Ar tonelico 2 Visual Guide

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!