Ar tonelico II released in US.

[Rmarques]

Still on the NiSA localizations topic, I've just started Atelier Iris 3: Grand Phantasm and would be enjoying it a lot but guess what? Yeah, the dialog is badly written and awkward. Unbearably so.

Heh, I found the dialog in AI3 to be decent. Nothing extraordinary, but not that bad. 
But still it's too bad that localization is still subpar. I really like the game. It gets especially jarring when compared to Soul Nomad's localization which is actually pretty good.

[ForceCube]

Heh, I found the dialog in AI3 to be decent. Nothing extraordinary, but not that bad. 
But still it's too bad that localization is still subpar. I really like the game. It gets especially jarring when compared to Soul Nomad's localization which is actually pretty good.

I didn't get very far into it, so maybe it gets better after a while. But what I saw was pretty underwhelming. It was way, waaaaaay too simple and short compared to Eternal Mana's, and consequently there are a few lines that are delivered so bluntly they're kinda embarassing. And unlike Cless says is the case with AT2, in AI3 the voiced dialogue doesn't suffer from this any less.

I'll give it another spin when I have more free time and patience for a quest-based game (have to be in the mood to enjoy these), but for now I'd rather just keep the memory of the good times I had with the first AI.

[Rmarques]

By the way, anyone playing Ar Tonelico 2, apparently there's a boss that if you fight her for too long, the game freezes (this didn't happen in the Japanese version), at least on the optional fights. Her name is Raki.

And apparently, the glitch is caused by a string that's supposed to appear when she uses a certain attack. Apparently, it's too long and kills the game by buffer overflow.

[Cless]

I was the one behind trying to find a fix for it. But it seems my words of failure are spreading far slower than my initial false alarm. I hyped it before testing it enough. What I had discovered rather, is that the current build of PCSX2 Playground has some kind of issue with savestate loading. For some reason, merely loading from a savestate causes the battle not to freeze where it normally does. Instead it just doesn't display the strings that are supposed to show up and presumably crash the game... I have no explanation for this.

[Rmarques]

That's... Weird.

[Cless]

There. Finally split this stuff from the currently playing thread.

Anyway, I've been so busy with crap that I haven't had much time to even play the game.

Bullet points:

• Translation is TERRIBLE. It's on par with the average SCEA PSX RPG localization. The original game had a mediocre localization, but it was still serviceable enough. This is far worse, and easily NIS America's worst work yet. The only plus is that the English voice acting is decent and the lines written for the VA are actually readable.
• Has a crippling freezing bug that occurs in a mandatory battle and optional battles with the same character. The mandatory battle can be won if you grind enough to beat it in three (sometimes four) or less attack phases. The only known way to beat the optional battles against it is by employing cheat codes that give you an infinite turn or go through a troublesome processes to convert the save to the Japanese version and beating it in Japanese.
• Random, unexplainable freezes apparently happen while in the Cosmosphere. I haven't experienced this myself.
• 65% of the voices were cut from the game, in both the English and Japanese tracks. To add insult to injury, the voices that were kept were seemingly drawn out of a hat. They're placed pretty much arbitrarily... Many important scenes are not voiced, yet numerous minor ones ARE.

I dunno if I can really put into words how disappointed I am with how this turned out. The game, at its core, seems much better than the original. I was looking forward to it as much as a major Tales localization. But the translation is so bad I can hardly take it seriously, and that freeze bug, which I've tried my hand at fixing is impeding my motivation to continue.

I'm writing a long letter to NISA, however much good it may do. They've pretty much lost my respect, and aren't living up to their "we're for the fans," especially when it comes to Gust titles. They put way more effort into their house titles, but Gust stuff gets the shaft for some reason.

I will not be blindly pre-ordering anything else NISA releases from this point forward unless they go out of their way to at least correct the damn freezes. And I used to buy practically everything they made except those terrible Idea Factory games.

