Ar tonelico 2 Visual Guide

For my entire gaming life, I’ve been obsessed with strategy guides.  Not in the typical way - I don’t care about boss strategies or cheat codes or secret maps.  It was because the guide took the game even further in a way that was so much more than a walkthrough.

The guides that truly stood out in my mind — those done by Working Designs and DoubleJump Books — were bursting with art, tidbits that you would never notice in normal playthroughs, and a quality that made you feel like you could really trust what they were saying.  They had personality and humor, were effective and elaborate without being bloated, and acted as physical arm of the game.  Often, when I had finished something really good, I would flip through the ridiculously thick guides, reliving everything in those pages that I had spent the past 60 hours going through.  Since almost every good game leaves me depressed at the end, it’s nice to be able to hold on for just a bit longer.

And so we come to this.  Every one of my favorite games has made me want to write a detailed strategy guide for it, but the Ar Tonelico series is the only one that has the depth and gameplay to keep things new and interesting; the characters and story and history to make me obsessed with it; and the complete lack of a mainstream audience to ensure there was no professional (English, anyway) strategy guide made.

It’s my hope to not only just create a reliable guide for getting the ending you want, or all the IPD’s collected, but to recreate what made me love guides so much.  To offer you a huge amount of information that you weren’t aware of, to make you think deeper about the game, to help you through anything you might have issues with, and to make you want to go back and play through it over and over again.

Strategy guides aren’t something regular fans normally take on, so there are no ‘How to Write a Guide’ tutorials online, which is partly why I made this blog.  Not only would it be funny to eternally log all my stupid mistakes in the process, but maybe it will inspire others along the way to pick up their favorite series and try their hand at writing.