1249: Platinum

Finally finished Ar Tonelico Qoga as much as it is possible to finish it tonight. I saw every ending, got every PSN trophy (including one that required me to go back and replay a good three hours due to an inadvertent mistake I made, and that ABSOLUTE COCK of a “find every treasure chest” trophy) and generally had my money’s worth several times over.

All told, the experience took me in excess of a hundred hours altogether. Given that I exhausted literally every piece of content that game had to offer, I’m happy with that. Were there more content, I would have probably continued, but as it stands, I feel very satisfied with what I’ve experienced.

A hundred hours is a long time to spend on a single piece of entertainment, and there was a growing movement a while back in favour of shorter, more easily-digestible games. To be honest, I can see the appeal — it’s nice to sit down to play something and know that you’re almost definitely going to finish it — but at the same time there’s something immensely gratifying in a game that takes this long to exhaust the possibilities of.

A hundred hours isn’t actually a particularly long period of time to be required to see everything in a role-playing game, however. Persona 3 and 4 each take approximately a hundred hours to finish normally, let alone collecting all the Personas, completing all the sidequests and levelling up enough to beat The Hardest, Most Irritatingly Cheap Secret Boss in the Known Universe. If you delve into all that extra content, it’s entirely possible you could add at least another 50-100 hours on top of that base figure. I must confess to having never actually finished a Persona game in this manner — generally, by the time I get to the end, I’m exhausted and ready to move on to something else. This is a compliment to the game’s story, incidentally — Persona games are deliberately emotionally exhausting, and the palpable sense of relief you get from beating the final bosses in them remain among some of my favourite moments in gaming.

Where’s the sweet spot? And what was it about Ar Tonelico Qoga that made me want to see absolutely everything it had to offer, regardless of how long it took?

Well, in part, it’s because everything I did felt like meaningful content. Sure, I had to repeat some story bits several times over, but there were differences here and there that kept me paying attention. Nothing felt grindy; my characters hit level 99 naturally while I was doing other stuff, so it was pretty rare that I’d find myself running around in circles waiting for enemy encounters. Similarly, crafting was a pleasure, because the enjoyable combat meant that I’d been inadvertently stocking myself up on ingredients without realising it over the course of the whole game and thus never had to go hunting for anything in particular. And when I did craft something new, I was rewarded with one of the many delightful intra-party scenes where the characters discuss whatever the hell it is they’re putting together this time, and Aoto can embarrass himself in some new and exciting way. (“Every man’s number one fantasy is a drill!”)

I can’t help comparing and contrasting with my experiences in something like Skyrim, which I played and sort of enjoyed for about 35-40 hours or so, then gave up on without getting anywhere near the conclusion of the main plot. It just wasn’t interesting. It didn’t draw me in. I felt like I was walking around a diorama rather than a living world; a model populated by mannequins who all said the same thing rather than a world filled with actual people.

Your average JRPG’s worldbuilding is all an illusion, of course — if anything, most JRPG worlds are even more static than those seen in Western RPGs, but a great deal more character is added by making every single character unique, regardless of their relevance to the overall narrative. This is something that Ar Tonelico did consistently well throughout — NPCs would change what they said according to the point in the story where you visited them, allowing for the exploration of some completely irrelevant but fun little mini-stories in the process.

Anyway. That’s that. Now I have to decide what’s next. While I’m mildly tempted by The Last of Us, I find myself wondering if I’ll feel like I got my money’s worth if it’s over in 10 hours or so. Perhaps I’ll wait until the price comes down a bit, as I have no real interest in the multiplayer modes. In the meantime, I have a pile of shame the size of a house to start on, and doubtless you’ll hear all about what I’m going for next very soon.