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Yeah I'll edit those images into this post after I'm done eating. So, the Sharl are a lot like the Viruses from the original Ar Tonelico, they're weird self-sustaining semi-permanent Song Magic that'd normally be nearly impossible to create without major resources but were easy to poo poo out en masse by using CLASS::CIEL_NOSURGE and the ship's power to do so. EDIT: Earthes (There's not one of these little portraits I'm using for Earthes) Ion  Kanon  Nelo 
Feinne fucked around with this message at 01:05 on May 13, 2015 |
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May 13, 2015 00:25
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Also these aren't 'real' sharl, right? Most of them died when the old planet got turned into a black hole. Though I thought a few independent sharl did make it onto the ship, like Ion's pet sharl dragon.
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May 13, 2015 00:38
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Kurieg posted:Also these aren't 'real' sharl, right? Most of them died when the old planet got turned into a black hole. Though I thought a few independent sharl did make it onto the ship, like Ion's pet sharl dragon. Those were Genom. Sharl are essentially artificial Genom.
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May 13, 2015 01:00
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I really like Delta in this scene. He's not ignoring what Ion's saying. He understands her position, but it's so crappy that he's easily able to refute her points and she has nothing to defend her position with. He's thinking pretty smart and is completely in the right in this case. Delta and Cass's last mission to the heart of enemy territory led to them being captured and canned for two years, so I can hardly blame them for not wanting to take Prim (their only known possible way to fight back) with them into the heart of enemy territory in the hopes that they MIGHT be able to talk the human-genocidal person down. If things go wrong, then that's it for them again, and probably for all the remaining free humans. Even if I accept Ion's premise that this problem can be solved by negotiation - which is a really shaky proposition - there are some big problems with it. At best, taking Prim with them to Kanon would put them into a tremendously weak position, and you can't negotiate with genocidal lunatics from a position of weakness. If there is to be any negotiation, the humans need a bargaining chip. Taking Prim back to Felion is the correct play. Feinne posted:Yeah I'll edit those images into this post after I'm done eating. Okay, thanks for the info. Yeah, that really doesn't make me any more inclined to care about the lives of the Sharl as opposed to actual people. I guess that makes me an evil person according to the standards of this game.
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May 13, 2015 01:00
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It's kind of obvious but looking back, Ar Tonelico and the Surge Concerto games really like their headgear/accessories. It's kind of a theme in Ar Tonelico that communicating, working together, and compromising is Good. I don't expect Ar Nosurge will be all that different considering Ciel Nosurge, so keep that in mind.
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May 13, 2015 01:15
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Stabbey_the_Clown posted:I really like Delta in this scene. He's not ignoring what Ion's saying. He understands her position, but it's so crappy that he's easily able to refute her points and she has nothing to defend her position with. He's thinking pretty smart and is completely in the right in this case. Delta is pretty awesome and continues to be so throughout the game. Ion's currently in the process of trying to stop anyone from doing anything that can't be undone while she's trying to figure out what the gently caress Nelo and Zill are up to. Ironically she actually was talking to people who might have listed to that but since it didn't work on Kanon she seems to have abandoned it for the moment. It also goes without saying this plan to destroy the Sharl must have some kind of unpleasant catch, because until Nay got all wired up after her talk with Delta about 'doing whatever it takes' she and the prime minister had discarded it as an option. Feinne fucked around with this message at 01:29 on May 13, 2015 |
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May 13, 2015 01:26
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I'm not sure that genocide just to defend against genocide is "completely right". He wants to kill every single one of the Sharl, which is actually arguably the most extreme position in this whole debacle. He's also knowingly making decisions based on incomplete information. He does have good points, but he's not some shining paragon here.
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May 13, 2015 01:30
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Delta's position is reasonable, but not necessarily right. Which I think is good writing.
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May 13, 2015 01:48
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The Prim thing was actually hinted, BTW --- from an earlier update, where Feinne had Ion look at some of the baddies' notes:quote:
Now, Prim is (and was) the only Dream Genom in the story thus far, as far as I am aware...
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May 13, 2015 02:01
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I wonder what they were researching… Let’s take a look around.
