Ar Tonelico is your typical Japanese overly complicated RPG, with an unnecessary amount of Moe. The story is set in a world populated Reyvateils, songstress that can craft magic out of songs, and humans. As expected of any JRPG, there are a bunch of corporations, the Tenba, the Teru, the Church and the Knights of Elemia. Of course, being a JRPG that has a unique type of creature or female(Or both), in this case Reyvateils, there are bad guys that seek to exploit the Reyvateils, surprising(I´m being sarcastic, by the by), regardless, the story centers on Lyner, one of the Knights of Elemia, who fell from Platina, a place a top a giant tower above the blast line, a zone no space ship can cross, who fell to a Virus invasion. Now Lyner has to return to Platina, and on the way, find a way to destroy the viruses and save the world.
What makes Ar Tonelico different from other JRPGs is it´s combat system, now stay with me, ´cause this is extensive: When battling, your party consists of 3 warriors and 1 Reyvateil. Warriors take turns with the enemies according to their speed, the Reyvateil however, you can press Triangle at any time to issue her orders. Reyvateils can only attack using magic, which they must charge up. Warriors can´t deal as much damage as Reyvateils, but they can take much more damage than them. When enemies target Reyvateils, you can have your warriors protect them, and you usually must, since they will probably die.
It doesn´t end there. Below the combatants, there are two gauges. The first gauge increases as you use spells. It can go up to 3 "stocks". How do you charge those stocks? That´s when the second gauge comes into to play. It has two bars, a blue one that goes from left to right and a purple one that goes from right to left. Every time they meet, the stock goes up by one. The blue bar increases as the warriors deal damage, and decreases when they take it. The purple one increases as the Reyvateil charges songs. Charging these stocks allow the Warriors to use HP-consuming techniques, which I found to be quite useless, and the higher the stocks, the better the enemy drops. While I enjoyed the combat system, later in the game, enemies get loads of HP, and you have to charge your spells longer, so Random encounters will become a drag.
Ar Tonelico has two other distinguishing features: Grathmelding and Diving. Diving has you go into a Reyvateils subconscious and partake in a visual-novel like mini adventure, which is how you unlock costumes for the girls. Some of the levels in their subconscious can be kinda entertaining. Then there´s grathmelding, which is, basically, Crafting. Find the recipie, the ingredients and then craft your items or equipment. The process is quite streamlined, so it´s quite easy to do it.
One of the better features of the game is it´s customization. By finding, or crafting, crystals, you can add extra effects to the Reyvateils spells and equipment. Perhaps add a chance to paralyze? 100% chance to crit with a spell? You can do it.
Graphically, it´s quite ugly. The sprites are simple, and the animation feels stiff, and lacks some frames. The music is a bit too cheery for my tastes, but it has some really good pieces, specially the reyvateils songs. Voice acting is fantastic, shame the dialogue is not too interesting. It´s filled with double entendres, so your milleage may vary.
While I did enjoy grathmelding, I was not too keen on the forced grathmelding. There are a couple of times where you are forced to grathmeld something in order to move on with the story, which means you have to find the ingredients, it´s no fun and it may force you to backtrack in search for the ingredients. By far the biggest blunder of the game are the loading times. The game will stutter a bit during combat, specially when too much stuff is going on, it makes the already slow combat even slower. The loading issues are verywhere though. Going to the menu to pick a spell? The game has to load a lot of information of each spell, that you don´t really need, when all you want to do is go down the list to use a friggin´healing spell
All in all, it´s a better than average JRPG, but it´s nothing special. I will admit that I enjoyed it though.
6 out of 10.
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