#oneaday Day 749: Tick

Finished Atelier Ayesha this evening. Well, I finished the main story, anyway; the game keeps going until its time limit is up, allowing you the opportunity to try and clear up as many outstanding tasks as possible in order to unlock as many endings as you can. I've done the "hard" bit now though; the main scenario is fully resolved.

And whew. What a journey. While the Atelier series — particularly in its more recent incarnations — is known as being wholesome and pleasant, I was expecting the Dusk series to start piling on the emotion a bit. In contrast with the Arland series, which is all colourful and nice throughout, the Dusk series — or, more specifically, Ayesha, which is the only one I've played so far — has this wonderfully melancholic feeling throughout where you know something is just… wrong. The world is "wrong" somehow. And there doesn't seem to be anything that anyone can do about it; there's just some sort of tragedy around the corner, waiting to happen.

Said tragedy for humanity doesn't happen during Atelier Ayesha, but Ayesha does have her own personal tragedy to deal with: the disappearance of her sister, and the worry that if she's too long about her investigations, she really will never see her again. There are some wonderful scenes throughout the game where Ayesha catches a brief glimpse of her sister's "astral form" but has it snatched away before she's really able to process anything, and for the entire duration you can tell that, as positive as Ayesha is, she's keeping herself busy so that she doesn't have a complete breakdown from the emotional trauma.

Those emotions, those feelings, all of that — they all come out in the final boss theme. I won't spoil the details of the encounter for those who haven't yet played the game or who don't know the narrative, but I will share a link to the music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EVcc16o0SaY 

Absolutely incredible stuff. This wonderfully moving theme is now second only to Blue Reflection's incredible finale, which still brings me to full-on tears every time I hear even the first few notes of it. Gust's sound team are something else, man.