Ranked #2976

Ar Tonelico

Note: I'm using the characters' names from the American video game in this review, since they are, in my opinion, more accurate and better translated.

This anime was only, I hope, created for promotional reasons. It's an introduction to the world of the PS2 RPG that goes by the same name. I liked the game and played it before watching this, therefore I fully realized the incoherence of the story and the plain mediocrity of this one episode OVA.

Ar Tonelico is a massive tower, reaching from the bottomless depths below the continent known as the Wings of Horus up into the skies high above. Lyner Barsett is out on a mission in his airship, but the electromagnetical disturbances around the tower, known as the Blastline, causes the machinery to go haywire and he crashes on the Wings of Horus, a world previously unknown to him.

Soon he encounters the Reyvateil (a female capable of crafting songs and use them like magic) Aurica Nestmile and together they visit various areas of the world, ultimately trying to fix Lyner's airship so that he can go back to where he came from. After about ten minutes, someone pressed the fast forward button, and suddenly Aurica had fallen in love with Lyner and they were, together with the mechanic Krushe, riding in the airship towards the top of the tower. Tossing in scenes from the latter half of the game randomly isn't a very clever thing to do, honestly.

You don't really get any information at all about the characters' backgrunds, feelings et cetera. So if you don't know their personalities from playing the game, you will probably find them, simply put, uninteresting and boring.

Sure, the aesthetics are fair and the music as well, but it doesn't save Ar Tonelico from being a choice of scenes from a video game rather than a real anime. It's purpose - to make people buy the game - fails as well, because of the dumb execution. If correctly made, it would contain more thourough character introduction, be a bit longer and above all have a coherent storyline, preferrably consisting of the first maybe 40 minutes of the game.

If I hadn't played the game before watching this, I would have thought it was bad instead of just mediocre. The anime adaption of Ar Tonelico is nothing but a badly made commercial, honestly. read more