I brought this point up elsewhere, and I think it's relevant. Back when NISA released GrimGrimoire, the exclusive RosenQueen soundtrack was incorrectly mastered and would only work in PCs. They fixed it, a mere preorder bonus! One of the IGN guys has been in contact with them but they seem to be sidestepping this issue. Sadly to say, it not looking good that we're going to be getting fixed copies. It's just stupid they can fix a bonus disc, but not the main release, the actual thing the people really bought.

There's a group of fans as dedicated to the Ar tonelico series as we are to the Tales series that would like to retranslate/edit the game's script. I'd like to give them a hand, but hacking the Japanese version may be difficult without ASM hacks, and the US version has those stupid ass bugs that shouldn't be there.

Being a niche game fan is so frustrating sometimes. That said, I'm not buying Mana Khemia 2 or X-Edge unless people say there aren't any problems with them.

[throughhim413]

I guess it's just me, but after AT1, this is pretty much exactly what I was expecting for AT2. NISA really should fix the problem, but I wouldn't be surprised if they didn't. I wonder if that group you're talking about is the same place that didn't care for my AT1 review. Was it these guys, by chance? If so, I was certainly impressed by their passion for the games.

[Rmarques]

There's a patch that fixes the bug for that boss battle. Apparently, the guy is also thinking of doing more fixes for the rest of the bugs.

[Gamesoul Master]

I loved Ar Tonelico (flawed as it might've been, like many of you, I got sucked into it, enough to play it through a couple times for all the endings... lol). Something about niche games that are just so much fun to play.

Ar Tonelico 2... got it on release day, but haven't played it all that much yet (been busy trying to complete other games). I like it so far though. Though they made a few changes that I really don't like so much.

Like, they need to give me back my jump command. Even if there is little use for it, I really got used to jumping everywhere (for no reason really) in the first game, and I still find myself hitting the "jump" button a lot while playing AT2... lol.

Not having a semi-transparent map available while moving around is also a pain (I *hate* having to go to a completely different screen to see the map). I'm quite used to keeping that map up at all times in the first game.

The zones not being more top-down view like the first game is annoying. Seems a bit harder to see things with this different camera view.

And while fighting in the battles, is it just me, or is it really hard to get a perfect guard? I'm quite good with timing, and I *think* you're supposed to hit the button at the very end of the colored segment of the bar, but that sometimes fails too. Not a big deal since it doesn't really make things harder, but I think getting a perfect guard shouldn't have been made quite so difficult. Of course, I could be simply trying the wrong tactic, so I'll play around with that some more the next time I play.

And of course, the points that Cless just brought up are actual *major* concerns with the game that are simply unacceptable (though I try to look past them in games as long as they're tolerable). So the translation thing, I'm used to dealing with. The freezing bug, I'm really hoping I somehow don't come across... XD

[Cless]

Well, I started helping those guys. I don't know what my role is going to be beyond helping them dump/insert the menu stuff, which I should be finished with soon.



But surprise, surprise...there's a lot of disagreement over how the freaking names of everything should be handled *facepalm*. Everyone pretty much universally agrees that AT1 localization continuity should be preserved, but after that, it's a huge mess. So many just want to arbitrarily revert half the name list back to the official Japanese transliterations, purely out of sentimental preference (I guess it's like how we view the ToP main character names...but IMO, a lot of Gust's official transliterations don't look or sound any better than most of the reinterpreted ones.), or just because "That's what Gust called them! And that's all they should ever be called!". I've accepted that there are a few names that would probably best be reverted due to them messing up things that had some real meaning behind them. But other than those, I'd prefer to stick to the US names. I'm not coordinating the project, so I can't force this view on the thing. I've presented my two cents a couple times, but few seem to be buying into it.

Of course, I look at things from a localization angle more than a translation angle these days. Names should be the least of everyone's concern here, IMO...the damn scriptwriting needs to be fixed more than those.