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Zurai posted:I'm not sure that genocide just to defend against genocide is "completely right". He wants to kill every single one of the Sharl, which is actually arguably the most extreme position in this whole debacle. He's also knowingly making decisions based on incomplete information. He does have good points, but he's not some shining paragon here. Fair point. I suppose though what I mean is that Delta's position is completely understandable. The decisions he's making based on incomplete information are good decisions based on the information which he does have. And honestly him not being a shining paragon is a point in his favor since those make for more interesting protagonists.
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May 13, 2015 02:02
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They're responding in a believable fashion. Felion's been at war with the Sharl as far as anyone can remember. They prey upon those outside the barrier but it's clear they won't be stop at that. Now they're launching an all-out assault and for once, PLASMA has a chance to strike at the leader of the Sharls. The Genomirai Church collaborate with the Sharl but as far as anyone knows, the Sharl take orders from someone else, so merely beating the Church isn't enough. They've got to take things down at the source so that the people of Felion can know peace. We just happen to be able to see things from a different perspective as well. The Sharl aren't evil but it makes no difference to people who are forced to endure the raids and kidnappings. Now there's a crisis so most people aren't going to take a diplomatic approach. On the other end, Kanon's clearly driven by stubborness and her conviction that she's doing the right thing even though she knows what she's doing is Not Nice. I imagine we'll get to her story before long.
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May 13, 2015 02:02
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OddObserver posted:The Prim thing was actually hinted, BTW --- from an earlier update, where Feinne had Ion look at some of the baddies' notes: I just thought that was reference to the fact they were putting Genom souls in Sharl bodies. After all, the Sharls we've seen from Ion's side certainly haven't been "mindless".
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May 13, 2015 02:22
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Yeah, but it's talking about controlling /all/ the other sharl. BTW, Feinne, are you going to be talking about the lyrics of yal fii-ne noh-iar? Not a big fan of Aquagon's translation of that.
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May 13, 2015 02:26
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I like to think that the "player controls Delta and Cass, fights Earthes and Ion" version is canon, because it makes a funny response to Ion's Genometrics. "Sabotaging our plans? TWO CAN PLAY THIS GAME, ION!" They're not very good at teamwork  I definitely didn't sympathize with Ion very much during this part; it's hard to feel equal sympathy for the beleaguered and the aggressors. Kanon's motivation is equally hard to sympathize with because there's very little that can't be excused when the alternative is complete extinction of all life. Sure, killing ALL the Sharl seems a bit extreme, but their opposition is either a) fanatical (Kanon), b) evil (Zill, Nelo) or c) unable to understand what they're doing is wrong (Prim, the Sharl)--you're not going to get them to the table without a Sword of Damocles over their heads. Admittedly, Nay doesn't seem too interested in diplomacy after two years of things getting worse and worse and 5000 years of Empressing, but presumably that's what Ion, Delta and Cass are there for.
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May 13, 2015 02:40
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You will better get Kanon's actual motivation for this when we reach the end of the phase. I'll just say she's well, well aware that she's the worst person. And there's an issue with the translation of yal fii-ne noh-iar's lyrics? Doesn't surprise me, since both of Kanon's songs are a mix of Russian and inherently hard to translate conlang stuff.
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May 13, 2015 02:42
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Feinne posted:You will better get Kanon's actual motivation for this when we reach the end of the phase. I'll just say she's well, well aware that she's the worst person. Well, talking about Russian bits only, they... vary from being very loose to where one could consider a poetic license to match usual hymnos style (likely justified in that it has too many sentence fragments), though losing some of the religiously-loaded words from the original, to a few bits that seem to completely miss the point --- at least compared to the Russian version, since I imagine they were translated from Japanese. Probably the bit that struck me the most, given blatant plot connection: Russian: Но через горе и страдание Всё, что пережить пришлось Ты с покаяньем получаешь Очищение от всех своих грехов Aquagon: Affected by all these laments and sadness, I shall offer my body, purify the sins, and awaken. Mostly literal: But through the sorrow and suffering, All that you had to survive, You with your penance receive Absolution from all your sins.
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May 13, 2015 02:58
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Yeah, that more literal translation is definitely just better in the context of the game. It's a difficult balance to maintain between maintaining as close to the actual words that are there while understanding the intent of those words and how that might translate better.
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May 13, 2015 03:09
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That music and those characters, those are the reasons I play Ar Tonelico! ...is what I would say if I actually played more than a few hours of them and then just read an LP instead. In a way, it reminds me of the Nier games and how the protagonist could have a jRPG/wRPG spin. Ion wants to gather all the pieces and fix everything at once (and believes that it is possible to do so), whereas Delta is moving from one objective to another and motivated by a sense of necessity.
