Ar Tonelico Qoga (PS3)

The Ar Tonelico series have always been great games and the finale is no different.
You play as a young man named Aoto, Aoto is a hot-head with a strong sense of duty, kind of a typical character archetype but by no means a stereotype. He soon commits himself to protecting a girl named Saki and help her find her way home, along the way he meets Finnel, and soon finds a greater journey in store. Although the plot is cliche at first glance, it is actually quite deep, and although this game is the ending of a trilogy it is still enjoyable without knowledge of the other two (Although I would highly recommend playing the first two for returning characters and a broader world)

The gameplay is of the real time RPG variant, you directly control characters and press buttons to attack in real time. Yyour party consists of 3 vanguards, which are basically the defenders, and a Reyvatail (a girl who can use magic) the vanguards protect the reyvatail so she can build up Burst and use stronger magic by purging, keep in mind that purging causes the Reyvatail to take off clothes ultimately down to their underwear, this is quite a strange mechanic that can only be attributed to crazy japanese game design, the game also features a lot of sexual innuendos so if you are considering buying this as a gift or for a child keep this in mind.

The main innovation this game features is the ability to "dive" into a heroine, diving brings you into that heroine's cosmosphere, a strange world that is akin to a human subconscious. These strange worlds very cool and give the player a much deeper insight into the heroines mind.

This game also features multiple endings for each heroine, there are 8 endings in all and the game takes about 30-40 hours to complete first time around, the game also has a new game plus feature that allows you to restart from key points in the game, so a complete playthrough isn't needed 8 times to see every ending.

Finally the music; the instumental music is good but nothing special, where this game really shines are its hymns, these are sang in the fictional language of hymnos and despite being a fictional language it sounds absolutely beautiful and in translation has some very meaningful lyrics.

In conclusion Ar Tonelico qoga is a great game. Although the combat is the weakest aspect of the game, the story is very good and the characters are interesting and have some very good development this paired with the music definitely make up for the flaws. I would definitely recommend this game to any JRPG fan.

I absolutely adore Ar Tonelico II so it took a while to adjust expectations down for Qoga. There are still many good bits here and there but it resembles a pizza someone dropped on the dirty floor. It still looks good and you can eat it but the grime really turns you off.

The hymns are sublime as always and some pieces are the best in the entire series, the BGM is either good or at least functional, even though I prefer the other games in this regard. That's where my praise ends though. The gameplay remains the JRPG paired with Visual Novel thing, so I'm fine with the static character shots over a background and textboxes approach. The 3D character models during normal gameplay though look awfully dated on the PS3 and the character (or rather costume) design is just horrible. As a JRPG fan I have a high tolerance and the other games weren't tame either but when one character runs around with different-colored stockings and nipple tassels while another character essentially just wears bits of masking tape on her chest it just gets stupid.

Speaking of characters, that's another low point. The main character is completely insufferable and while Lyner was a barely alive cardboard-cutout and Croix a bit of a wet blanket, at least they were inoffensive. Aoto on the other hand seems to be a amalgamation of the worst possible anime hero cliches the writers could come up with, always going on an on about being a guy, the man, protecting the female death robots dishing out 100 times the damage he does. And he constantly fails at protecting them too. There is a surprising amount of cut scene stupidity and it usually revolves around Aoto; A giant killer robot? No problem. An old guy choking him? Whoops, hands tied. And he's schizophrenic too; One girl he treats decently, the other much more likeable one he bullies for absolutely no reason other than a poignant reveal waiting down the line. Saki is a completely bland "moe" girl, one main character is barely in the story and another one is quite interesting but only appears when you're two thirds through the game.

The story takes a long time before it develops at that point too, until then it just strings a long series of "save girl x/world from y" quests together like this is baby's first RPG. It's ultimately harmless, has fun parts and gets nice at the end but it's nothing to write home about. Neither is the combat for that matter, while the AT II combat required at least timing and could be challenging, this is just a bad knockoff from the Tales series; run to the same 4 or 5 enemies, mash attack button and cast your overpowered one-hit-kill attack spell. Rinse and repeat. The final boss has 5 stages, 4 of which are exactly the same with slightly different background and music. Why?

Cosmospheres and Item Synthesis are fun as always, the westernized translation can be a bit grating but is at least mostly accurate so what's left is a halfway decent game. If you want to play an RPG and already went through the better entries in the PS3 library then it's definitely worth a try, as long as you can get over the whole pointless stripping mechanic and the tedious, unchallenging combat. Or better yet, dust off a PS2 and play the other Ar Tonelico games which are far superior to this mediocre ending.

Includes the soundtrack too, which is just pure quality!

The game graphics aren't top notc. The overall feeling and spirit compensates the lack of graphics very well!