1174: The Second Tower

I beat Ar Tonelico II: Melody of Metafalica this evening. Or, more accurately, I saw one of its four endings. Two of the other endings won’t be particularly difficult to obtain with the tactical saves I made on the way to the finale, but the last remaining one will require playing about 80% of the game again, albeit with a completely different second “phase”. I’ll probably take care of that last ending alongside a new game, which will either be Hyperdimension Neptunia Victory or the third Ar Tonelico game, both of which I anticipate I will be enthusing about considerably on these pages in the very near future if previous instalments in their respective franchises are anything to go by.

Anyway, Ar Tonelico II. It’s… well, fantastic. I must confess to having not been as immediately smitten with it as I was the first game, as the conflicting art styles between the field and battle sprites (and between the field sprites of the first game and the second game) were initially a little jarring. (Seriously, everyone has really, really big hands and massive feet on the field maps and it’s very disconcerting to begin with.) But after not very long at all, I found myself looking past this rather superficial consideration and immersing myself in what turned out to be a very pleasingly deep and meaningful story packed with good characterisation and questionable translation from the original Japanese. (On that note, though, the translation was at least understandable despite a few errors, and certainly no worse than some visual novels I’ve played.)

Spoilarz Ahead

Ar Tonelico II stands on its own, but also fits into the current “trilogy” as the sort of “dark middle episode”. Whereas the first Ar Tonelico was rather bright and breezy most of the way through, the land of Ar Tonelico II is a bit bleaker. The people are struggling, there isn’t enough land for everyone and everyone is clinging to the seemingly hopeless desire that the land’s Holy Maiden will be able to create “Metafalica” — a verdant green land summoned through the use of Reyvateil Song Magic. Plenty of political machinations and backstabbings threaten to fuck everything up completely (and pretty much do on several occasions over the course of the entire narrative) but, this being a JRPG, our plucky band of heroes are there to wander the lands, right wrongs and eventually figure out how in the world they are going to help everyone find hope for the future.

Ar Tonelico II’s story is nice in that it isn’t quite the clichéd “Big Bad wants to destroy the world” business. Sure, there’s world-threatening stuff going on and the eventual aim of the game is to save the world from an unpleasant fate, but it’s not quite what you might expect. For starters, you spend most of the game not being quite sure who the “good” and “bad” guys are. There’s no sign of a single easily-identifiable antagonist who is fucking shit up and needs a good Omnislash to the face; no white-haired pretty boy accompanied by tubular bells and organ music every time he appears. In fact, over the course of the narrative, none of these characters are presented as one-dimensional — most of them go through some sort of change and/or growth as the story progresses.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about Ar Tonelico II in this regard is the fact that the final boss “Mir” from the first game is actually a party member in the second — though you don’t know this when you first meet her, and in fact it’s entirely possible to go through pretty much the whole game without noticing this or figuring it out, depending on the choices you make and the optional events you witness. Not having played the first game won’t affect your enjoyment of the second, but if you have played the first game, the moment where you find yourself going “Wait… OH. Mir?!” is a “big reveal” on a par with Darth Revan in Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic or SHODAN’s first appearance in System Shock 2.

Herein lies one of the interesting things about the first two Ar Tonelico games in general: “good” and “evil” aren’t absolute. In Ar Tonelico, we get some insight into why Mir is the way she is and why she is so angry about everything — and it’s easy to find yourself sympathising with her rather than just wanting to kick her ass. In Ar Tonelico II, by spending some time with her as a (relatively) normal person, we get to find out a whole lot more about her — what happened to her in the distant past, what led her to her actions in the first game, and how she feels about what has happened to her then and since. If you follow her “route” through to its complete conclusion in Ar Tonelico II, it’s a really wonderful story arc for one of the most interesting, troubled characters I’ve encountered in a very long time. I don’t yet know if she shows up in Ar Tonelico Qoga, the third game, but I’ll be very happy to see her again if she does.

The overriding theme of the Ar Tonelico series is that of bonds between people, and this is particularly apparent in the second game. The main theme of Ar Tonelico II’s story is that the more intense a relationship between two or more people, the more painful it is. The more people you surround yourself with, the more “alive” you feel from being part of something bigger than yourself, but the more pain you suffer when you lose those precious people. The world-ending chaos at the end of Ar Tonelico II is not brought about by a desire for dominance or a display of power, but instead out of a simple desire to not feel that sharp pain of loss any longer. If everyone was able to abandon their physical bodies and live on purely as an individual spiritual entity, the primary antagonist’s theory goes, no-one would have any need for other people, no-one would feel the pain of loss, and everyone would be happy in their complete and total individuality. But, responds the protagonist, no-one would be truly alive then. Life would not have meaning drawn from the people around you and the hardships you work together to overcome. You’d be little more than data.

It’s an interesting and somewhat bittersweet message, but it works hugely well in the context of both the overarching plot and the smaller, individual character-led stories that unfold over the course of the whole game. I’m all for exploring deep and thought-provoking themes through interactive entertainment, and Ar Tonelico II successfully achieves that without sacrificing the “spectacular” side of its overall experience. It’s still recognisably a JRPG with all the over-the-top pyrotechnics and anime-style special attacks that entails, but at the same time it’s a complex and emotional tale far beyond the “Evil Guy Is Over There, Go Stab Him” trope that people (largely incorrectly) assume still characterises the genre.

In other words, just go play it, all right?