One of the best RPG's of all time
So the 3rd instalment of the Ar tonelico series is here and its time for the review. Unfortunately as the game is completely in Japanese I won't be able to go into the story too much as my Japanese is extremely limited. So anyway lets get on to the review.
Gameplay- In this game there are two Reyvateils that you use for most of the game Finnell and Saki and later Tilia (who I failed to get) There is relationship points as usual with the girls which later lead to which ending you receive. I believe there are 10 endings, 2 bad, 4 normal and 4 true, so there is a lot of replay value. Most endings depend on two parts in the game besides the relationship points, which luckily after completing the game new game+ can be started from that point or the start of the 2 phases of the game.
The game involves walking around towns and trails, in which it is 3rd person. Towns and cities like the old games will have a list of places to visit within the town which funnily enough are in English? the areas where you fight monsters again has a bar of monsters you've fought. This means that when you win a fight the bar will decrease, when its fully depleted you won't have any more random encounters.
The game also features synthesis which you do with the girls, the girls have different things they help you make these can be weapons to medical items. Each girl also has different talking topics which can be found from doing different things in the game.
The other part to do with the girls is the Cosmosphere which is the dive system in this game. The dive system in this game is like a map with different locations on it. You have to choice where to go and some times which option to take to try and complete their level of the cosmosphere, completing these unlocks powers in the characters making them stronger and have the ability to change. Besides that you can unlock CG throughout the game which can be viewed in an album when you complete the game.
Finally I want to go onto the battle system. It involves you running around as Aoto fighting the enemies with your sword when one of girls will stand at the back singing. You need to protect her as if an enemies gets close she'll be unable to concentrate and her % will stop going up. % is how powerful her move will be when you want to release it which you have the option to do at anytime. Honestly I found it kind of simple but that's probably because I didn't truly understand it. I know to get the better moves with the girls but it took a long time in battle to get enough % to pull them off. No battles I had let them get to that point. Hopefully I will fully understand it with the English version. The other area I found it limited was the fact you only really hacked enemies yourself you didn't have any special moves or anything. But besides that it was easy to use.
Graphics- The graphics were really good and a huge improvement from the original games not that I thought them were bad, some of you may think it may have lost some charm but I think its all still there. There's great location and character designs, there's not a lot weapons an seem to look the same through the game but the character designs and the locations and how they have been designs will keep you happy enough throughout the game. The videos had nice and charming Anime styled cut scences and videos.
Sound- The game has a large and impressive soundtrack with quite a lot of music, which I enjoyed a lot. The voice acting was really impressive even though in Japanese, hopefully the English version will have English and Japanese voices.
Summary- I personally really enjoyed it and I can't wait for the localized version of the game so I can get the full experience. But there are a few down points of the game. Personally I didn't think the game was that big, as in there wasn't that many places to visit. Other places you visit were to big and some quite complex to get around which could be kind of annoying at points. The other thing is I felt that the battle system was too easy but too complex to expand (well in Japanese anyway) But that's why I'm looking forward to the English version.
The only other down point to the game is that as a JRPG it felt quite short taking me only 19 hours to do, and that's with doing the cosmosphere to the best of my ability. I'm usually used to JRPG's being a lot longer than this but that's not to put you off the game.
+ Great character designs
+ Great CG
+ Great voice acting
+ Great Area degins
+ Cosmosphere is a lot of fun
- Simple combat
- Too Short