Ar Tonelico Qoga: Knell of Retarded Names

So, the main character is Aoto, your typical care-free but honourable young boy who gets inadvertently roped in to saving the world.

One day there's a fight in his village. Some Clustanian (I know, awful name) soldiers are fighting an old guy and a girl. Aoto helps the guy and girl win the fight, after which the old guy dies and the girls transforms from an armoured warrior chick to a wee 16 year old. She's shy, apologetic, but also eager to please and generally in awe of everything you do. So every otaku's dream woman, I guess.

Anyway, she's called Saki, and she's a Reyvetail. Revyetail's are girls who can perform magic by singing songs. They stand on the battle field with you and sing. The songs have red beats and green beats. If you attack in time with the red beats your attacks do more damage, and you also build the purge meter faster. When the purge meter is full, the Reyvetail can Purge and cast a spell. She can either launch her own powerful attack, or power up your attacks with elemental powers. You get more powerful spells by doing Dives. You go into the Reyvetail's mind and seek out Hyumas, which are parts of their personality. There's 4 levels of Hyumas, each more powerful than the last. So you go around doing this and saving the planet and so on.

Sounds simple, no?

No. Here's the rub. The power of a Reyvetail's spells is directly related to how naked she is. More naked = more powerful. So to do powerful spells/Purge they have to strip off. Early on, Aoto and co were outnumbered by some soldiers. So Saki prayed to the Goddess, stripped to her underwear, and all the soldiers turned into cake. Problem solved in the best way possible, with boobs and cake.

And that's the game in nutshell. There's more to say, but I'll do that later.

So this has really good gameplay, right? You wouldn't be playing it for any other reasons I'm sure.

It's okay. I mainly got it because the combat isn't turn-based.

This sounds hilarious. You should've got Valkyria chronicles.

Isn't that RTS?

A_Nonny_Moose wrote:

Isn't that RTS?

Its very different. DL the demo, see if you like it and get the game before it goes up in price and people start trying to sell it for 50 pounds usewd or something.

A_Nonny_Moose wrote:

No. Here's the rub. The power of a Reyvetail's spells is directly related to how naked she is. More naked = more powerful. So to do powerful spells/Purge they have to strip off. Early on, Aoto and co were outnumbered by some soldiers. So Saki prayed to the Goddess, stripped to her underwear, and all the soldiers turned into cake. Problem solved in the best way possible, with boobs and cake.

dear god....... i might need this game

Game is pretty sweet. Don't care for the stripinz much but whatever. Like the combat despite it being simple decent RPG if found for cheap!

God damn it. This game is constantly splitting up my party. Characters are always wandering off or getting captured. It's really annoying.

I will find you and give you a sex change for spoilers like that.

Okay, I actually understand the battle system now. For some reason I misread certain things early on.

Anyway, the Reyvetail stands there and sings. She has a little circle around her and if an enemy enters it she stops singing. Reyvetails die really easily as well, so keeping enemies away from them is a priority. There's a knock back thing you can do to push enemies far out of the circle, but it needs to recharge after each use.

You can equip up to 4 Hyumas, 1 for each shoulder button. Each shoulder button has an element, and each Hyuma has an attribute, like "attack up" or "curse resistance" or whatever. You hold a shoulder button and shake the controller up and down to Purge. Purging uses a Hyuma to boost your stats, attributes an element to your attack and increases your resistance to that element, and most important of all, Purging makes the Reyvetail take some clothes off.

That's very important because the Reyvetail's EX attack gets more powerful as the Reyvetail gets more naked. To Purge you need to build the Purge meter by attacking during the red beats on the music chart. You can Purge any time once the meter is full, but if you Purge on a red beat you get a little cutscene of the Reyvetail's clothes vanishing.

You press X to use an EX attack, and they do stupid amouns of damage at maximum nakedness. There's 3 levels of stripping to Purge through, and if you Purge after that I think you go into somekind of overdrive mode, but no battle has lasted long enough for me to try it yet.The toughest enemies I've fought have about 12'000, and the high level EX attacks do like 50'000 damage. Each Reyvetail has their own unique EX attack.

Which brings me on to Diving. It's interesting as a story mechanic because it's a decent way to flesh out the characters, diving into their minds to unify their messed up emotions and stuff. But it also unlocks other personalities (as well as Hyumas). The two playable Reyvetails, Saki and Finnel, and 3 or 4 other alternate personas inside them. Diving deep enough allows you to merge the personas, so you can switch between them any time and use them in battle. There's no gameplay in Dives though. You just spend points to continue the story. Sometimes you get choices, and choosing the wrong one can eject you from the dive, but that's about it.

For example, one of Saki's personas is Sarapatra. A big busty blond who represents Saki's repressed/undeveloped sexuality. I got Saki and Sarapatra to fuse and I can now use eithe of them in battle, whereas before I could only use Saki. Sarapatra has a better EX attack though, so I use her all the time now.

Is this actually a decent RPG?

Seeing how the JRP is kinda dead at the moment

It's okay. The story is mostly incomprehensible, and fights are very simple once you get the hang of it. It's definitely guilty of a lot of things people complain about when it comes to current JRPGs.

How far into it did you get?

I think I got close to the end. But then the rush of good games started coming out and I forgot about it.

For how long did you play it?

I think around 35 hours. I gather there's a short bonus chapter after the end, and there's like 6 different endings or something, along with a NG+ ability so you can carry over all your stats when you start again. If you like the game enough it could certainly eat up a lot of time. There's a trophy for getting 100 hours of play time if I remember right.

A_Nonny_Moose wrote:

I think around 35 hours. I gather there's a short bonus chapter after the end, and there's like 6 different endings or something, along with a NG+ ability so you can carry over all your stats when you start again. If you like the game enough it could certainly eat up a lot of time. There's a trophy for getting 100 hours of play time if I remember right.

I idled to get that trophy lol.

Dude, tidy up your sig. It's a mess.

This game is honest about it's sexuality.

http://www.siliconera.com/2014/06/30/ar-nosurge-plus-brings-bath-scenes-costumes-vita/

Be happy moose its honest.