tanatola:

i did rewatch eva though

(via azdoine)

In addition to just being a fascinating book in general, Embracing Defeat by John W. Dower caused me to realize that much of Ar Tonelico 2 is an unsubtle, if distorted, metaphor for Japan during and immediately after WWII

(Cloche / the institution of the Maiden are Hirohito / the institution of the Emperor; the Grand Bell / Alfman are the “militarist cliques” / Tojo; the path from IPD –> Dive Therapy –> Cloche Fan Club represents the Japanese self-concept evolving from self-sacrificial military zeal through postwar liberalization to a reclamation of the emperor system as the basis for a newly democratized but still [literally] univocal national polity)

(Luca pretty much has to be Douglas MacArthur, I guess???)

ar tonelico 2

In these times of Peak Whateverthefuck – you know what I mean, Trump, the endless (social/news) media circus, “2017″ the year and the concept – it is a precious thing to have one’s expectations massively and pleasingly exceeded, and it is in that spirit that I want to share with you my newfound affection for this Playstation 2 game, Ar Tonelico 2

(I was going to wait until I’d finished the game and then frame this post as a “review,” but I’m in the final dungeon and just unexpectedly got access to an entire extensive sub-game the developers apparently threw in for the hell of it, so actually finishing it will take longer than projected)

I had heard of this series before, and it had a cool-seeming world and some good music, but it looked like … that sort of bad “pervy” anime type stuff?  I don’t mean “oh, I am a prude/snob and can’t stomach sex in my entertainment (unless it’s the HBO kind).”  There’s this certain category of anime and anime-related media that specializes in being about sexuality without including any actual sex, so there are just hours and hours of innuendo and guys/girls accidentally falling on top of each other and getting embarrassed about it and that kind of thing.  I guess this appeals to a certain niche of adolescent (?) who is obsessed with sex but not experienced enough to be able to parse and enjoy stories about sexual relationships per se?  I’m not trying to be condescending here – I am honestly curious where this stuff comes from.  But anyway to me it is usually just intensely boring, so I try to avoid it.

And in the Ar Tonelico series, well, there is this special sub-species of human (”Reyvateil”) that can use magic, and they are coincidentally all female (something about the X and Y chromosomes, you see), and to optimize their magic it is necessary for the male protagonists to “dive into” their “Cosmospheres” which are internal dreamscapes reflecting, at successive levels, increasingly intimate and emotionally fraught parts of their psyches, but this task must be done by the male protagonist for strictly-business reasons you see (it makes their magic better), and also … look, bear with me, also, they sort of shut down unless they are regularly rejuvenated using these crystals which have to be, uh, inserted into them, and this must also be done by the hardy male protagonist, gritting his teeth and doing the deed because the Reyvateils must be kept alive after all, and

so basically this just sounds like a strangely elaborate way of planning out a story that can be about sex and dating, yet without anyone ever having sex or dating, with constant innuendo about how the things they are doing – which the writers and audience know are obvious stand-ins for sex and dating – are kind of like sex and dating, and again, there’s a gigantic amount of anime like this and I have no idea what the appeal is.

But @baroquespiral made a brief post about the series and I really liked the song in it, and I had to do some extra-relaxing relaxation before starting a new job, and so I downloaded one of the games – with the labor-of-love fan relocalization patch, natch – thinking, hey, I’ll waste a few hours trying to get this to work on my computer and then it’ll be worth another few hours of mild amusement at anime bullshit, why not?

Ar Tonelico 2 is one of the best jRPGs I’ve ever played.  (Admittedly I haven’t played many jRPGs, but I’d take it over most of the Final Fantasies I’ve played, if that gives you a sense.)

It’s honestly really good all around.  The battle system is not too deep but extremely fun and rarely frustrating.  There’s almost none of the usual jRPG tedium: it’s usually clear what to do next without everything just being a straight line, and there isn’t a lot of time spent (say) moving through previously visited areas to get somewhere.  You’re always doing something new and cool, or speeding through something old.  The plot is complicated and exciting, especially in the first ~20 hours or so, where the show-stopping dramatic sequences and twists or quasi-twists just keep coming.  The characters (excluding the male lead, who is kind of a cypher throughout) are sympathetic and much, much more interesting than the anime tropes they appear to be at first glance.

The high quality of the game, as an entry in its genre, is closely related to this quality that … I want to call “generousness”?  Both plot-wise and (more surprisingly) gameplay-wise, it continually layers on more and more novel features, and takes a certain joy in continuing to do this each time you think it’s done.  A lot of this ultimately doesn’t matter from a cold optimizer’s perspective (the game is pretty easy and most abilities are about as good as any other), but all of it is incredibly endearing – one becomes endeared not just to the characters and world but also to the developers, who are clearly not just grimly pushing their way through the office 9-5, no, they believe in this game and they put more awesome shit in it than could ever be justified by usual corporate logic, given the presumably niche (and relatively captive) audience.

Let me try to be more concrete.  Remember those “Cosmospheres”?  Over the course of the game you will delve deeper and deeper into the minds of your waifus, exploring successively weighter and darker psychological strata.  This starts out pretty schematic and dull and – like everything else in the game – you think you know where it’s going, but there are fake-outs and subtleties you don’t expect and the whole thing becomes increasingly well-written and accurate as a metaphor for being in a relationship.

