Ar tonelico 2 Visual Guide

After almost two months, I’ve finished two full playthroughs of Ar tonelico 2, and have written everything down, from story notes to synthesis results to talk topics.  I have made sure I got 100% of everything in my playthroughs, which I know now will be in my guide.

Now comes the fun part - actually pulling this huge document into a real guide.  I’ll be posting samples of what I come up with, so if you have any suggestions or feedback, I will gladly welcome it.

As I’ve been playing through the game with the PCSX2 emulator, I noticed something — all the times the game froze on my PS2 (usually in battle) still happen in PCSX2, but after about 8 seconds, everything always eventually chugs back to life.  I didn’t really think too much about it until I reached the infamous Raki fight in Phase V.

In case you don’t know about this, there is a well-known glitch in the game where Raki uses a skill named ‘Fractal Change’ which completely freezes the game.  This has happened to almost everyone, and NISA’s explanation is that it has to do with the allocation of memory in the game.

Much like the other random glitches, when you use PCSX2, the Raki glitch disappears.  She powers up, and where the game would normally choke, it comes back after a couple seconds, as shown below.

The Raki glitch

It’s interesting that the text to the skill is completely missing - even though the emulator can recover from the hang, there’s still no actual text to display for the Fractal Change skill.

In this way, emulators are great.  While the PS2 has no means of recovery when a game stomps all over its own memory, an emulator can essentially wait for it to clear itself out, and save you hours of frustration.  Of course, PCSX2 saves you from those lock-ups, but brings its own lock-ups to the table; mainly, whenever you use savestates too much as opposed to saving on a memory card.  But at least you don’t have to power level to get through that.

Phase IV really is the phase of secret scenes.  My first non-guide playthrough months ago, I thought I was thoroughly exploring things…but only now do I see exactly how much I missed.  And the missable scenes in Ar tonelico 2 aren’t just throw-away scenes, or even just character development; these missable scenes are what put the pieces of the story together and fill in backstory, and make things make sense.  Phase IV so far has been when most of them happen, and it’s staggering how many you can miss.

My playthrough with Luca I got all the scenes (that I could find), and when I went back through with Cloche, just to see how many were actually not mandatory, I found I could easily skip 6-7 entire story-based scenes.  And a lot of times, the game doesn’t even really give you hints that there could a be scene anywhere you might be missing.

These missable scenes also come up in ways you wouldn’t expect.  In one instance at the end of Infelsphere level 4, you actually miss out on a reasonable snippet of a scene just based on which bed you slept in to enter the Infelsphere.  And while some of these are pretty inconsequential, others shed a lot of light on things.

I’m aiming to finish Cloche’s Phase IV runthrough tonight, which will leave me with two playthroughs of Phase V left until the majority of the data-gathering aspect of the guide is done.  Then comes the actual part of the process where I can show you all some actual work being done, in getting the guide itself put together.

Phase III is now done as well.  Cloche’s play through is always so much faster, since I don’t have to notate much, and it’s a great double-check on what I found on my initial runthrough.

So now I’m onto Phase IV, which is really pretty close to the end of the game.  I’m already thinking about what to do when I’m finished with these write-ups (which has surpassed 50,000 words in the walkthrough alone….but most of that is story notation for my own reference when I build the guide).

Once I finish the Cloche and Luca playthrough, I will begin the actual creation of the guide.  Hopefully I will still be able to elicit some design help so it doesn’t look awful, and the main guide plus the appendices will be built — all with game art, but no screenshots.  After the bulk of the data is set in guide form, I will play through the full game twice more (to get the last two Reyvateil’s endings), using my guide fully to make sure I’ve eliminated all possible mistakes, and fully understood the conditions for activating everything.  This will also be when I put in combat advice, since I’m using level 99 characters for this current playthrough.

At some point, I want to also comb through the game forums to see the types of questions people have about the game, and make sure that all the ones possible are answered in this guide.

In the meantime, I am looking forward to getting through Phase IV, which I seem to remember being pretty short.

Early in this project, I made a rather lengthy post about the settings I used for PCSX2 to play through Ar tonelico 2.  I had tried out a few betas since, but hadn’t posted anything about it…considering the vast majority of traffic to this site seems to be about PCSX2 At2 bugs or issues, I thought I might recap what I know, and my recent attempts at the newest betas.

First, the basics.  Ar tonelico 2 has several issues with PCSX2 and its plugins.  It produces the following (incomplete) list of bugs:

• Vertical black lines alongside character models
• Mis-placed facial portraits, resulting in 1-2 pixel border gaps in the character art (GSdx issue)
• Static backgrounds being split in half: with most static backgrounds, the picture is displayed off-center, with the side-seam ride in the middle of the screen.
• Screen blackening and jumping when approaching a treasure chest.
• Possible lockup when starting Phase V.  (I haven’t gotten to Phase V yet, but from research done, it appears to only happen when using savestates, and can be fixed by loading a memory card save, and playing through the same scene)

Most of these are tiny issues, and none of which stop you from playing the game (except the Phase V bug, but personally, the static background bug ruins the experience for me as a player).  As taking pictures on an emulator is way easier (and prettier) than from a straight PS2, I am constantly looking for the next beta of PCSX2 to fix all these graphical issues so I can take beautiful screenshots.

The latest beta that was released (as of this post) is 720, released 3/9.  After downloading it and updating my plugins and clearing my ini’s, I can say that none of the above issues have been solved yet, and it played pretty much exactly the same.  Better than one of the betas, which refused to start the game though.

