The one game that Hiroko and I enthusiastically played through together in its entirety.

Ar tonelico 3 impressions

Originally posted 2010-03-23.

I gave up on the guy in Japan sitting on my Ar tonelico 3 Saikyou DX Combo box, and just ordered another copy of the game. Now I’m about 30 hours in, having forcefully inserted some gaming hours in the cracks of my iPad development schedule.

First, the artwork. From the first Famitsu scans that came out, I was kind of worried about the visual style of the game. It seems so flat and imprecise, compared to what we expect from Nagi. It’s most obvious in the portraits for the Origin Reyvateils in Ar tonelico 1 and 3. Nearly every surface of Shurelia’s Linkage suit is rendered with a continuous, careful blend of highlight and shadow, creating a hyper-idealized, tangible presence. Tilia’s Linkage, in comparison, looks like a sketch, with either flat fields of shading or indistinct gradients.