Second Verse, Better Than the First
Ar Tonelico II was one of the best RPGs the PS2 had ever seen, with a killer battle system, a storyline and characters I actually cared about and tons of replay value... until it decided I couldn't finish it.
Published: January 28, 2009
You're not just randomly mashing directions and hitting buttons, though. By carefully managing each of the directions with what the Reyvateils are "feeling" at the time, you'll sync your fighters with their emotions, helping the song magic to level up faster (which in turn makes the end result far more powerful as they graduate through the phases of a spell you've unlocked by diving into them, but more on that in a bit). As their levels go up, so does the power of the characters you're fighting with, eventually culminating in a super attack that has its own accompanying little anime cutscene. It makes every fight important, because properly attacking during that respective phase and then timing your defensive button presses during that phase will give you rewards in the form of a boost to the potency of the girls' magic, plus points that are used to dive into the Reyvateils' Cosmospheres.
If that last sentence made absolutely zero sense to you, then you clearly didn't play the last game. The Cosmosphere is essentially a gateway into the psyche of each of the heroines in the game. They essentially play out as a series of dialogue blocks hidden under various spots you'll roam between inside the girls' inner world. To actually get those scenes to play out, though, you need Dive Points (and, later in the game, Sphere Points to dive into the Infelsphere, a story-specific meeting between the two main girls in the game), though I never even got close to running out of points during any point in the game. In Ar Tonelico II, you'll actually have a couple chances to make dialogue choices (something the first game didn't have), and you can only pick one girl to completely dive into.
This determines what ending you'll get, yes, but it also creates a cap for the other Reyvateils' spells, so there's a lot more gravity to picking which girl you want to "go all the way with." It also completely changes the storyline depending on whether you opt to stick with prissy, bitchy Cloche or cheery, friendly Luca. As you'll discover while experiencing each of their storylines, however, neither personality is their "true" one, and eventually you'll uncover some surprisingly mature, personal reasons for why the girls are the way they are, eventually helping them to grow and make themselves "whole." It's one of the biggest reasons why Ar Tonelico II has an emotional impact, and it gives the characters some fairly meaty development arcs.
Diving also serves another purpose this time around. As you wander a dungeon, the same great random encounter meter moves changes color, indicating when you're about to enter a fight. Finish that fight off and a bit of the meter will disappear. When it's gone, so are all the random encounters in that area until you leave and return, which makes exploring infinitely less tedious. In fact, it encouraged me to fight around a little more, because, hey, just a few more fights and then I can explore and seek out any chests that might be tucked away, right? In addition to seeing when encounters might crop up, another meter alerts to when you're approaching an out of control (or "I.P.D. Infected" in AT parlance) Reyvateil.
These encounters actually ended up being the most challenging battles of the game, usually because they'll hit when you don't always have a full party. If you can actually subdue the I.P.D., you'll send them off to be "fixed," but eventually you unlock the ability to dive into these girls to cure them with a bit of talking "therapy." Once cured, these girls will join your main Reyvateil's fan club, unlocking a spell that grows in power with every new fan. Unfortunately, I tried of going through look-alike conversations and just started hammering the X button to get through them, and a good 80% of the time, it actually worked. A second try would fix things the rest of the time. Still, it was an interesting idea, and the time invested does absolutely pay off.
