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Ar Tonelico and * nosurge discussion thread

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    • Baughn

    Baughn

    Healing-type writer
    Location
    Dublin
    Translated Material for Ar tonelico
    Translated Material for Surge Concerto
    Game (re)translations
    Language Information
    Fiction
    Here on SV:
    In the harmonious land of ponies:
    The above is woefully incomplete. Please send links.
     
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    • Indeed. Just the translation of Ciel makes it impractical from a costs viewpoint. There's also that the sales for both DX ports were depressingly bad: from what I recall, neither Ciel or Arno got to 30k units sold across all platforms.

    I wanted to say that the licensing troubles could be surmounted since Koei-Tecmo and Bandai-Namco have shown they can collaborate if they feel like doing it, going from Shurelia's inclusion in Arno and the recent Tales of DLC added to one of the Atelier games, but with that sales data...
     
    If/when AI gets advanced enough for it to be able to decompile the PS2/3 games and allow us to recompile them for other platforms, I think so.

    For Ciel, I'm happy to keep working on the translation just as I have thus far, but I'll leave porting it to DX to others, especially after Koei-Tecmo's braindead decision to region-lock the Steam version solely to Japan.
     
    To say something nice about AT3's battle system, I do like how it made the Reyvateil's current Song magic the battle theme, something I'm surprised previous entries didn't do aside from Replekia and a few major bosses (though with AT2 having two Reyvateils, that would've been awkward to implement outside of combined songs... which makes me picture Luca singing a Song in a conflicting key just to spite Cloche)

    I'm wondering just how much standard Music Theory would even apply to Hymmnos Songs (speaking from an in-universe perspective, like out-of-universe EXEC_CHRONICLE KEY's in A Minor I think)? Like the Ar Ciela language has Wave Frequency Band Levels which represent emotions for instance

    Also, I've been rereading Feinne's Let'sPlay of the first game over on the LP Archive, but it sucks now that the videos and audio files for it are no longer available (it was a screenshot LP, so it can still be mostly read at least)
     
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    Well, it had to do with hardware limitations, as they couldn't really do all that they needed for the RAH system in the PS2 due to processing and memory problems, which is why only a prototype of it is used in AT2 when the player activates Replekia, and for the second and third Sublimation movements in the first two phases of the final battle.

    As for music theory, that'd only apply if the Reyvateil is a learned musician herself, as otherwise she makes her songs based on pure instinct, similarly to the difference between learning Hymmnos consciously and just going on the information the server feeds her when she sings.

    As for the LPs, they're a good resource, but... I lost all respect for Feinne after seeing the way he treated Ar nosurge in his LP of it, and how he considers anybody who's taken a liking at Ion.
     
    Baughn said:
    We're going to have to wait until we can have an AI do it, huh?
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    I personally would love AI getting involved in media translation and (for software) porting to other hardware or code types. It'd probably take a lot of the coding bits out of existing translation projects, although I dunno if humans would be removed from the act altogether.

    When stuff is translated, often the translator try to find equivalent stuff in local languages or culture to what the original language says - jokes in particular experience this, as what made a neat pun in Japanese might not work in English, on the wordplay or reference front. Even English to English can experience this, with stuff referencing American culture getting ported to some equiv. for European release - I recall hearing one 'sell my liver to pay off student debt' joke got turned into some equiv 'costs a lot of money' joke in a videogame.

    There's also the non-code portions such as music, art assets, voice clips and so on, which would often get redone or used higher-quality sources to fit the new hardware; often it's made super HQ, then lowered to fit what the game can run well/at all. Although with how Baughn's been showing off AI art design, at least part of this might get taken over by computers too :p
    aquagon said:
    As for the LPs, they're a good resource, but... I lost all respect for Feinne after seeing the way he treated Ar nosurge in his LP of it, and how he considers anybody who's taken a liking at Ion.
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    Is this the same fellow as the fanfic writer? How'd he treat nosurge/Ion?
     
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    Mizu said:
    Is this the same fellow as the fanfic writer? How'd he treat nosurge/Ion?
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    No, it's a different person. But the summary of it is that he started talking wonders about the game when the LP started, but as he got closer to the end, he started saying more and more frequently "what a piece of crap. Why I'm even bothering to play this?" As for Ion, he considers a bitch on the same level as Luca (he despises her too), and basically said that anybody who likes her is a poor loser who couldn't ever get into a relationship with anybody in real life.
     
    aquagon said:
    By the way, I see Hyacinthium has shared in here the fic I've been denouncing all this time.

