#oneaday Day 117: Car Racing

This evening, I felt like playing some random PlayStation 2 shenanigans, so I fired up R: Racing for the first time. (My wife misheard the name as “Car Racing” and was somewhat incredulous; I almost didn’t want to correct her.)

For the unfamiliar, R: Racing is a game from Namco where they sort of wanted to make a new Ridge Racer, but also wanted to get in on this “racing sim” action that had been growing in popularity since the original Gran Turismo at the tail end of the previous generation. To that end, they made what is essentially a new Ridge Racer game, but featuring real cars and circuits along with the requisite tuning options that no-one understands.

One of the things that excited me most about R: Racing back when it was originally announced was that it had an actual story mode. This was very unusual for racing games at the time, and when it first released I still hadn’t come to the conclusion that no, not all games need stories, a subject that I was sure I’d blogged about at some point in the past, but couldn’t find any evidence thereof.

Anyway, long story short, for one reason or another I never picked up R: Racing back in the day, despite it being something that appealed quite a bit… but it is one of the many titles I added to my PS2 collection when I stumbled across it in CEX for somewhere in the region of 50p and subsequently never got around to actually trying. Until now!

Honestly, of all the things it reminds me of, it’s actually most akin to the Ace Combat series. Perhaps not surprising, since they’re both Namco titles — and there’s a strong argument to suggest the Ridge Racer series unfolds in Ace Combat’s Strangereal setting — but it works pretty well. The narrative sequences are kept short and snappy — arguably to a fault — but it provides a certain incentive to progress through the game’s 14-chapter “Racing Life” mode, which appears to be primarily intended as an introduction before what I assume is “the real game” starts. Put it this way: I’m 6 chapters into that 14-chapter story after a little over an hour of play, and my save file says it’s 12% complete. That suggests you beat the story and there’s a whole lot more stuff to fiddle around with.

The narrative involves Rena, a female protagonist — quick, alert the Woke Content Detector idiots! — who works as an ambulance driver. One day, she displays some fancy moves on the job, and her coworker, who apparently never sleeps, signs her up to be part of a mysterious organisation known as “G.V.I.” who are somehow involved with motorsports, but in what appears to be a not entirely trustworthy sort of way. Rather than being a racing team themselves, it appears that they work with racing teams and… honestly, I don’t really understand at the point I’m at in the narrative because it hasn’t really explained anything other than the fact it somehow caused Rena’s amply-bosomed rival Gina to be pissy with her pretty much immediately upon first meeting her.

What then follows is a series of races and championships, beginning with a straightforward speedway race that is easy to win, and progressing through track, street and rally racing across several courses, many of which appear to have several variations in the same way that the Ridge Racer series’ tracks typically unfold as different routes through the same environments.

R: Racing’s unique selling point appears to be its “pressure” mechanic, whereby if you get up another driver’s arse for long enough, a bar above their car starts filling up, and when it fills, they’ll get so stressed out at your proximity to their rectum that they’ll do something stupid, allowing you to pass easily. There’s no obligation to fill the bar, and indeed doing so for every opponent is probably quite inefficient, but it’s fun nonetheless — and it’s a mechanic I’ve not really seen in a racer before. Presumably it’s attempting to reflect the sort of stress the player feels when they have an opponent bearing down on them in their rear-view mirror; in execution, it’s a tad “artificial”, but, well, it’s a mechanic that is there to be taken advantage of, so you might as well do so!

The soundtrack hails from post-Ridge Racer V Namco so unfortunately we’ve left the funky acid jazz beats of the late PS1 era far behind and are into cacophonous EDM territory. R: Racing’s soundtrack isn’t quite as obnoxiously awful as Ridge Racer V’s, but it’s almost aggressively bland, which is a bit of a shame. The Ridge Racer series has some serious highs when it gets music right, so it’s always unfortunate when an entry doesn’t really live up to those standards.

Still, it’s an enjoyable enough game. Although definitely more sim-esque than the mainline Ridge Racer titles, it’s also a lot more forgiving than the Gran Turismos and Forza Motorsports (do they still make those?) of the world. There’s a braking assist function for those allergic to actually using the brakes themselves, which makes the game feel really arcadey (and a tad easy), but you can still throw the cars into power slides if you’re aggressive enough with them. It’s just not necessarily the best thing to do at every opportunity in R: Racing, unlike mainline Ridge Racer.

I enjoyed what I played this evening! I’m looking forward to exploring it a bit further. It occupies a nice sweet spot between sim and arcade that I rather like, and the story mode is intriguing, even if, as I suspect, it turns out to be a bit rushed and doesn’t really go anywhere. Even if that does end up being the case, I suspect the “Event Challenge” mode, or whatever it’s called, will have a fair bit of meat on the bones to fiddle around with. We’ll see, I guess, and I’ll write something more substantial once I’ve spent some more time with it.

For now, though, an evening well spent, I say.