(extremely mic.com voice: The Game Where You Level Up By Respecting Women)

Anyway, as you do that, your waifus develop more and more powerful spells, to be used in the battle system, right?  Let’s just breeze by the fact that all of these spells involve summoning side characters that occur inside the caster’s psyche, of which there are a zillion.  This system of diving into the Cosmospheres is intertwined with another system where you get to know your waifus because when you go to an inn or save point to rest, like in a normal RPG, they just want to … hang out and talk about shit?  There’s this “talking about shit” system, and the triggers for wanting to talk about shit can be virtually anything else in the game, and then that feeds back into the Cosmospheres, as having more of these conversations implies you know the waifu in question better and can dive into further levels of her metaphorically presented psyche.

But, OK, then that’s tied to all these other systems?  For pretty much anything you do in a normal RPG, in Ar Tonelico 2 you do that thing with a getting-to-know-people twist.  In a normal RPG, you go to shops and buy stuff, right?  In Ar Tonelico 2, you do that, but all the shopkeepers become your BFFs, and you keep getting seemingly random cutscenes when you enter the shop where they just want to talk about stuff, like friends do.  And of course those trigger more of the save point events where your characters want to talk about stuff related to the stuff you talked about at the shop.

There are so many of these interlocking systems.  There’s a major plot element about lots of Reyvateils getting this dire psychological disease, and there are a huge number of super-minor-character Reyvateils who you can help through this using a therapy system separate from the main diving-into-minds system, and then there’s a process with its own system where they can decide to join the “fan club” of one major character, which allows them to sing chorally with her in battle and use extra-powerful magic.  In the shops, sometimes the shopkeepers will want to talk about recipes, and then different characters can make different items from these recipes, and sometimes the things they make are bath bombs which you can use in the bathing system (don’t even ask).

And like, eventually you do get a hang of all of this, and are able to GameFAQs it all out, to the extent you personally wish to.  But narratively, and experientially, it just works – at conveying this pleasant atmosphere of real camaraderie and non-trivial human connection, where your prowess in battle is founded in your party’s deep understanding and acceptance of one another, and when you stop at a save point and your characters want to hang out and chat, it isn’t just another RPG system to optimize, it’s like, yeah, man, let’s hang out, I love everyone in this bar!

And like, I’m being sardonic about all this by saying “waifus” and so on, but – as I’m sure is clear by now – everything, no matter how extremely anime it is (and it gets extremely anime), is executed well and just plain grows on you.

Everything in this game goes the extra mile, even if it doesn’t have to.  The voice acting (Japanese) is really good???  I usually breeze quickly through dialogue in games, cutting off the voice actors (if present) mid-sentence on every sentence, but in this one I frequently slowed down to enjoy how the actors would milk (yet believably milk) the more dramatic passages.  There are four different endings, two of which correspond to significantly different paths after a major mid-game decision point, so even after I actually beat the game, there will be more to see.  And so on.

The story made me cry, twice.

If you do play it, again, get the fan relocalization.  The official localization apparently cut a bunch of stuff and also included a nearly game-breaking bug close to the end.

On the Weeb Ass Shit scale, I give Ar Tonelico 2: W 6 / A 6 / S 1.

The names of Kierkegaard’s works have that unique sound otherwise found only in the English-language titles of anime series, and I get the sense this is not an just artifact of their journey from Danish to English

(Either/Or is about the blazing rivalry of two CLAMP-esque bishounen; Concluding Unscientific Postscript is a paranomal adventure; Works of Love is shoujo; The Sickness Unto Death is some kind of grimdark chuunibyou thing)

I may be alone in this but I think AT2 (and maybe AT1) has the best context for its innuendo. Like, comparing diving to sex conveys the intimacy of jumping into someone’s innermost thoughts.

I haven’t played any of the other games, but I think I agree – the story has some fantasy concepts which initially seem like “mere pretexts” for the constant forced sexual tension that comes with the territory in this kind of anime-related media, but it makes so much sense as a pretext that the sexual tension no longer seems forced, since the whole narrative just makes sense as written

Like yes, if there was this practice of “diving into people’s minds” to boost their magical abilities, then it would be intimate and scary and frequently likened to sex, and it would be used as a kind of therapy but said therapists would be seen as disreputable in a kind of slut-shaming way, etc.

It’s a reverse Freudian reveal, where the surface meaning is “the cigar is a penis,” and the real surprise is that it is both a fully-functional penis and a serviceable, delicious cigar (albeit one you feel a bit ridiculous smoking, but that part of the metaphor fits too)

Normal jRPG: formerly mysterious character joins your party unexpectedly in the mid-to-late-game, and she has like her own spells and stuff

Ar Tonelico 2:  formerly mysterious character joins your party unexpectedly in the mid-to-late-game, and she has like her own spells and stuff, and she can do dual techs with 2 of the previously established characters, and she can make her own distinct items from each recipe in the crafting system, and there’s an entire lengthy sub-game where you explore her inner dreamscape