Ar tonelico 2 Visual Guide

So making a guide for Ar Tonelico 2 is probably going to be hard.  Especially because there are so many variables — the entire game splits in two paths in the first act, and it has four endings, which you are usually locked into very early.  Add into that a bunch of unknowns — I.P.D. displacements, Dualstall strategies, and item drops, and you need a way to play and replay and replay certain scenes, along with the entire game as a whole.

Luckily, there is an excellent PS2 emulator for the PC.  And while not absolutely perfect, it is remarkable they were able to develop something like this that could do so much.  As with all emulators, the performance depends largely on the setup you do (and the rom itself), and I have spent hours and hours tweaking to get the most accurate PS2 performance for this game.  In case anyone else out there is interested, I thought I would share what I found out starting Ar Tonelico 2 with the PCSX2 emulator.

First things first; while the emulator itself is free, in order to do anything at all, you need a dump of your PS2 BIOS (instructions here), as well as a legitimate copy of Ar Tonelico 2.  While you can use a plugin to play the game directly off the DVD, I found it way easier to rip it into an ISO and play off that.

Here are the software/versions I am using…I have used a lot of versions of this emulator and plugins, and have run into a lot of issues.  This exact combination is the best I have found so far….please note this is all written on 2/8/09, and future releases will change this all around, I am sure:

• PCSX2 Playground 0.9.5 Beta, SVN 708 (must have the base PCSX2 Playground installed first)  I have run into performance issues playing AT2 with non-PG beta versions.
• GSdx 872m SSSE3 0.1.12 Graphics plugin that is bundled with the Playground package.  The SSSE3 vs SSE2 vs SSE41 all depend on your CPU, see this thread for details.  Also keep in mind this is an earlier version of the plugin than is available now — this is because 0.1.14 disabled the use of screenshots when using DirectX 9 capability (DX10 produces black tears in the game portraits, so DX9 is a must).  There is also another graphic filter out there, ZeroGS.  It works well, but certain scenes which involve dynamic zooming of the background (Waterfall Hill Park , for instance) absolutely kill it.
• SPU2ghz Playground 1.9.0   For sound; this is bundled with the playground plugins, and has worked just fine for me with no tweaking.
• Linuzappz Iso CDDVD 0.7.0   For CD/DVD; again, this is bundled with the playground plugins, and I use it because I use an ISO, instead of my original game disc.
• PlayStation2 Bios USA v01.60

Now, the settings.  The only ones I’ve really touched are graphics, CPU, and Controllers.

GSdx 872m SSSE3 0.1.12
Resolution: Windowed
This doesn’t affect the actual in-game resolution, and I’m still trying to decide the best way to play.  Windowed allows you to use other applications (note taking, screen shot analyzing) at the same time without tabbing out of your game.  However, I might play full screen with a synchronized screenshot folder to my Mac, and do the data collection there.

Renderer: Direct3D9 (Hardware)
The software renders, as expected, are ridiculously slow, so hardware is the only way to go.  DX10 is better performance-wise, but has a bug that drives me up the wall, shown in this screenshot — a black tear right across the left character portrait in every screen.  DX9 runs a bit slower, but doesn’t have this tear.

Shader: Pixel Shader 3.0
I didn’t notice any difference between 2.0 and 3.0, but bigger is better right?

Interlacing: Normal
Bob makes the screen shake, Blend is fuzzy, and Weave seems to stutter on movement and have horrendous pixelated redraws.

Aspect Ratio: 4:3
Widescreen stretches, and I want to preserve the correct aspect ratio.

D3D internal res: Native
Took me a while to figure this one out…I had originally upped the internal resolution to create faux-HD screenshots.  This graphic filter messes up the facial texture placement when you don’t use the native resolution though (as shown here).  So I stick with native, which is still excellent.

Texture Filtering
Alpha Correction
Again, enabled for the sake of it.  No easily-discernible difference for me.

CPU
I enabled multi-threading, as I have a dual-core.  The other thing to note in this section is to turn Frame Limiting on to ‘Limit’ — this forces the game to operate at 60fps.  While running the game at ‘Normal’ (fast as possible) is great for speeding through at 90fps, it completely destroys the audio, which alternates from way too fast to way too slow in an effort to keep up with the shifting frame rates.  Keeping it stable at 60 means, even though I’m not speeding through, I don’t butcher the gorgeous music.

Controllers
Currently just using keyboard controls.  I want to hook up my DualShock 3 or Xbox 360 controller, but both have driver issues, and since AT2 doesn’t use the shoulder buttons much (or at all), it’s easy to do a standard Up-Down-Left-Right W-A-S-D setup.

Even with all the setup, there are still a few issues I’ve encountered so far (though I haven’t played very much).  Most of these are artifacts or graphical glitches…haven’t encountered any slowdown yet.  And there are no settings or plugins I’ve found that fix the opening screens.

More will be posted as I actually go through the game itself, but my test runthrough handled battle, character portrait talk scenes, zooming scenery, world map navigation, and FMVs, which should take care of most of what the game has.