Ar Tonelico II: Melody of Metafalica

I'm very happy I started off my year with this game because it's so much of what I like, visually and narratively. It got me out of my year-long depressive slump. It's a beautiful story about love and trust, the love we have for each other. Alongside amazing music, fun gameplay, interesting character designs and gorgeous spritework.

It's immediately gripping from the beginning and holds that intensity throughout most of the game. The character-focused narrative is incredibly well realized and the focus on the girls' emotions, negative and positive, makes them some of the best romanceable girls in any videogame I've ever played. Maybe that's not much cause I haven't played too many dating sims, but it easily outclasses every JRPG I've played with romanceable characters. Luca in particular I related to a lot. The lack of ability to do things for yourself because you're so desperate for others' validation, and how hard it is to make deep relationships after you've lost your love for yourself. How every relationship is formed with the intention of using people and controlling them, because you're too scared to open your heart otherwise. I really wish someone would love me as much as Croix loves Luca in her ending.

I will say, it has some pacing problems in phase 2, where the plot progression stops entirely to give you a traumadump of the girl whose route you chose. I'm not against the traumadump, but it messes up the pace for a a few hours. Phase 5 I also think has some pacing problems, in that the final dungeon has near infinite encounters, while also being extremely large. (There is a bar at the bottom right of the screen that shows how many more encounters you can have in the area. Once it depletes you won't fight any more enemies until you leave the area.) I also wish the political aspect that was building up in phase 1 was fully realized, as the conclusion to those arcs is a bit lackluster.

Regardless, the presentation is outstanding. The music is always enjoyable and there's not a single track I found grating. The spritework is super expressive and detailed, it's incredibly beautiful. The 3d environments are very visually appealing, especially when combined with the pre-painted areas you find for small rooms. The animated cutscenes perfectly capture how detailed the character designs are, and the EX attack animations are awesome.

In comparison to the first game, it builds up on all it's good points while fixing their shortcomings. The only thing it didn't fix is that the strategy for all battles is build up song magic by attacking -> use song magic and kill all enemies in the encounter. It's not bad but it gets a bit boring when you reach the 25 hour mark, which is why I took a break around that time.

The combat system is incredibly fun. The action commands for parrying attacks keeps the battle flow active, while the attack phase has you dividing your attack types to increase your damage or accessing higher levels of song magic. The only downside is, every fight feels very easy, so there's not much challenge to the strategizing. Even the final boss I found quite easy, not having any character die during the battle.

The characters are all good, with a special focus on the reyvateils as they're the main draw of the game. But even if the non-reyvateil characters are lacking in comparison, they're still fully realized and all have some sort of plot relevance. I will admit, some of the plot relevance feels like it exists to make the characters matter, but it still makes the characters very interesting.

The cosmospheres were a grand step up from the first game's. There was much more to the characters' emotions and actions. There is so much more abuse of the main character (which I find entertaining). The problems they deal with are incredibly real despite their reasons being very fantastic in nature. The sexuality aspect is bumped up too, which makes it incredibly interesting, way moreso than the first game.

And I really, really love Croix, who you can see shine as a character outside the plot in the shop events. In those cases, you can see him take on the role of a straight man to the various shopkeepers' funny man. And I really like his passionate love for whichever reyvateil you choose to romance. It's incredibly sweet and comforting to know that someone can love you even while knowing all your terrible secrets. The various shopkeepers' relations to the reyvateils provides a lot of information on their characters too, so I tried to do as many as possible. I really recommend people do them, as they add a lot to the characters.

All in all, this is definitely one of my favorite JRPGs of all time now. I loved every second of it despite the flaws I could find.