Ar tonelico: Qoga Tips
As I was playing close to my 40th hour of Ar tonelico: Qoga, I realized I was pretty obsessed with the game. I also realized there's a lot of stuff they don't tell you how to do (or at least they don't tell you very well), so I thought I'd compile a list of tips I learned while playing. Some of this is obvious stuff, but hopefully it has something for everyone. Feel free to comment and add anything you like, and I'll update the post.
COMBAT OVERVIEW
Combat seems to be the most convoluted part of the entire game. The details are barely explained, and you're never told how everything fits together. Mix this with a poorly-explained Purge system and you have a lot of confusion. A quick basic overview: at the core, combat is about making sure your Reyvateil doesn't die. (Though it's only Game Over if all your characters die). She is not controllable, and stands in the back singing; your three main characters are meant to engage the enemy and keep them off her until she has enough Burst (the rapidly increasing percentage) to execute a Song Magic that will kill everyone.
When a monster gets inside the glowing circle your Reyvateil is in, she takes damage and stops singing - you can execute a Blowback with the Circle button which instantly knocks the enemy away, but is on a 5-ish second timer. You'll be doing this lots.
Now, that's the theory of combat. In the beginning of the game, you'll never get to use Song Magic because enemies die from your main characters beating the snot out of them too quickly. Later on, the only way to kill them is by using Song Magic.
Because you auto-move to the closest enemy when you hit the attack button and blocking is automatic, you really will be spending most of the time staring at that Harmograph during a battle. You do more damage when you time a strike with a vertically-high beat, but the extra damage is negligible especially if you just keep spamming the attack button, so it isn't worth waiting for only high beats. The most important thing to remember is the color of the beats. There are red and green beats; if you attack when your indicator is directly on a red beat, you'll get a "BEAT UP" message which makes the Reyvateil's heart grow. Why this matters is explained later, in the Purge section.
Update
My lack of updates have been fourfold:
- Entertaining company in real life. This happens once every 2-3 years, but it meant I couldn't continue Metroid: Other M, which is what I'm trying to finish for backlog and scripting purposes. The good news is that I have to have it done by next Tuesday, when Dragon Age II comes out. I also need to play the last 5 minutes of Trauma Team and actually finish it.
- Above-mentioned company also made me discover the pure joy of playing Minecraft on a dedicated server with close friends. I am the material-bitch, who spends all their time digging in mines so everyone else has enough cobblestone to build awesome things.
- RIFT. I cancelled my World of Warcraft account (sorry, Jacquelle), which doesn't say much because I've cancelled it about 10 times in the 2 years I've been on-and-off playing. Even so, RIFT has completely blown me away. I'll probably write something up on it in the future when I get a better grasp on things, but it's so fun. It's also not so much of a timesink; I'm not sure how they did it, but it always feels like you're doing something awesome, even if you can only play a couple hours at a time. In WoW, I would stare unmoving and unaware at the screen for 14 hours and then see that all I did was craft a pair of pants. In RIFT, during a couple hour session playing with my friend, we did a few entire quest threads, explored a mountain area, got a few artifacts, sealed 3 large Rifts and fought back a full-scale invasion of our hometown. It also links in to Twitter, so if you're so inclined to see all my picture updates (I try to only take interesting ones), you can check it out here.
- This has nothing to do with anything, but I haven't been so excited for any video game in recent memory as I have been for Catherine. Words cannot express how much I want to play this, and the fact that Atlus is actually releasing it in the US at the end of July brings me so much joy...I was expecting at least a late-year release, but I guess there's a lot less to translate in a 10 hour puzzle-game than a 200 hour RPG like Persona.
- Bonus - The fact that I can't listen to this while playing a game makes it hard to play anything, since that's all I've been doing.
Almost there: Trauma Team and Witcher
The past couple of weeks I've been focused on finishing Trauma Team and The Witcher, both of which are startlingly long (Trauma Team is also startlingly good). I can only get in a couple hours here and there, and I've been keeping notes to do a script on Witcher, so nothing has been worth posting so far.
Witcher is juvenile and sexist, but I'm still somehow putting lots and lots and hours into it. The gameplay has gotten repetitive and the story has droned on far too long...Chapter IV was a complete joke, consisting of a series of unrelated side quests that had you going back and forth between two opposite ends of an island. And Witcher is one game where traveling is one of the most painful things you can do; the main character can't jump and can barely vault, so when there's a 2 inch drop to something below, you have to run all the way around to a gradual decline to get down to it.