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#oneaday Day 114: dotHack and Slash

I’ve been playing .hack//Infection for the last couple of days on PlayStation 2. I’ve had the full set of four games on my shelf for a very long time and been meaning to properly run through them all, but have somehow never gotten around to it. I have previously completed Infection a very long time ago, but I’ve never gone through all four games and seen how it all ends — nor have I been spoiled on any of it. I also own a copy of the .hack//G.U. remasters on PlayStation 4, so I’ll have to get to those at some point, too, but I wanted to knock out the PS2 games first.

For the unfamiliar, .hack was one of the first (possibly the first) “MMO gone mad, if you die in the game you die for real” series. Unusually, it was designed from the outset as a fully transmedia production: not only were there four PS2 games in the series, each of these games also came with a DVD featuring an episode of a specially made anime known as .hack//Liminality which tells a “real world” story that unfolds concurrently with the events of the game, and there was a completely separate anime series known as .hack//Sign. Since that time, there have apparently been several other anime and manga series, along with the aforementioned .hack//G.U. trilogy of games, which originated on PS2 but which were ported to PS4 in 2017.

That may all sound terribly complicated, but be at ease: you can have a satisfying .hack experience if you just play the games. .hack//Infection, the first of the original set of four games, tells the story of “you”, an 8th grader who has just signed up for the hottest new MMO, The World, at the recommendation of your friend Yasuhiko, a veteran player. You join up and in that inimitable “early 2000s MMO” sort of way, you party up with Yasuhiko, or “Orca” as he’s known in the game, who destroys absolutely everything before you can even get a hit in by virtue of him being 50 levels higher than you.

But something goes horribly wrong. After an encounter with a mysterious young girl who is seemingly being chased by a bizarre creature carrying a red wand, Orca is entrusted with a strange book and shortly afterwards, his character is “Data Drained”, leaving the real Yasuhiko comatose. You end up taking possession of the book, which manifests itself as a strange bracelet that equips you with the power to Data Drain enemies in the game, and it’s then up to you to investigate the strange happenings in The World and determine if there’s any truth to the game seemingly having an impact on the real world.

The cool thing about .hack//Infection is that the entire PS2 game is diegetic, intended to represent you using your computer to check your mail, read the news and log in to The World. You never see the actual real world yourself in the game — hence the inclusion of the Liminality DVDs — but instead all your investigation is online. This unfolds through a combination of you checking and replying to mails (with predefined responses) and browsing through the official message boards for The World, looking for clues.

Canonically, .hack//Infection is supposed to be unfolding in 2010, but obviously in 2002 developers CyberConnect2 had to make something of a best guess as to what that near-future setting might look like. They actually got a fair few things right, such as high-speed, always-on Internet access being pretty much universal and fibre-optic cables being the main means of this infrastructure being implemented — though here in the real world, fibre broadband is a little more recent than 2010.

What’s quite interesting is the design of The World itself, because it could quite plausibly work as an online RPG — though perhaps not in the way that western players understood “MMOs” at the time. For context, World of Warcraft came out in 2004, two years after .hack//Infection, so “MMO” up until that point in the west meant either EverQuest or Ultima Online.

The World is closer in execution to something like Sega’s Phantasy Star Online from 2000 in that there are small, shared communal areas (known as “Root Towns”) where you can hang out with other players, but your actual fighting and questing takes place in discrete areas that you teleport to rather than exploring a coherent world. It’s not quite the same as the “instanced” areas seen in World of Warcraft and, later, Final Fantasy XIV, as you can meet up with other players who happen to be visiting the same area, but the nature of how The World is structured means that you’re relatively unlikely to stumble across someone at random.

Anyway, let’s not get bogged down too much in details as I’ll probably want to write about this on MoeGamer once I’m finished. Suffice to say for now that .hack//Infection and its subsequent parts unfold as a combination of you just flat-out playing The World to get treasure, gear and helpful items, and gradually working your way through the core mystery at the heart of everything. At most points in the game, you can put the main plot on hold and just go dungeon-crawling to your heart’s content — and it’s probably advisable to, since you’ll need to level both your own character and the various companions you can recruit to your cause.

.hack//Infection is somewhat clunky by more recent action RPG standards, but once you get a feel for it and an understanding of its mechanics, it’s enjoyable. There’s a variety of enemies to deal with, and their different strengths and weaknesses will often require you to think about various strategies to deal with them. And, since the game is supposed to be simulating an MMO, you can pretty much concentrate on your own play; any companions you bring with you will usually do a pretty good job of fighting alongside you, though you can issue various orders to them if you need them to, say, heal or unleash their most powerful abilities. You can also micromanage their equipment to a certain degree, and since equipment has skills attached, by doing this you can try and optimise them for the challenges you’re about to face.

