Ar tonelico 2 Visual Guide

Reading through the vast amount of information available online for Ar Tonelico, it’s really easy to get overwhelmed.

As I said - to me, this guide isn’t about just putting some pictures on a walkthrough, I want it to incorporate the world, too.  The problem is, how to draw the line of what you include and what you don’t, when there is so much out there, and so much that people have already covered thoroughly?  In my perfect world, this guide would be able 600 pages and contain every drop of information on the series I could gather, but I know that isn’t possible.

The past couple of days, I’ve found a couple sites that house more historical AT-series data than I thought possible (including a disgustingly-long full language lesson on Hymmnos).  I want to include all of this, but I know I can’t.  Aside from my only including original work (or collaborations) in this, a line needs to be drawn in how much can go in.  So how to decide?

Currently, this is what I want to accomplish with the guide:

• Provide a full companion to every point in the game.  This includes going through the story, collecting all items, completing all syntheses, rescuing all I.P.D.’s, completing each available Cosmosphere, and obtaining the desired ending.
• Design the guide so that almost all the information a user would need is either exactly on the page they are already at, or in a logical section easy to find.
• Make it really really purdy.
• Include as much history and external source as (realistically) possible.  Ideally, every person reading it would come across things they never knew about the world, or clarification on the story of the game itself.

First and foremost, is the game guide itself, and that’s what the entire first part of the project will be: data mining the game.

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.