Ar tonelico 2 Visual Guide

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.