I can completely understand the criticisms of .hack from back in the day. It is repetitive. The dungeons are very obviously constructed from pre-built blocks with different textures put atop them, and there’s not a lot of variation to them. And yet there’s something about .hack that I’ve always found fascinating and compelling. I think it’s the oddly menacing atmosphere the whole thing has; The World, as a game, is designed to be cheerful and colourful, but it’s very obvious that there are dark things going on beneath the surface, and that the players of the game are clearly being used for some nefarious purpose.

I’m in no rush to plough through all four games, but I’ve enjoyed making a start on .hack//Infection this weekend, and as a long term project I’m looking forward to seeing how it all comes together in the end. And there will, of course, be in-depth articles on MoeGamer (and possibly videos) to go along with it.

2452: Dark Cloud, Revisited

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I first played Level-5’s Dark Cloud midway through the PlayStation 2’s lifecycle. I recall enjoying it enough to finish it, but finding it lacking in a few areas compared to some other role-playing games that were around at the time. Most of the criticisms I had of Dark Cloud were addressed by its sequel (known as Dark Chronicle here in Europe for some reason) but, regardless, I still have fond memories of the original.

Looking for something to fill the gap between now and Final Fantasy XV at the end of next month, I remembered that I’d bought several PS4 revamps of Level-5 games when they were part of a sale ages ago, but never booted them up. (Specifically, I got Dark Cloud, Dark Chronicle and Rogue Galaxy, the latter of which I’ve never played at all.) Since I played the demo of Dragon Quest Builders earlier in the week and heard it compared favourably to Dark Cloud and its sequel, I decided to fire up Dark Cloud and take another look, a good (probably) ten years or more after I played the original.

Interestingly, having played it for a couple of hours this evening, I’m finding myself liking it a lot more than when I played it the first time around. I’m not sure if it’s a matter of my tastes changing (which, although I know they have a bit, haven’t drifted that far away from what I enjoyed 10+ years ago) or if Dark Cloud has just aged very gracefully, but either way, I like it a lot.

For those who weren’t around for Dark Cloud first time around for one reason or another, here’s the gist. You play a teenage boy who looks a bit like a non-elfin Link in a poncho, who is a silent protagonist for the course of the adventure. In the opening moments of the game, your village is destroyed by a Dark Genie which, moments before, we saw had been unleashed on the world by an obviously evil gentleman in an M.Bison uniform and sporting a spectacular moustache. Somehow, you manage to survive through a windmill falling on top of you as you rescue your childhood friend and obvious love interest Paige from certain death.

Awakening to find your village nothing more than a bare patch of land, you start hearing voices. Specifically, the Fairy King decides you are his chosen one, and blesses you with the magical gem Atlamillia, which apparently will enable you to rebuild the world. Conveniently, the Fairy King explains, he managed to seal away all the people and buildings of the world in magical spheres called Atla to prevent them from certain annihilation at the hands of the Dark Genie, but unfortunately this wasn’t enough to stop them from being scattered all over the place, with most of them rather inconveniently rolling in to local dungeons.

What then unfolds is a rather unusual adventure that alternates between action-RPG dungeon crawling in randomly generated maps, and a top-down building arrangement game called the Georama. The latter is sometimes described as a “sim”, but it’s not anything like as deep as something like ActRaiser or Dragon Quest Builders — all you have to do is find the component parts of each building, plop them down on the map, talk to the residents to figure out the right part of the map to put their building in (and which direction to face, in some cases) and then your job is done. In other words, there’s no actual “management” required beyond making sure everything is in the right place, making it more of a puzzle than a simulation.

The Georama does give the dungeon crawling a unique twist, however — as well as finding treasures that your own character can use, you’re also finding people and places, and in turn these can unlock new facilities for you to make use of when you return to the surface. Once you rebuild the Odd Gaffer’s Buggy, for example, he’ll start selling you items. Rebuild Paige’s house and her father will teach you to fish. Even seemingly incidental houses will reward you with special events and items when you complete and place them correctly.

The Georama gameplay gives Dark Cloud an interesting sense of personality. Because you’re quite literally rebuilding these people’s lives from nothing, you get to know them quite well; far from being the random, anonymous NPCs you get wandering around towns in more conventional role-playing games, Dark Cloud’s characters all have names and personalities. Some of them get along with one another; some of them don’t (in which case you’ll need to make sure their houses are far apart!).

Meanwhile, the dungeon crawling, although action-based, has plenty of aspects to get your teeth into. Your main concern, at least early in the game, is the game of “press your luck” you play with your supplies, because not only do you have to make sure your HP don’t run out, you also have to keep yourself watered and ensure that your weapon doesn’t break. This latter aspect is of particularly key importance, because weapons can be customised and level up through use, meaning if you break one it can potentially be absolutely heartbreaking.

The weapon growth and customisation system takes the place of a traditional experience and levels system. Instead, each weapon has its own level, with most capping at 5. Once they’ve capped, however, you can turn them into a gem that can be attached to another weapon in order to transfer some of the capped weapon’s statistics and attributes. When the new weapon is upgraded, it absorbs the gem and becomes far more powerful than it would have been through just upgrading alone. Ultimately it becomes possible to construct some formidable weapons, making it all the more important that you don’t inadvertently snap the blade on a passing rock monster.