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May 13, 2015 03:23
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Oh, just as an FYI NISA is doing the same deal they did with Ar Nosurge where they are cross-selling the limited edition of Ar Nosurge Plus through their store starting today. Please do support crazy people who bring us weird dumb bad poo poo on two fronts at once if you are planning on picking it up.
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May 13, 2015 03:28
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I want to but no money.
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May 13, 2015 03:29
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Ion's got a goal in mind but no real idea of how to put the pieces all together. It's like playing Tetris with the goal of filling the screen up completely, which is completely at odds with how the game actually works. She's already found Kanon, Delta, and Cass but no one's listening to her and she's not sure how to get them to stop fighting. Delta doesn't really have anything other than his attachment to his friends and his forgotten past, so it's easy for him to just follow Cass around or whatever orders he has for the moment.
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May 13, 2015 03:32
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They haven't explained how Kanon is alive again after the first game assured you she was totally definitely dead for real, right?
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May 13, 2015 04:07
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Oh so just to give some idea what's coming up, we'll be seeing the end of Delta/Cass Phase 1 next followed by the end of Ion Phase 1. At that point I'll likely have a vote as to whose Phase 2 we want to focus on first, which will also determine the order of the Dives you'll see early in 2 (Ion can potentially do several in a row early on as long as you still have DP, because we've got two advanced Dives we can't technically finish available from the start). The Dives are just going to kind of intersperse because the very last thing I want to do is have like four Dives in a row with no plot (I mean unless there's a consensus that no, that's totally fine).Sindai posted:They haven't explained how Kanon is alive again after the first game assured you she was totally definitely dead for real, right? Nor will they, because this game was apparently written before that part of Ciel Nosurge was by totally different people who weren't ever consulting each other on anything. I think it's best to assume that memory was just in error and things didn't go that way.
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May 13, 2015 04:11
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Oh. That's really weird.
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May 13, 2015 04:17
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Ion has no real reason to unilaterally hate the Sharl given her only real experience with them in this time period so far is seeing them helping the player in her dream world during Ciel Nosurge and then later seeing an entire civilization of Sharl living their lives as an independent society while hinting at doing "something" to humans inside of the ship. Oh and the fact that the Sharl are literally Genom souls reborn into new bodies, that's pretty important too. I really don't think that not wanting to commit genocide on an entire civilization is an unreasonable position for her to take, even if it means having to fight her friends to get the point across. Especially considering her own experience doing exactly that to these same Genom, albeit under different circumstances.
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May 13, 2015 04:42
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I find it kinda hard to sympathize with Delta and Cass and the rest of humanity. I mean even though they have been pushed to the brink, pretty much everything that has happened to push them to the brink has been entirely humanities fault.
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May 13, 2015 04:42
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Not these particular humans though. Should these random colonists be punished for the sins of 5000 years ago?
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May 13, 2015 04:48
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megamariox posted:I find it kinda hard to sympathize with Delta and Cass and the rest of humanity. I mean even though they have been pushed to the brink, pretty much everything that has happened to push them to the brink has been entirely humanities fault. Most of those people just inherited someone else's lovely decisions, though... Particularly the Ancients like Delta and Cass, who inherited Nelo, got frozen for 5000 years, and then woke up right as she moved onto Plan B. Nay in particular has spent her entire life getting kicked from one lovely situation to the next with no real power to actually improve any of it.
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May 13, 2015 04:50
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Yeah Ion basically has the right idea about stopping the cycle of people screwing each other over for the past ten thousand years. Although really just killing Zill at any time would have done most of the job. This is the third or fourth time she's tried to kill all humans.
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May 13, 2015 04:55
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I love that Kanoyeel's songs are in Russian, it makes sense given where she's learning most of these songs from that they be lexically different. The fact that it gives Origa a chance to be awesome doesn't hurt. megamariox posted:I find it kinda hard to sympathize with Delta and Cass and the rest of humanity. I mean even though they have been pushed to the brink, pretty much everything that has happened to push them to the brink has been entirely humanities fault. A few members of humanity, not the whole. Ion had the Genom's blessing to do what she did to them, as terrible as it was, they agreed with her reasoning. (Admittedly that might be why she's finding it hard to believe that the sharls are in the wrong now) Right now the Sharl's are operating at the direction of Zill and Nelo, two humans(ish), who don't have the sharl's OR Humanity's best interests at heart.
