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Ar Tonelico comes packaged with a small “Official Artbook,” a slick little collection of character artwork and background information about the game world. To give an idea of the game’s general character, it may be productive to quote a small excerpt:

“The Tower of Ar Tonelico has four giant Grathnode Discs high in the sky, and four giant Parameno Discs near the surface of the earth. The Parameno Discs act as a request (melody or song) receptacle. Those that are accepted must go through a Quantizing process (alignment). It passes through a filter, separates the characteristics, gets rid of the noise, and sends the approved powers to the Grathnode Discs, which then releases [sic] the magic back to the client.”

In other words, this is a game for crazy nerds. In terms of pretentious dork appeal, only the Xenosaga series compares. (Ar Tonelico has no speaking roles for characters from the New Testament, which puts it one down in that particular competition.)

Beyond the reams of pointlessly dense background detail, Ar Tonelico punches all kinds of classic nerd buttons. Big-eyed Japanese cartoon characters – check. “Love simulation”-style dialogue scenes – check. Pandering to master/servant fantasies – check. If those aren’t your thing, you’ll probably find this game somewhere between boring and creepy.

Going Up, Going Down

Ar Tonelico’s guts are conventional RPG mechanics. Though it comes from a collaboration between Banpresto and Gust, two makers of distinctly left-of-center games, it’s a traditional epic quest with an active-time combat system, not much different from the classic Final Fantasy games.

The quirky bit is the magic system. While the regular characters wait for their initiative bars to fill up and attack in turn, the party’s magic-user acts outside the main initiative chain. She “sings” a spell with continuous effect, whether it’s a buffer spell that stays up as long as she sings it, or a one-shot spell that grows more powerful the longer she charges it. The player can trigger her actions at any time, whether to switch up spells or cut loose a charged attack.

Off the Deep End

Mechanically, the spell-casting system is pretty neat. It gives the player freedom to quickly mix up offensive tactics, rather than waiting for the magic-user’s turn to roll around. The problem is what it makes you do when combat isn’t happening.

The magic-using characters are called “Reyvateils,” artificial lifeforms in the shape of attractive young women. They have minds of their own and develop bonds with their partners (i.e., the game’s main character), which are deepened by a direct mental connection. You can dive in their minds and explore their unconscious fantasies – that’s how you unlock new spells.

Do you get where all this is going? To build your spell-caster, you have to sit through syrupy dialogue about how devoted she is, how wonderful you are, and on and on and on. If you don’t read the mind-diving as a sexual metaphor on your own, the game will fix that for you with a hailstorm of double-entendres.

Lost in Translation

All this extra talking might have worked if it were decently written. In fact, the script ranges from boring to flatly bad. There little life or individuality to the dialogue and descriptions. They’re full of constructions that nobody bothered to massage out of the raw Japanese translations.

To make matters worse, the American voice actors treat their lines with exactly as much respect as they deserve. At best, their delivery’s flat and inoffensive. At other times they seem to be genuinely offended by the script, venting their frustrations with the nastiest readings possible. In its one smart decision as far as localization, though, NIS provided an option to toggle the Japanese voices (or turn off the voices altogether.)

Priorities

It’s strange to step back from the details of the script and just look at what got the attention in the making of this game, compared to what got short shrift as a consequence. As the excerpt at the top implies, someone put a ton of effort into backstory and world-building. The game world is a series of layered realms, stacking up to form the successive floors of a tower, and they’ve all got distinctive visual styles and personalities. Flipping through that art book reveals reams of fiddly details about the environment and inhabitants of each different realm.

None of that has much to do with the plot of the game itself, though. It’s hard to even call it a plot – it’s more like a sequence of coincidental events. The characters are all recognizable types – “Standard-Brand Hero,” “Mysterious Stranger,” “Smart, Sassy Girl,” “Shy, Submissive Girl.” When the game wants to introduce a romantic angle, a female character pops out of nowhere with a crush on the hero. Suddenly, with almost no development at all, they’re a couple.

Sifting Through the Ashes

Ar Tonelico has other problems, like dungeon design – it likes to mislead you with long paths that meet dead ends – and the usual round of much-too-repetitive random encounters. It also has a couple more things going for it – the soundtrack bats a solid .500-plus average, including some especially memorable themes over the opening movie and other key scenes.

Nerd appeal, though, is the crucial, deciding factor. If you like big-eyed cartoon girls and master/servant fantasies, go right ahead and grab this. They’ll even chirp at you in squeaky Japanese if that happens to be to your taste. Otherwise, though, you can rest secure in the knowledge that you’re barely missing anything here at all.

Article by: D.F. Smith

Video produced by: Paul Bonnano