Dark Cloud is charming and enjoyable, and there are still relatively few games quite like it; even Dragon Quest Builders itself is a distinct experience, focusing more on the town-building and crafting side of things than dungeon crawling. I think I made a good choice in revisiting it, and I’m looking forward to playing some more soon.

2410: Sounds of Vana’Diel

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Talking to some of my Final Fantasy XIV friends today, I realised quite what an impact XIV’s predecessor Final Fantasy XI had on me, even though I never really got that far with it in the long term.

As with many other things throughout my life, the thing that has stayed with me for the longest ever since I played it for the first time is the music. (Incidentally, the music is, more than anything, the reason why I find I can’t stay away from Final Fantasy XIV for long, even when, as I did recently, I think I’m “over it”.)

Final Fantasy XI’s music is not as well known as many of the other soundtracks in the series, primarily because XI itself is not as well known as the other Final Fantasy games that have been released over the years. It’s not as technically accomplished as XIV’s diverse soundtrack, and it’s not the work of series veteran Nobuo Uematsu (who hasn’t been quite as involved with the series in more recent years) but it is nonetheless made up of a selection of rather lovely pieces of music.

Here are a few that make me feel suitably nostalgic every time I hear them.

This music, simply called Ronfaure after the area in which it plays, is one of my favourite pieces from Final Fantasy XIV, because it pretty much sums up the overall atmosphere of the game: vaguely melancholic and rather traditional.

Final Fantasy XI is — at least, from what I remember — one of the more traditionally-set Final Fantasy games, with an emphasis on good old swords, shields, magic, orcs and goblins. Its soundtrack reflects this, and is a contrast to XIV’s diverse track listing, which reflects the diversity of XIV’s world itself.

The first character I played in Final Fantasy XI — and the only one that ever got anywhere to date — hailed from the Federation of Windurst, and thus his starting area was Sarutabaruta, which featured this wonderfully calming piece of music to accompany your exploration.

Sarutabaruta was a land of grassy meadows and sunshine; a thoroughly pleasant place to have a stroll, were it not for the monsters wandering here and there, of course.

One of the things I liked most about Final Fantasy XI, even after I played World of Warcraft for the first time, was the fact that it had a battle theme. Well, actually it had several according to your progress and whether or not you were in a party, but this one was likely to be the first one you heard as you stepped out of the gates of your starting city for the first time and prepared to have the shit kicked out of you by a small bumblebee. (FFXI was an MMO designed in the EverQuest mould, in comparison to FFXIV’s rough adherence to the World of Warcraft formula, and consequently was brutally difficult, particularly at low levels.)

I always particularly liked that the battle theme for FFXI actually sounded like a Final Fantasy battle theme.

Final Fantasy XI’s character creator was simple compared to those that came in later years, but one of the things I always liked about it was that each of the several races you could play as in the game had their own “theme tune” and even had their own signature animations to show you what they were all about while you were deciding. The Mithra, FFXI’s take on the catgirl, were exactly how you would expect them to be from a game designed by Japanese people, and their music reflected that nicely.

Final Fantasy XI’s group content was structured rather differently to XIV. It wouldn’t be until about level 25 or so that you’d encounter your first real “boss”, marked by a “Burning Circle” that you had to enter with a party of companions you’d previously gathered — no Duty Finder for you here.

Confronting said boss was A Big Deal, in other words, which is why I can remember it vividly: battling a dragon and his Ahriman companion, accompanied by this stirring soundtrack.

I never got far enough into the story to get properly into the expansion packs for FFXI, but I did visit some of the areas, because they were good for level-grinding.

I think, for once, YouTube comments sum up what I feel on hearing this piece of music better than anything I could say here:

“And here I am, 8 or 9 years later laying in bed listening to this music, wondering what ever happened to the people I considered my closest friends. Time is cruel, and one by one we each took a break from the game and never returned. If youre in a guild/ls/free company now, these will be the days that you someday look back on 😀 Dont let your friendships disappear, get on Facebook/Discord/Guildwork and keep in touch with them.”

“Makes me tear up… I miss my old ls. r.i.p. Saints”

“comments like these make me wanna cry ;-; chemistry like this is so hard to find now. social life is so fast now”

Quite. For all their faults, for all the assholes who play them and all the whining that inevitably goes on around them, MMOs are, at heart, about people finding and connecting with one another, then sharing unforgettable experiences together.

1730: Distant Thunder

I’ve been playing a bunch of Ace Combat 4 (known variously as Shattered Skies or Distant Thunder depending on where in the world you are) and, frankly, I’m gobsmacked.

This is a game that came out in 2001 for the PlayStation 2, sporting visuals that are still reasonably impressive (albeit low-resolution) today, and which run at an absolutely rock-solid 60 frames per second without breaking a sweat.