    Just some warnings about it: the author thinks AT1 is the only good game in the series and that AT2 and AT3 spit on it, and that Ciel nosurge is just a "game that reduces women to being pets and that is only about grooming the player's perfect wife". They also have an absurd hatred toward Metafalss, have an unhealthy obsession about the human pregnancy period and how that interacts with the Reyvateils' life spans, as well as twisting the lore in absurd ways due to refusing to actually understand everything Tsuchiya and company have explained through the Ar Portal and the setting encyclopedias, since the author's notes are mostly spent decrying the canon, calling the developers incompetent and hating everything about the series that isn't AT1.

    The only good thing I can say is that it's decently written and the Lyner/Ayatane pairing is well-constructed, but I hated what they did to Aurica, to Infel Phira, to Infel, to Nenesha, and to Mir in that fic. And their other fics are arguably even worse, featuring stuff like Lyner's mother being a prostitute, the people of Sol Ciel decrying Dive Therapy and saying it's indecent, or Misha throwing her D-Cellophane into the Sea of Death.
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    Yeah. Finally checked out the rest of their stuff during work today and my eyebrows went way up. It seems like their stranger fic ideas and similar never actually changed past the NGE era ones I remember. The dive therapy section was honestly bizarre.

    Edit: There was also a fic where the author note reveals some real bio essentiaist bullshit about men's capacity for love being inherently sexual, so that's a trashfire. o_O
     
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    aquagon said:
    As for Ion, he considers a bitch on the same level as Luca (he despises her too), and basically said that anybody who likes her is a poor loser who couldn't ever get into a relationship with anybody in real life.
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    How unfortunate. I really like Luca as a character, too, both in design and personality.
     
    TimeToDisco(34)_0.png Well. In hopes of changing the conversation a little... here's another picture I thought was nice. This one made with Disco-Diffusion v5. AI is moving rather quickly. Not fast enough that we're likely to see games ported using AI during the next ten years, as that probably requires human-level intelligence which still seems some distance off, but-

    There's been a lot of people saying <skill X> requires human-level intelligence. There's also been a lot of cases of that being wrong, such as the painting above. Unfortunately I doubt they'll be as friendly and controllable as SF fans tend to assume, but at least we're living in interesting times, yeah? And there's a lot of fringe benefits to be had on the way there.
     
    I do respect AT2 having a character like Luca, as I feel your average Dating Sim (or partial Dating Sim in AT's case) would've either seen her as too risky to include, or simplified her to a stock Yandere. Like imagine hw people would react if someone like Luca showed up in a Persona game

    But honestly, while there are a whole bunch of characters I don't like in fiction, I wouldn't think to call anyone a loser for liking them (unless maybe I was in a really bad mood I guess). I might be skeptical of some of their defences for them, but I'd probably just nod and move along

    Yeah, moving along, I'd also say when it comes to getting an AI to generate art, Ar Tonelico may be one of the more appropriate series to do that for
     
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    The advances in art generation algorithms are truly astounding, to say the least. Though I wonder how long it'll before we start seeing them in other fields, since from what I've been reading, most research is focusing on practical applications like say, in chemistry to find new compounds.
     
    aquagon said:
    The advances in art generation algorithms are truly astounding, to say the least. Though I wonder how long it'll before we start seeing them in other fields, since from what I've been reading, most research is focusing on practical applications like say, in chemistry to find new compounds.
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    Two days ago I started using an AI to assist me with programming the AI art generator you just saw the output of. That assistance is helping quite a lot, actually; I'd say it's doubled my coding speed, and Copilot is still at the prototype stage.

    At work, my job is helping a different AI filter through search results so you'll get things other than spam. That, too, is working rather well — though search is very much a red queen's race. I managed to finagle myself into deploying AIs to prod for a day job, yeah.

    All of these developments have arrived rather suddenly. AI has a habit of going from barely-usable to superhuman, for any given skill, in 2 to 3 years at most.

    Take that as you may.
     