I've hit Chapter 5 though, which is the last one before the epilogue, so I'm almost there. The script should be good, there's enough material to pick at.
Trauma Team is the real gem; I started playing it when it first came out and put 12 hours into it, but stopped for some reason. After picking it up again, it's become absolutely addictive. The storyline is really engaging, and the characters are just absolute masterpieces. Trauma Center was always a good game series, but it was really all about cutting people open with a stylus (or a Wiimote). While Nurse Angie was cute, the characters had about as much depth as a dried up puddle.
Trauma Team changes all that, and the characters are what drives everything. Even the character I thought I was going to hate (dark haired mopey emo kid) turned out to be an amazing one. I have no idea how many copies this sold, but it wasn't nearly enough.
Back to the grind...hopefully I'll finish Witcher soon and can get the script out, and move onto something else.
WoW: Polaroids from Azeroth 5
Part 5 in a series of scavenged pictures and notes that describe the life of a woman called Jacquelle, who comes from a far off land.
On a happy note: I learned how to cook! This is kind of ill-timed, since I've started wanting all my steaks bloody and raw and have no interest in cooking anything. But I feel like I've accomplished something, anyway. I baked bread!
WoW: Polaroids from Azeroth 4
Someone needs to fire their sculptor. At least he lives up to his name, 'Sir Craps-a-lot'
WoW: Polaroids from Azeroth 3
My mother always told me you can tell the class of a place is from how many lines of laundry they have running out the windows. I think it's pretty obvious my escape didn't take me through the best areas.
WoW: Polaroids from Azeroth 2
After helping out the guards, I got a new cape! It's probably the ugliest thing I've ever seen, but who wants to offend edgy people armed to the teeth? Besides, I think I heard that puke colors are in.
WoW: Polaroids from Azeroth 1
A few years ago outside a small village in Tunisia, an ancient book was unearthed. Inside were countless photographs of the life of a woman who lived in a time long ago, in a place far, far away. Each picture bore her handwritten notes, which have been translated and enclosed. This is the first set.
World of Warcraft
I've played WoW a couple times in the past couple of years (I generally play for a month, get sick of not playing any other games, and stop). It's a fun game, though I resent being forced to socialize; if they offered this offline, I would play non-stop. I hate having to deal with the griefing and trolling and immature players, and I haven't found enough good players to balance it all out. Generally, I play inside my own little bubble, but in order to write about it, I am going to try all kinds of crazy things. So yes, I will even try to talk in General Chat.
Introduction
I've always hated typical game reviews. They are always biased one way or another - it's impossible for them not to be. Some aspects of games are attractive to certain people, and can turn off everyone else. You can't possibly explain all the facets and pieces in one sweeping single-digit number and a few tiny paragraphs that sounds like a write up from the back of the box.
So I started to think and wonder, how could you make a good review? Something that can tell a player, no matter what type of gamer they are, exactly what the game holds. The good, the bad, the buggy. Free of bias, you wouldn't get a hateful review of The Sims written by someone who never liked that genre to begin with. You would get a review of a game like Alpha Protocol which carefully weighed the technical foibles against the impressiveness of the ideas, and stated everything crystal clear, so everyone knew immediately whether they wanted to buy it or not.
Fortunately, that's all impossible. It sounds like it would be a bitch to write anyway. Game reviews will always be biased, and try to spread recommendations and damnations around everywhere, because there's no other choice. Word of mouth from friends whose taste you know and trust will always be the best way to get reliable information on games, and even that's a bit whacked sometimes.
So what does all that have to do with this site? Absolutely nothing, I just wanted to pad out my 'intro' post.
This site throws all reviewing conventions out the window. Mainly because it isn't a review site. It's strictly a personal endeavor I have to clear my backlog of games, and jot down impressions, thoughts, and blobs of writing in the meantime. It will have spoilers (marked), and it won't try to convince anyone of anything either way. These are games I choose to play, and I will give my own personal impressions of what I discover along the way. In the end, hopefully I will beat the number of games I completed last year, which I think was around 2.
My two 2010 games, apparently on fire