More importantly, though, it’s a game that manages to be utterly compelling, addictive and thrilling while treating the player with respect and, at the same time, telling an interesting story in a rather unusual manner.

Given what I’ve experienced of Ace Combat 4 to date, it’s easy to see why Ace Combat veterans were a little miffed at Assault Horizon — though I maintain that was an enjoyable enough game in its own right.

Ace Combat 4 is a lot more distinctive than Assault Horizon, though. While the newer game is clad in that unmistakeable “triple-A veneer” that makes a lot of modern games look gorgeous but lack a clearly defined visual identity compared to their contemporaries, Ace Combat 4 is immediately recognisable (although some may argue its interface takes more than a few cues from Metal Gear Solid).

At heart, it’s a solid jet fighter sim that throws the odd bit of realism out of the window in the name of fun. Your plane carries an implausibly huge stock of missiles, for example, which is useful, because you’ll find yourself shooting down an awful lot of planes and blowing up an awful lot of ground targets in each mission. You can’t just fire them off willy-nilly, however — well, maybe you can at ground targets — since enemies will dodge and evade missiles, just like you can. To get a solid lock, you need to manoeuvre carefully behind an enemy and keep them in your sites as you fire off the missiles — and, unlike Assault Horizon with its Dogfight Mode, you have to do this manually rather than pressing a button to do so. It’s a lot more challenging, but also a lot more satisfying, too.

The missions are far less scripted than Assault Horizon, too — though that’s not to say they don’t have interesting things going on. Throughout the first part of the game, you’re often under threat from the enemy forces’ superweapon Stonehenge, for example, and when you’re warned it’s about to fire you’d better make sure you’re hugging the ground if you don’t want to be blown to smithereens. In one particularly memorable mission, you have to fly back to your base while Stonehenge is firing at you, and the only means of getting low enough to stay under its devastating blasts is to fly through a rather perilous canyon.

I’m impressed with the storytelling, too. The game runs two parallel storylines throughout its campaign — one presented in a rather faceless manner to the player, a la many flight and space sims over the years, and another much more personal tale from the perspective of a child living in an occupied city. As you progress through the campaign, the effects of your victories are mirrored in this parallel storyline, until in its later stages you’re referred to more explicitly, particularly after the mission where you shoot down the primary sort-of-antagonist-but-not-really’s wingman. I haven’t yet finished the game, but the smart money is on an epic final confrontation between Mobius One (me) and Yellow Thirteen before the credits roll.

I’ve been having an absolute blast so far, then. I don’t think I’m far off the end of the game, and I’m looking forward to seeing what its sequels have in store.

Now why didn’t I discover this series thirteen years ago?

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?

1145: Metafalica

I’ve been continuing to play Ar Tonelico II and it’s really rather good. One thing I’ve found particularly endearing about it is the fact that just when you think you’ve got a handle on the way it does things, it goes and does something else interesting just to throw you off a bit. And yet even despite all these mechanics that get added over time, it still feels like a coherent experience as a whole.

Let’s take the stage I’ve got up to now — “Phase 2” in game terms. In the first Ar Tonelico, the change from Phase 1 to Phase 2 marked the point where you were out of the “exposition” chapter and into the plot proper. Phase 2 was also the point where you had to choose between the two heroines, and then had two completely separate (but related) storylines to follow along with. The paths then reconverged towards the end of Phase 2 and remained together for the (completely optional) Phase 3, which offered the “true” ending of the game.

Phase 2 in Ar Tonelico II is a bit different. Rather than, like the first one, being set in the same locations and simply branching off in two different directions, Phase 2 of Ar Tonelico II takes place in a completely different area that works completely differently to the environment you’ve spent the previous 12 hours in. The early part of the game is, aside from its many and varied peculiar gameplay systems, relatively conventional — you visit towns and do stuff in them, then you go to dungeons. Then you go back to towns. And so on. The linear plotline is broken up by an optional “hunting” sidequest in which you can track down various “I.P.D.”-infected Reyvateils to add to your “Girl Power” arsenal (I’m not even going to get started explaining that, I’ll be here all day) but for the most part, you’re doing the usual JRPG business.

Phase 2, meanwhile, takes place in an environment that changes according to your choices. Early in the Phase, you’re introduced to a new mechanic known as the Infelsphere. This virtual world works in a similar way to the “cosmospheres” found inside the heroines’ minds, but rather than reflecting their inner turmoil and anxieties, the Infelsphere represents the relationship between the two heroines and how they understand each other. Events unfold in the Infelsphere in which you have to make choices as to how to respond, and the choices you make in the Infelsphere subsequently affect what parts of the “real world” open and close to you. Your eventual goal is to get to a specific location by navigating your way through a maze of these pathways that open and close according to how the Infelsphere events unfold, with each point on the path containing some sort of “trial” to overcome. This might be as simple as defeating a monster, or it might be a challenge such as successfully smuggling biscuits past the penguin-like “Pippen” creatures.