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    And before I forget, here's the translated column I mentioned on one of my previous posts, the one about what served as the inspiration for Phantasmagoria: ARM Backup/Ar Portal translation/Hymmne Chronicle/Issue 7

    It also was supposed to have some voiced messages from Noriko Mitose about the song, but sadly they weren't in my archives of the Ar Portal and I haven't been able to find them, so we can assume they're lost forever...

    There's also another project I did during last year that I wanted to share, and while it's lacking screenshots for pretty much all texts, it's a series of translations for the conlang phrases found in every single dialog, graphic and video across all five games: Constructed Language Translations
     
    aquagon said:
    most research is focusing on practical applications like say, in chemistry to find new compounds.
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    I recently read about such an AI for chemistry, yeah. If I remember correctly it helped identify possible chemical materials more quickly. So they are indeed showing up in a lot of fields lately.

    Still not good enough to translate the series for cheap yet though... I think, unless something happened recently in the field. But that would be the most realistic near term option I'd think. AI language translation to massive drop translation costs.
     
    Rewatching some dubbed scenes from AT1, it's kinda weird how Bourd of all characters is one of the best voice-acted. Radolf's kinda iffy, I guess I keep picturing him with a deeper voice, and Jack sounds less 'cool drifter' and more 'dork trying to sound like a cool drifter' (though that could be intentional), though him sharing a VA with Shinji is never not going to be funny

    I'm also trying to picture how the AT world would interact with other mind-diving series. There are quite a few points of overlap with Reyvateils and Persona-Users (mainly P1&2 where they could use multiple but not all Personae) for instance, what with Personae/Mind-Constructs and Cosmosphere being like S. Links fused with the Collective Unconsciousness, and some Persona-Users are even artificial, singers, or coders. Granted, there's obvious differences too, like the average Persona-User is fully human and doesn't live on a sky tower. The Phantom Thieves would look a little more questionable though, given the whole 'entering someone's mind non-consensually' thing would look to Ar Ciel

    Speaking of which, have to wonder how Ar Ciel would treat Inception's mind-thieves (forget their exact name), given they also enter people's minds without consent to steal ideas (which in AT would be easy to equate with Song Magic), but also do so with regular humans? There'd have to be a 'We need to go deeper' joke either way

    Ar Tonelico and Psychonauts... ooh boy, and people think Ar Tonelico's weird
     
    Had a weird idea of a Haruhi Suzumiya Fanfic that arose purely from the fact that Kyon can be easily be inserted into Ionasal to become Kyonasal

    Kyon is Nay's son and ends up stuck in Japan and going to North High...only to have what to him clearly looks like a descended Will with eccentric behavior be interested in him. At which point theres a catch: The rest of the Brigade all had reasons to hide who they were and not tell Haruhi what she is. Kyon however sees Haruhi just happen to choose a room with a information-based life-form in it for the Brigade and drags in what his clearly one her chosen. He immediately suspects Mikuru as a Time Traveler due to the list only missing them.

    And then he decides to derail everyone but Mikuru's plans: Kyon asks how she figured out what he was. This results in a short argument where Haruhi insists she has no clue what Kyon is going on about, disbelieving Kyon's claims about his origins...right up to the point he pulls out song magic(because Sharl) to create a tiny light show in the room. This makes Haruhi realize Kyon wasnt lying about being a Slider...and also makes Kyon realize Haruhi didn't actually know. At this point, Kyon proceeds to then point out what caught his interest in her originally as payment for his being a bit if an unintentional jerk...plus spilling the beans on the others.

    This makes Haruhi trust Kyon a LOT because well...Kyon basically tells her exactly what is going on as far as he can tell. It also means she finds out about him going and becoming John Smith the day after that whole event ends. And a LOT of teasing of Kyon, Yuki, Asahina, and Mikuru over Kyon and Mikuru sleeping together at Asahina and Yuki's place.
     
    Aren't there problems with Haruhi realising the supernatural exists? I vaguely recall she's a local deity or something and has to remain unaware of that stuff lest reality 404?
     