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May 13, 2015 04:55
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Feinne posted:Nor will they, because this game was apparently written before that part of Ciel Nosurge was by totally different people who weren't ever consulting each other on anything. I think it's best to assume that memory was just in error and things didn't go that way. They don't explain it but the popular consensus is that Zill extracted her soul from the mass of enerrgy from Ra Ciela's destruction and placed her in a new body the same way the genom souls are being extracted and placed in sharl. Bits in Ciel show this sort of thing to be possible. It is a giant "wait what?" that's never really explained though. Argas fucked around with this message at 07:33 on May 13, 2015 |
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May 13, 2015 05:09
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Clarste posted:Not these particular humans though. Should these random colonists be punished for the sins of 5000 years ago? I don't think that the colonists should be punished for the sins of 5000 years ago but when it comes to sympathies it is all generally about how you present it. You can give a character the most tragic back-story every that should make them completely sympathetic but if it isn't presented well then the character doesn't come across as sympathetic which is what I feel with Delta, Cass and humanity in this game.
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May 13, 2015 05:33
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Argas posted:They don't explain it but the popular consensus is that Zill extracted her soul from the mass of enerrgy from Ra Ciela's destruction and placed her in a new body the same way the genom souls are extracted being placed in sharl. Bits in Ciel show this sorry of thing to be possible. You could imagine that's what we see with her in the past during the CIEL_N_PROTECTA section. Also I've finished Phase I, loving hell I forgot how hard the final boss of Ion's Phase is on Hard. Perhaps I'll include some video of the several times I got my poo poo wrecked at some point. Might get Delta/Cass end of the phase out tomorrow. Oh and now that I've finished the phase I can be clear about the flow of the next few updates. We'll have the Delta/Cass end of the phase, then Ion's (which will include some side things like Diving to get Nelico's Friend Skill and some relevant purification talks), and then we'll see how both of their Phase 2's start in the same update. At this point, I'll have a vote to determine whose story we progress in first. I'll probably do all the Dives right at the start as far as actually playing, though, and then intersperse them semi-agnostic to who's plot we're actually in. Feinne fucked around with this message at 06:26 on May 13, 2015 |
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May 13, 2015 05:56
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When I played the game myself at this point I kind of wished they would do a branching story thing where you could have controlled Ion & Earthes instead and beat up Cass & Delta.
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May 13, 2015 06:05
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FrickenMoron posted:When I played the game myself at this point I kind of wished they would do a branching story thing where you could have controlled Ion & Earthes instead and beat up Cass & Delta. Well you can fight this battle as Earthes, you simply need to finish Delta and Cass's episode first and then converge with Earthes. The cutscene afterwards is the same though.
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May 13, 2015 06:51
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It's funny/weird to imagine how that battle actually played out, as both sides frantically dug through their shared inventories.
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May 13, 2015 07:34
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Argas posted:It's funny/weird to imagine how that battle actually played out, as both sides frantically dug through their shared inventories. I imagine halfway through it stopped being about different approaches to the current situation and started being about Delta and Earthes trying to grab the same healing item, continually pulling each other's arms partway through their end of the shared inventory, and arguing which of them it all actually belongs to.
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May 13, 2015 08:38
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Is this some kind of Buddhist thing where eventually the human souls in the planet will be reborn into human bodies, or are they just kind of frozen there forever?
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May 13, 2015 08:58
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Glazius posted:Is this some kind of Buddhist thing where eventually the human souls in the planet will be reborn into human bodies, or are they just kind of frozen there forever? If you're Kanon you envision this to work like the former. Also remember the comedy third option as well, that it might just be an impossible distraction Zill and Nelo have cooked up while they're doing something else.
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May 13, 2015 15:21
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Feinne posted:If you're Kanon you envision this to work like the former. Also remember the comedy third option as well, that it might just be an impossible distraction Zill and Nelo have cooked up while they're doing something else. More like actual third option. Pretty sure I saw life energy being mentioned somewhere in Nelo/Zill's dialogue about Nelo's plan, so it's entirely possible that Nelo wants to convert people to energy to get herself back home.
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May 13, 2015 17:37
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