Thematically, in each of these trials, you’re “proving your love” to one of the heroines, which subsequently provides you with keys to unlock new events in the Infelsphere, and so it continues. It’s a really peculiar, really interesting structure that not only offers some unconventional JRPG gameplay in the “real world” sections, but also provides some intriguing insights into the characters and the way they respond to various situations in the Infelsphere component.

You’ll notice I haven’t really mentioned the plot in this description, and that’s deliberate, as discussing the plot surrounding all this would be a massive spoiler, so I’ll spare you that — for now, anyway. What I am finding particularly pleasing about Ar Tonelico II as a whole, though, is that even if it didn’t have a compelling plot and awesome characters — which it does — it would still have rock-solid gameplay with an absolute bucketload of things to do. It is just one of the many, many examples out there that prove JRPGs are far more than the “ATTACK, MAGIC, ITEM”-fests that ill-informed detractors of the genre assume these games still are.

They haven’t been that way for a long time, people. So if you haven’t played a JRPG since Final Fantasy VII I strongly recommend you check out what the genre has done since then — you might just be very pleasantly surprised by what you find.

1134: Melody of Elemia

I completed Ar Tonelico: Melody of Elemia this evening. What a fine, fine game that was. I’ll be writing somewhat more “professionally” for want of a better word about it this Wednesday over on Games Are Evil, but for now I just wanted to enthuse a little about the great experience that was that game. There may be some spoilers ahead; be forewarned.

The most immediately striking thing about Ar Tonelico for a new player coming to it for the first time in 2013 is that it looks old. It’s also worth noting that it came out in 2007, so it actually looked pretty old when it first came out. That said, after a few hours of play, the low-resolution isometric-perspective sprite-based graphics cease to matter on a technical level, and the amount of character and personality in them starts to shine through. A friend of mine just noted that the visual style is actually something of a successor to stuff like Secret of Mana and the like and that’s a great comparision — I’m kicking myself for not figuring that out sooner.

Outside of the in-game graphics, Ar Tonelico has some absolutely lovely character designs. Lyner may look fairly “generic JRPG hero” in his stylings, but at least he has some personality about him. The two heroines Aurica and Misha are both attractive and appealing in completely different ways, and a plot twist I won’t go into here sees you interacting with Misha in both her “spunky young girl” and “equally spunky young woman” forms. The third Reyvateil introduced later in the game also proves herself to be an interesting character in her own right, again with her own unique visual style and “appeal elements”.

One of the most interesting things about the game to me — and the thing I’m intending to write about this Wednesday — is the game’s multi-route, multi-ending structure. Now, this could very easily be a recipe for disaster, as multiple endings in lengthy RPGs are often a good method to ensure your players won’t see all of the awesome story content you made. That’s not necessarily a bad thing — it’s kind of cool when you can discuss a game with a friend and discover they had a completely different experience to you — but it’s also frustrating to some people who like to know they’ve got everything they can out of a game before moving on.

Ar Tonelico’s multiple endings and routes are handled in a rather peculiar manner. There are three “phases” to the game, each of which is a complete story arc in and of itself, complete with final boss confrontation at the end of each. Early in the second “phase”, you have the opportunity to go with one of the two heroines and experience their story. Aurica’s story gives you an overall view of what is going on in the overarching plot of the game, while Misha’s story gives you a more personal view of what is going on with her and how she is relevant to everything. If you play Misha’s route first, there are a number of scenes you see completely without context that don’t really make sense. If you play Aurica’s route, however, you play an important part in these scenes. The two paths then converge towards the end of the second phase, and the game then apparently ends — the credits roll and everything.

There’s a twist, though. In a post-credits sequence, you get to run around and do all the usual JRPG “our party’s splitting up, say goodbye” business, but once you’ve done all that, you’re presented with another choice: live a happy life with [insert girl you chose here], or refuse to accept that as “the end” and move on. If the latter option is chosen, you find yourself entering a completely optional third phase that is about 20 hours by itself, and which leads to the “true” ending.

Except in that third phase, there are four possible endings, three of which relate to one of the three heroine characters — the latter of whom only becomes a major player in this third phase. The third phase is pretty much identical regardless of which girl you picked earlier, but the very end — if you fulfilled some very precise conditions — allows you to pick between the girl you chose earlier and the new addition. There’s also a “bad” ending relatively early in the third phase that basically says “I can’t be bothered with all this sidequesting, let’s just get this over with”.

So that’s a total of… hang on… (counts) six endings? Fortunately, there’s absolutely no need to play through the game six times to see all of them — instead, you can play through once, save before the “big decision” in phase 2, play one route to either the end of phase 2 or to complete completion in phase 3, then go back and do the other route, stopping wherever you didn’t stop first time around. In my case, I played Aurica’s route through to total completion, then played Misha’s route to the natural end at the conclusion of phase 2. I don’t feel like I missed out on anything, and it only required me to play less than 10 hours over and above what I’d already played anyway. And I feel rewarded for having done so — I have a deeper understanding of the story as a whole, and particularly the characters.

