experience the story without having to get stuck on a part due to not being strong enough. That may be good for some people, but it was a turn off for me. This is a problem with the series in general; they just simply lack any sense of difficulty at all. I won't dock points due to difficulty however, as some may prefer an easier game over a harder game; it's all relative.

Characters level up when they defeat enemies in random encounters throughout the dungeons of this game. Pretty standard. The Reyvateils, or the "casters" of this game, are special in that they do not gain experience through combat; instead the heroines of the game get their own special level-up system called the Dualstall system. This is pretty much you putting them into a bath with them wearing nothing but bath towels, inserting some crystals, watch them play around a bit and then instantly they level up. I'd have preferred if they just leveled up like the normal vanguard characters instead of implementing such a strange system. About midway through the game, your Reyvateils will simply start being a much higher level than the rest of your party. As a result, they'll also have much more health and take a lot less damage compared to your vanguards. (Funny once you think about it, how I can miss a block and watch my vanguard with 2k HP take 400 damage while my Reyvateil with 3.5k HP take 70 damage. Hey wait a minute! Maybe the Reyvateil should guard the vanguard instead!). Yet another problem with the game balance (or lack of).

Cosmospheres are a unique system used in this game to expand your Reyvateil's collection of spells. Basically, you dive into a Reyvateil, try to clear the inner struggles with each of them (lots of text shuffling), while along the way getting new spells and costumes for them. The cosmosphere's focus however is really to expand on the background of each of the Reyvateils and to develop their character. The songs learned and costumes acquired are really a second thought to it. This beats the system used in traditional RPGs. No longer does X level mean you get Y spell, now you have to go through the cosmosphere to get said spell.

There is synthesis in this game, similar to the first title. It has been dumbed down significantly though, and for the most part is unnecessary. You'll find weapons/armors in dungeons at a much more reliable rate than hoping that you'll get a recipe from the shopkeeper. There are probably only about 1-3 useful items that you can ever create from synthesis; the rest are either weak, or simply not worth the time and/or effort to make. I did not use any equipment/items from synthesis and I did fine. For those of you that enjoy the humorous conversations that take place between the shopkeepers and your party, then the whole synthesis system will probably be much more enjoyable for you than it was for me.

That about wraps it up for basic gameplay of this game... let's move on.

Graphics/Sound: 5/10
The game uses 2D sprites, just like in the previous title. What has changed is that now in this title, the backgrounds are all 3D. Some of the items placed on these 3D backgrounds however are still 2D. You'll notice it right away that everything just looks.... off. Bushes are one of the easiest examples of this. Get near one, and you'll quickly see that its just a 2D texture.

Most of the game will be spent in dungeons, and dungeons will share the same pool of random doodads. Just a note, this game likes cubes. Lots of cubes.... everywhere.... cube invasion.... cubes in every single dungeon! For the most part, you'll experience the same dungeon template multiple times throughout the game. Towns when you first visit them are a nice change from the bland dungeon templates. You'll be revisiting the few towns in this game many many times, so I'm thankful that most of them are at least pleasant to look at from a graphical standpoint.

Enemy graphics follow the same jRPG template. Use one pool of enemies and just rehash/recolor them and call them something new. You'll probably fight the same monster 5-10 times except it will be a different color/size/etc.

Ar tonelico 2 does stick to its 2D roots however and brings the charm back into a market whose sole concern is graphics. The graphics of this game will be a turn off to many who probably own an XB360 or PS3, but they still hold a certain charm.

There are a few good graphics as well. Most of the spell graphics, although not very advanced, are quite humorous or fun to look at. Some of the more powerful spells may also have certain anime clips that play as well. Most of the EX attacks, or the super attacks are also fun to look at for the first few times you sell them. (After a while you'll get annoyed with them since you can't refuse to use them). The character portraits are all for the most part well done. Expressions are shown through character portraits; because they are portraits, the game rotates them in based on what emotion that it wants to express at the time.

In the sound department, this is the series true strength. The game features many full length songs sung in the games fictional "Hymmnos" language. It's hard to appreciate them at first due to them being a different language and spanning multiple genres of music. Eventually, you'll find 2-3 of them that you just simply enjoy. (These "hymns" are played during important events and certain boss battles.) There are a select few pieces from the game/OST as well that I still listen to now on my computer.

Replayability/Length: 5/10
There are 4 different endings to this game, based on which Reyvateil that you end up with. This means that you could play through the game 4 times to get as much out of the game as possible. Realistically, even with 4 endings the game really only has enough content to make a 2nd playthrough viable. Anything after that would just be too boring for the average fan to play again.

The main attraction to another playthrough would be the cosmospheres. The cosmospheres are the bread and butter to this series. They are extremely detailed, and they really take you into the mind of the Reyvateil (no pun intended). Because the game prevents you from viewing the full cosmosphere of every Reyvateil in one playthrough, you have to play through the game multiple times to experience them all. (Alternatively, you could just wait until the end of the game to choose the ending; doing this will mean that you only have to play through the game twice max.)

The game also offers a split path early in the plot. Who you go with sadly, does not change the story much. Most of the time as I played the other path, I just felt like I was replaying the same thing again. Except for a different phase 2, the two paths are for the most part identical. Yep, down to the same lines, everything.

This doesn't mean don't replay it! Replay it for the cosmospheres! Finishing all of the cosmospheres was one of the most rewarding experiences for me, as they were really a window to each of the Reyvateil's inner conscience. You know that deep and dirty secret that you hope no one will ever figure out about you. Yeah. That one. You'll be cheating yourself out of essential character development if you don't.

What I'm trying to say is however, 1-2 playthroughs of this game is enough. This game is long, you'll probably take 30+ hours beating it the first time. It is a very long and epic sized story for you to read through. The second playthrough you'll probably be able to finish in 20+ hours due to blazing through the storyline as you know what's already going to happen. Anyone who tells you that you can get over 80-100+ hours out of this game is really pushing it. You could... but you probably wouldn't be enjoying those said hours.

That's about 30-50 hours of gameplay for an RPG. Not too shabby. Oh yeah, and there's also an Extras menu where you can see certain stats about how much you completed in the game; this appears after beating the game once and will constantly be updated on any save you do. This is a boon for those perfectionists among you :).

Other Notes

Localization by NIS America was terribly done.
- A random and small fraction of the scenes are voiced. Not a big deal to me, but if you like voice acting...
- Game freeze bugs. The game tends to be unstable and may freeze at random times. There is also a guaranteed known freeze near the end of the game during a mandatory boss battle.
- EX Attack bugs (on Japanese version too). Sometimes you'll just do no damage on your special attack. All that time wasted to do 0 damage.
- LOTS of grammar/spelling mistakes. You'll feel like a 5 year old translated this.
- There's a lot of innuendo. Biggest understatement of the year. Try not to play this game around people you know, as they will think you are a weirdo. The text/voice acting is just simply overloaded with all of this innuendo that it quickly gets on my nerves.

Final Score: 5/10
Story (Weighed 30%) - 5/10
Gameplay (Weighed 40%) - 5/10
Graphics/Sound (Weighed 10%) -5/10
Replayability/Length (Weighed 20%) -5/10

Reviewer's Score: 5/10, Originally Posted: 03/24/09

Game Release: Ar tonelico II: Melody of Metafalica (US, 01/20/09)