1188: What the Hell Does ‘Qoga’ Mean Anyway?

So, I still have one ending of Ar Tonelico II left to see, but given that seeing it involves playing through approximately 85% of the game again, I decided to start the third Ar Tonelico game — the curiously-named Ar Tonelico Qoga — in the meantime. Also, I was waiting for my new old PS2 and my new copy of Ar Tonelico II to arrive before I returned to the lands of Metafalss, so it just made sense to try out the sequel while I waited.

And… gosh. The Ar Tonelico series’ jump to “next-gen” consoles (how dated that sentence will look in a few months) meant that the team at Gust et al clearly decided to let loose with their wildest fantasies and build something that is, frankly, off the chart in terms of JRPG weirdness. And that’s just within the first four or five hours; I’ve barely got anywhere with the story yet.

Within the first five minutes, you’re thrown into combat against what is either a big muscly man dressed in a cheerleader outfit or an incredibly masculine woman dressed in a cheerleader outfit (I haven’t had that particular question conclusively answered yet), only to be followed by a tough-looking swordswoman inexplicably shapeshifting into the adorable young Reyvateil Saki, who regularly refers to herself in the third person and apparently has the ability to transmogrify assailants into cake, but at the expense of some of her memories. An hour or two later, you meet another Reyvateil named Finnel, who is a waitress at a local bistro, but who has somehow managed to get herself stuck halfway up a cliff a very long way away from where she is supposed to be. Also, there’s some business with a master assassin who is dressed like a jester, one of the party members is clearly actually [SPOILER REDACTED] from [SPOILER REDACTED] rather than who they say they are, and somewhere along the line Reyvateils “discovered” the fact that if they take their clothes off, their magic gets more powerful due to their bare skin being able to absorb more magic from the tower, or something.

I would like to reiterate that I am approximately four hours into the game so far, and already this is the calibre of insanity we’re dealing with. I shudder to think where this one is going to end up.

While none of the above descriptions are exaggerations, though, I have to say that the game appears to handle itself just as well as the previous entries in the series. It’s got a self-consciously silly element, yes, and that’s even more pronounced than the two PS2 games, but at the same time it also takes itself seriously when it needs to. Ar Tonelico Qoga’s setting is a curious inversion of the first game’s power structure in particular; whereas in the original game, Reyvateils were often treated as little more than servants to do their masters’ bidding, in Qoga it’s the Reyvateils (or, more accurately, the Clustanian Reyvateils) who wield all the power, regularly inflicting acts of genocide on humankind in the name of “Cleansing” an area. It’s interesting to see the difference this makes to the dynamics of the game world — while I’m not far enough to be able to comment on this in detail yet, it’s intriguing.

In all three games, Reyvateils are enormously powerful entities, but the way in which they’re treated is very different. In the first game, they are, for the most part, downtrodden and treated like crap; in the second, they are mostly respected but also feared, particularly if they become infected with the “I.P.D.” condition that causes them to become uncontrollable and dangerous; in the third, it seems, they are the “enemy” — or at least some of them are, anyway. As the jaunts through the mental worlds of their Cosmospheres make clear, however, Reyvateils are complex beings, just like “normal” humans, and no two are alike — so to say “Reyvateils are evil” is as ridiculous an assertion as saying “humans are evil”.

I can’t comment that much more on the plot as yet, but it’s shaping up to be interesting — and if they go where they’re implying they’re going in Ar Tonelico II’s ending, I’ll be very happy indeed.

What has taken a bit of adjusting to so far is the new battle system. Just like Ar Tonelico II shook up the battle system from Ar Tonelico’s interesting (if very easy) combat, Ar Tonelico Qoga completely reinvents in-game combat once again, replacing the turn-based fighting of the previous games with real-time arena-based combat that requires you to attack rhythmically in order to build up the Reyvateil’s enthusiasm and, well, make her clothes fall off. Sorry, “Purge”. I haven’t quite got my head around it yet as it’s fast-paced and confusing (and challenging!) but it’s certainly an interesting change from the previous games, and I look forward to discovering its hidden depths over time.

I’m looking forward to “Diving” into the two heroines and finding out more about them. Even the first levels of their Cosmospheres in this one seem to indicate that they’re both, as the vernacular would have it, “dealing with some shit”, so I’m intrigued to find out what makes them tick — and also to figure out how on Earth this whole new “Hyuma” system for programming their song magic works. I get the feeling it’s going to be a long, bewildering and enjoyable journey.