So that’s Ar Tonelico — a really, really excellent JRPG and surprisingly thought-provoking if you can look past the notorious innuendo (of which there isn’t anywhere near as much as people make out). It’s also in possession of I think the best soundtrack I think I’ve ever heard in a JRPG… though I’m about to start Ar Tonelico 2 as I type this, so I may well be revising that statement in the near future!

1126: Ah! Tonelico

I’ve been continuing to play through Ar Tonelico, and it’s certainly pushing all my buttons in all the right ways. I’ve stopped noticing the “subpar” (compared to its contemporaries) graphics and accepted them as quaint and charming, and have found myself able to concentrate on the story and characters, both of which are great stuff.

The highlight of the game by a long shot is still the Dive system, which I believe I mentioned in a previous post on the subject. Just in case I didn’t, though (I’m tired and can’t be bothered to go back and check, all right?) let me explain once again.

One of the key plot concepts in the Ar Tonelico universe is the relationship between humans and the Reyvateil, the latter of whom are the only ones able to make use of “Song Magic”. A Reyvateil and her partner, known as an Oracle, share a close personal bond — so close, in fact, that it’s possible for her Oracle to “Dive” into her mind and explore the worlds inside her imagination, known as her Cosmosphere.

Note that I said “worlds,” not “world” — each Reyvateil has multiple similar but not identical worlds inside her head, each of which reflect a particular facet of her personality, something she has had to deal with (or repress) and struggles she is yet to overcome. As the Oracle delves deeper into her mind, the worlds become increasingly strange and twisted, and the problems that the Reyvateil must overcome more deep-seated and difficult to resolve.

Inside the Cosmosphere, the player character Lyner comes across numerous different incarnations of the Reyvateil he’s diving into. On one level, she might be a shrine maiden who wants to protect people, but who is anxious about being able to do so. On another, she might be a schoolgirl with no faith in her abilities, who believes she’ll never be able to live up to her peers. On another, she might be sexually aggressive and dominant. Sometimes incarnations from other levels put in an appearance, too, and their interactions reflect the Reyvateil’s inner struggles between clashing emotions and ideals.

Alongside the incarnations of the Reyvateil, Lyner also encounters characters whom he (and the Reyvateil) know in the real world. But there’s often something a bit “off” about these characters, something not quite right. It transpires that these projections of familiar characters reflect how the Reyvateil sees them, not necessarily how they actually are. This provides yet another interesting perspective on the Reyvateil’s personality — not only do we see her internal struggles, but also her own attempts to deal with how she thinks other people see her.

I love this kind of thing. It’s one of the reasons I adore Persona 3 and particularly 4 so much. Games are a brilliant medium through which the inner workings of a character’s mind can be explored, and games that do just that are among my most fondly-remembered titles — stretching right back to The Adventures of Alundra on PS1 and its “nightmare dungeons”. Ar Tonelico is certainly scratching that itch very nicely — and it helps massively that the characters involved are entertaining and fun to be around. Plus it seems there’s a very obvious “split” just after the halfway point, so after I’ve finished it once I can go back and focus on the other Reyvateil to see what her subconscious has to say about herself. Looking forward to it.

I haven’t touched on the series’ endearing use of innuendo, which is seemingly the main thing it’s known for, but I’ll save that discussion for another day — perhaps when I’ve played the apparently increasingly-shameless sequels!

(Comics back tomorrow.)

1117: Another Game with a Barely-Pronounceable Title

If you had no idea what genre a game called Ar Tonelico: Melody of Elemia fell into, it’s highly likely that you’d guess that it was a JRPG. And you’d be absolutely correct. It’s a title that doesn’t make a whole lot of sense if you know nothing about the game, though to its credit, unlike many other barely-pronounceable game names, its relevance does become apparent almost immediately. However, it’s still pretty much the exact opposite of the rather literal naming conventions adopted by social and mobile games these days, which tend to be called things like “City Wars” and “Farm Town” and “Slots”.

Strange name aside… yes, I’ve been playing the PS2 game Ar Tonelico: Melody of Elemia, hereafter referred to as Ar Tonelico to save me typing out that whole title every time. I knew literally nothing about this game prior to firing it up for the first time, but had been urged to do so by a friend over at the Squadron of Shame who has been accompanying on my journey through the oddest and quirkiest undiscovered treasures that the Japanese role-playing game genre has to offer. I promised him that the next game I played after I completed the crap out of Hyperdimension Neptunia mk2 would be Ar Tonelico, so here I am.

So what’s it all about? Well, if you live in the UK, don’t count on any help from the box or manual — the game never saw an official release in the UK despite being fully-translated into English, and instead your best bet for a copy these days is Italy, of all places. It’s rather peculiar to think of Italians playing JRPGs, but there you go.

