Ar tonelico II: Melody of Metafalica/YMMV

Ar Tonelico 2

• Alas, Poor Villain: Infel.
• Breather Boss / Zero Effort Boss: Dueling with bosses and Reyvateils-only battles appear to be not as hard as they look.
• Crowning Music of Awesome: Almost any time the hymns come out. The first appearance of METHOD_REPLEKIA/. is a good example. There are more examples than could be easily listed here.
  • The Moon Dwelling Demon and The Second Tower are AWESOME
  • Goddess' Footsteps is great as well.
  • EXEC_over.METHOD_SUBLIMATION/. ~omness chs ciel sos infel~ is amazing. Drop what you're doing now and listen to it. You'll thank us.
  • Rustling Throb Croche
  • Let's not forget EXEC_SPHILIA/. Jacqli conversing with the Heart of Gaea, about their similarities (sadness, hatred, imprisonment), and promising her understanding whether Cloche/Luca is beautiful or ugly, and convincing her to open her heart, something she may have not yet done for the protagonist.
• Ensemble Darkhorse: Cocona is arguably the most popular Vanguard in the series and Gust seems to have predicted this so they intentionally hinting her return in the next Ar tonelico...wait does this makes Gust a Magnificent Bastard?
  • That or Dangerously Genre Savvy.
  • Croix is also far-and-away the most popular male character in the entire series, on both sides of the Pacific. Probably because he's not actually a bog-standard Idiot Hero like the other two male leads and actually knows what he's doing to some extent.
• Fan-Preferred Couple: If doujinshi is anything to go by, Croix/Jacqli is the main one. And, more often than not, Cloche and Luca get paired with each other.
• Foe Yay: Targana and Croix, especially after seeing the flashback at Dive Pier.
• Fridge Brilliance: What's the deal with Cocona creating a fireball and throwing it with one of her attacks? She's a Reyvateil and said fireball is the most basic attack spell for Reyvateils
• Game Breaker: The Replekia system, which rapidly accelerates the Song Magic's charging speed. The speed increase is proportional to how many IPD's are in the Fan Club.
  • Made even worse if you get Jacqli's combo magic. Hello, 1,000,000% (or maybe even 10,000,000%) Phantasmagoria. Meet the Big Bad.
    • Sadly, this is also actually breaks the game - a too high Percentage can cause a Buffer Overflow, which ends up healing the enemy you tried to out-laser.
  • Some of the more powerful IPD equips also count, particularly the one's that have the Guard+ skills. With Guard+++ or Guard++++ , getting Perfect guards, which nullifies damage taken by the vanguard and Reyvateil, becomes easy.
• Les Yay: "I joined the Fan Club after having naughty fantasies of Cloche." And that's a mild one.
  • There's also Skycat's tendency to flirt with Luca whenever she has the chance.
  • Two words: Softly Sexy.
  • Luca and Cloche in general have lesbian vibes coming off at numerous points, with even the boxart depicting them embracing.
  • Infel is waiting for a princess on a white horse. It turns out to be Nenesha, whose death hit her so incredibly hard that she tried to bring her back, then sing Sublimation together.
    • To add on, the official setting materials state that when they were alive, only Nenesha could understand Infel, and that they even lived together. However... it just calls them friends.
• The Scrappy: Luca is hated by many fans because she manipulates Croix into becoming a knight so that she can use his position to search for her lost sister, though the point of her Character Development is that she grows out of her selfish and manipulative behavior and becomes genuinely kind.
• They Just Didn't Care: There are, unfortunately, visible mistakes and outright failures to do any translation at all in text that pops up frequently in Metafalica. Additionally, over half of the Japanese voice work was deleted from the North American release of the game despite there being plenty of space on the disc to accommodate it all, perhaps to mask the incompleteness of the dub (not dubbing the Synchronity Chain shout, when we've just listened to them saying the phrase before the Chain starts? SERIOUSLY?). The worst part of it? NIS America's official response to the Game Breaking Bug listed under Timed Mission was "Level grind until you can take off 80 percent of her HP in 3 rounds, or kill her in 3 rounds".
  • Thankfully, most of the worst issues seem to be fixed in the official EU release, although it still does not seem to be absolutely 100% stable. One can hope the corrected version will be released in the US, as well.
• Tear Jerker: when Luca and Chloche find out that they are in fact long-lost sisters.
  • Also, Reisha's death.

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