    A semi-demi-serious comparison I made between the AT2 Reyvateils and the Danganronpa Rivals on Discord:

    Cloche - Byakuya
    Luca - Nagito
    Jakuri - Kokichi
     
    Mizu said:
    Aren't there problems with Haruhi realising the supernatural exists? I vaguely recall she's a local deity or something and has to remain unaware of that stuff lest reality 404?
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    The main issues is she is an extremely excitable young teenage girl with a very eccentric personality...and has basically divine powers she has not learned to control and no one knows even remotely a way to help her learn to control them...at least, no one willing to actually teach here. But to someone using song magic, Haruhi might appear to be an descended Will who forgot about it. So they would basically point out that she is using a very strong and dangeroous power....and they have experience using it on a weaker scale.

    Now, this doesnt have to be true, just that Haruhi believes it is likely. But Well, if Koizumi tells her what the Espers believe, that she is either a Kami or God? Wills are in many ways analagous to Kami, so this just reinforces that belief that the Song Mage is right. Yuki pointing out that it appears that her powers work by information manipulation? Well, the song mage would basically see no difference between what Yuki was doing and themselves, just different languages. And if Haruhi uses that method to do things? Thats sounding more like a Will. So everyone would reinforce the idea that Haruhi is a Will and that she needs training to master that ability.
     
    Daedwartin said:
    Well, the song mage would basically see no difference between what Yuki was doing and themselves, just different languages.
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    Without commenting on the rest of this-

    To expand on what you said, Ciel / Ar nosurge's ClassDrive "spells" are essentially the exact same thing Yuki was doing. Not quite down to the syntax, but I don't imagine Yuki would take more than a few hours to learn how to use it.

    EXSPHERE_NOSURGE serves as a fine demonstration.
     
    Baughn said:
    Without commenting on the rest of this-

    To expand on what you said, Ciel / Ar nosurge's ClassDrive "spells" are essentially the exact same thing Yuki was doing. Not quite down to the syntax, but I don't imagine Yuki would take more than a few hours to learn how to use it.

    EXSPHERE_NOSURGE serves as a fine demonstration.
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    What would be of interest I think is that what Yuki is saying is literally just SQL reversed...which would beg the question of WHY it comes out as that. Was humanity subtly pushed that direction when creating programming languages, is humanity just hearing something that makes sense to their ears, or did her masters just make it so her syntax is basically just SQL?
     
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    I've been thinking, when it comes to fanfics and hypothetical future games, of how would you get around the problem the series has of non-MC Vanguard characters getting way less development than the MC and the Reyvateils (not sure if Cocona counts as an exception or not)? AT3 tried to solve this by keeping Vanguards to a minimum, AnS more so, compared to 1 and 2 both having five, but I'd like to think about how to do this while keeping a five Vanguard party.
    My thoughts were maybe giving them 'Character Quests' like Tales of Legendia did, character-specific sidequest chains culminating in a boss fight. For my fic Elegy of Sacrifice (working title) though, since it's a death game, having one of the Vanguards be an enemy in the game who who's currently in alliance with the lead at this stage in the game would be another way to put focus on them

    Also on Elegy of Sacrifice, and a less serious question, I was planning to use this pics as references for the main characters and I wanted people's feedback on if they looked Ar Tonelico-y enough, or how they could look more AT-y (pretty sure Zerochan's safe to link to)?
    Trans-girl Vanguard
    Trans-male Reyvateil
    Rival Vanguard
    Rival Reyvateil
     
    AT3 also employed a couple other solutions beyond reducing the number of vanguards: it also gave dedicated events to the vanguards interacting with the secondary cast (like the conversation between Cocona and Mute about Loude, or Richa and Gojo talking about Archia and leading into Gojo's reunion with the remnants of his younger sister's Cosmosphere), and making party-wide talk topics, so these are also ideas.
     
    About my AT Quest, I was wondering if Elegy of Sacrifice or March of Sacrifice would be the better title? Elegy is a more impactful and mood-setting word, but 'March' can have multiple layers of meaning, like 'War March', 'Death March', and 'Funeral March', all of which fit the story about a Tournament to the Death

    I was originally gonna use the Hymmnos word for Sacrifice, Sarrifis (there's also Tasyue, but that's a more specific dialect), but I think I'll stick with Sacrifice to get the meaning across quicker, especially to series newcomers

    Also had a thought that if we ever do get a PC port of AT2 (not likely anytime soon, but still), then we could really use a Vanguard Cloche mod
     
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