Anyway. Ar Tonelico initially appears to be a rather straightforward JRPG with a floppy-haired, youthful protagonist wandering around the world seeking adventure on a Grand Quest to Save the World. And on the one hand, it is. On the other hand, however, it does a lot of very, very interesting things that have really made me sit up and pay attention, even only about four hours into the whole experience.

For starters, there’s a deep crafting system to explore. This is a game from Gust, developers of the Atelier series (which I am yet to try but have all the PS3 incarnations of on my shelf), and their specialism is deep crafting systems. In Ar Tonelico’s case, it takes the form of the peculiarly-named “Grathmeld” system, in which you have to find recipe cards around the world and in shops, find ingredients inside chests, shops and monsters and then fuse them all together using crystals. When you craft, you get a fun little animated sequence of your character Lyner assembling whatever item it is, then if it’s a new item he has a fun little conversation with one of the other characters about it, and a discussion often ensues about what the new item should be called. You can’t freely rename items, which is a shame, but you do get to choose between a couple of different suggestions, and the game then tracks which character named which item, which is a nice touch.

Perhaps the most bewildering aspect of the game is its battle system. For the first hour or two, it’s a very conventional turn-based “attack, magic, item” affair. But as soon as you encounter the “Reyvateil” characters, also known as Song Maidens, things start to get interesting.

Reyvateils sit in the back row of your party and don’t follow the usual turn order. Instead, they act like a mage or priest in an MMO, sitting behind the front row of fighters charging up spells (or Songs, in this case) to have various effects, while at the same time the front row is knocking seven shades of shit out of the enemy and ensuring the Reyvateil doesn’t take damage. A strong focus is placed on the party’s “harmonics” with the Reyvateil, with this represented by a bifurcated horizontal meter at the bottom of the screen. The left half of the bar fills when the front row lands successful attacks and drops when they take damage. The right half of the bar fills as the Reyvateil chants to charge up a spell. Should the two halves meet, the whole party goes up a “Harmonic level”, which means the Reyvateil’s spellcasting speeds up and the front row gain access to stronger attacks. The Harmonic level at the end of the battle also determines what rewards you receive.

There’s another consideration in that system, which is the cap on the Harmonic level. At the start of each battle, you can only level the Harmonics up to 2; to increase the cap, you have to let the Reyvateil unleash her magic and deal enough damage for a separate bar to fill and open up the next level cap. The trouble is, at least early in the game, most enemies are absolutely obliterated by the Reyvateil’s Song Magic, so you’ll sometimes find yourself deliberately pulling your punches a little in an attempt to earn some higher Harmonic levels. It’s an interesting system that will doubtless come into its own in more difficult battles later.

By far my favorite part of the game so far, however, has been the “Dive” system, where the protagonist Lyner is able to enter the subconscious of a Reyvateil and learn more about her. A Reyvateil’s subconscious is split into ten distinct levels, each of which is made up of a number of different locations. Lyner must spend “Dive Points” earned through battle — which represent the trust the Reyvateil holds in him — to trigger various events, with revelations and strange happenings often unlocking new spells for the Reyvateil to cast in the real world. These vary from simple attack magic to “green magic” spells which can be cast outside of battle, usually to solve puzzles.

In gameplay terms, it’s an elaborate means of unlocking abilities. But in story terms, it’s a way of literally doing a deep dive into a character and discovering their innermost secrets. The scenes I’ve seen already have been heartfelt, interesting and help make me interested in the character. I’m very intrigued to see how they continue as the game progresses, as it’s clear that the whole point of the “Dive” system is to help the Reyvateil come to terms with repressed memories and emotions in a vaguely similar manner to Persona 4’s “Midnight Channel” — or perhaps just to peek in on some embarrassing things they’d rather forget about.

At four hours in, that’s about all I can say so far, but I’m enjoying it a great deal. It looks super-dated — it’s in 4:3 aspect ratio running on the PS2 and it pretty much looked like a PS1 game in the first place — but none of that matters to me. It is worth noting that it has an astonishingly good soundtrack, and that the English dub appears to be handled by the entire cast of Persona 3, which is fine by me — if a little odd to hear voices I recognise playing characters I’m less familiar with. (If you’re wondering why I’m not playing with the Japanese voices, which are also included on the disc, it’s because the FMV sequences in the game use the English voices, and it would be somewhat jarring to go back and forth between the two. The game also isn’t fully-voiced, either, so it doesn’t make as much difference as it would have in, say Hyperdimension Neptunia mk2.)

I’ll be sticking with this one, then — though I may well be splitting my time between it and the Gamecube version of Fire Emblem when that eventually arrives. (The new 3DS version isn’t out here until April, and I’m told I should play the Gamecube version before the Wii version that I scored for a song when Game was in trouble a while back.)