The background glitch is not an issue with At2 so much as an issue with all GUST games.  There was an unofficial patch for PCSX2 released, but apparently only works for earlier versions of the emulator.  In that same thread, it was said there was work being done in the emulator to fix this though.

I will post more about the Phase V glitch when I get there, as I am using both save states and memory cards.  In the meantime, let’s hope the future betas work out well!

Well, my internet has been out since Friday — bad for me, good for the guide!  I was able to finish Cloche’s Phase II write up, and get a good chunk into Phase III.  Now, I say get a good chunk in, but I spent 6 hours writing and noting and I haven’t even made it to the first story point.  So much stuff opens up with talk topics and dualstalls and shop events, and then other events fire based on those, and the existing guides get a number of the prerequisites for things incorrect.  So hopefully when this is all done, it can be the most accurate English guide to all the intricacies of the game.

Playing Cloche and Luca’s route side by side is fascinating; there are more changes than you might expect, though (thankfully for me) a lot of it stays the same.  In general, of the many things things I learned in this weekend’s playing:

• When in the Infelsphere, you only get the multiple choice decisions for that scene if you have not entered any of the other sections.  Therefore, the first area you pick in the Infelsphere, you will get a choice in the scene.  The second area you pick, you will not.  On my first casual playthrough, I had just thought some scenes had choices and some didn’t, but they all do — in order to see all the choices (some of which are fascinating), you have to use multiple Cards of Reset to clear the other markers.  Doesn’t affect anything in the big scheme of things, but I love seeing extra little things like that.
• I already knew this, but Dualstalls are confusing.  An event for not curing 30 IPDs fired flawlessly in Luca’s path, but will not trigger at all in Cloche’s, following the same setup.  A hidden requirement?  A bug?  Who knows, but I need to figure it out.
• There are some major changes to some of the scenes depending on when you lock a certain Reyvateil’s ending.  This makes me happy because, as tempting as it is to create 1 save at the very end and bang out most of the 4 endings, starting over fully and devoted yourself to 1 Reyvateil for the game from the very beginning gives you something special.

Now, back to work in writing up Phase III.

One thing I just ran into that I think is going to be great for the guide….the fact that the choices you make in the Cosmosphere sometimes have an effect on levels deeper on.  As an example, a choice you make in Luca’s level 3 changes something that happens in her level 5.  I’m curious to see how they handle that in the Extras menu — since it does not dynamically save data in the Cosmosphere replays, I guess you are locked into whatever path you chose in your save file?  Makes things very hard to test, but I don’t think this kind of thing is very well known, so I’m happy to be able to shed some light on it in the guide.

As a progress update, I just finished Phase II with Luca, and am getting ready to start up Cloche’s Phase II.  Phases III, IV and V should be easier since I don’t have to contend with two split paths, but the hardest part will be compiling all this data at the end.  Still, I am making better progress than I thought.

Another mock up of a page design; this one took me most of the day to do, and was easily the most fun so far.  I have a soft spot for the IPDs — there is a wealth of personality and quirks inside each of the 100 IPDs, and I think most of it gets glanced over by players, especially when the info is split up in different screens.  Hopefully a design like this will get people to read about each individual IPD and recognize the unique personality she has, instead of just which ones have Guard++++.

The Dive Therapy topics are blank for IPD number 2, because I didn’t manage to catch her and didn’t want to spend house stalking her in-game.

I am also going to have a lot of fun with Hymmnos deciphering in the game; it was great finding out things about the IPDs names that I didn’t know….the Hymmnos spelling mimics the Japanese pronunciation of the name, and apparently all names in Hymmnos are capitalized!

IPD Mock Up

Also, the other two mock-ups if you didn’t see them (I like the IPD one best though):

Guide Mock Up

Bestiary Mock Up

Well, one of the questions that’s been floating around my head for a while has been answered, at least: “Is this legal?”

Obviously writing a text guide/FAQ is, but the problem comes in using and reproducing artwork in printed form when you aren’t the copyright holder.  After trying to research it and coming up with nothing, I decided to just write Nippon Ichi and see what they said.

Incredibly, they said ’sure’.

It’s amazing, but they wrote back and said as long as it isn’t charged for and it states it is unofficial, they have no issue at all with it.  So now I no longer have to worry about getting sued for reprinting Ar tonelico artwork!  They were incredibly nice about everything, so I have to really thank them for encouraging a fan’s work instead of stomping it down.

As far as the guide itself, this weekend will be spent mocking up 1-page designs for each of the major sections, similar to what I’ve done for the bestiary and dungeon.  It won’t be the final design (or even close), but I need to map out the data in my head to paper so I know what I’m missing and need to focus on.  After that, it’s on to Phase II…and luckily, Phase I is the the longest and most complicated Phase, so the rest of the game should be a bit easier to get through.

The best way I can think of to make sure I am getting the correct amount of data the most efficient way possible, is trying to put together appendices of the data.  This lets me lay out all the data I’ve found so far into something visual, and I can see what I’m missing or what I should be looking for, or other cool things to try to add.  Also, building backwards from the appendices up makes it easier to pull data into the actual walkthrough section of the guide.  At least that’s what I’m telling myself.

So here’s another proof-of-concept, this time of a page out of the Bestiary.  Only six monsters, and yes, it does jump numbers — monsters 003 and 004 don’t show up in Phase I, and that’s all the data I have so far.  Also, forgive the horrid design, that’s not my forte.