Video Game / Ar tonelico: Melody of Elemia

Left to right: Misha, Aurica, Lyner

The first game in the EXA_PICO collection of games and the Ar tonelico trilogy, Ar tonelico: Melody of Elemia, originally titled Ar tonelico: Sekai no Owari de Utaitsudzukeru Shoujo (The Girl who Continues to Sing at the End of the World) takes place in and around the first tower, in the region of Sol Ciel. This is where the series gets its name: Ar tonelico is the name of that tower. The story starts in the city of Platina, during an outbreak of enemy creatures called Viruses. The protagonist, a Knight of Elemia named Lyner Barsett, goes to investigate with fellow knight Ayatane, and the tower administrator, Shurelia. Unfortunately, they rapidly discover that the Viruses are able to turn intangible, rendering normal defeat impossible. Shurelia therefore sends Lyner on a quest for the only thing that can help them: the Hymn Crystal Purger. Taking an airship, he travels down to the Wings of Horus, the Floating Continent that surrounds the tower. More accurately, he crashes thanks to an attack from a dragon, which complicates matters extremely.

In the process of searching for the crystal and a way to repair his airship, he meets and teams up with a number of people, including two Reyvateils. First is the shy Aurica, who healed his injuries after his crash. Second is the more outspoken Misha, actually his Forgotten Childhood Friend. But there's one problem - Misha looks much younger than she should be. Aside from those two are the wanderer Jack, the local church knight Radolf, and the airship grathmelder Krusche. As the story progresses, Lyner and his comrades not only try to find the Hymn Crystal and fix Lyner's airship, but discover the reason for Misha's youthful appearance, and the source of the recent Virus outbreak.

The first game also has a single-episode OVA adaptation, which focuses on Lyner's crash and desire to return to Platina. Due to time constraints, the details of the plot are largely condensed and simplified, with other elements left out entirely.

Tropes about the sequel, Ar tonelico II: Melody of Metafalica can be found on its page.

Ditto for Ar tonelico Qoga: Knell of Ar Ciel.

Ciel nosurge, the first game in the Surge Concerto prequel series, has its own page too.

All the games have a number of drama CDs devoted to the heroine Reyvateils (and some other people besides). Some of the cast went on to have parts in the crossover game Cross Edge. There also exists a manga, set in Sol Ciel, titled Ar tonelico: Arpeggio.

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Tropes specific to Ar Tonelico: Melody of Elemia:

• Action Initiative: The games' main mechanic is that your back row is composed of a Glass Cannon Squishy Wizard that dies really easily, your front row is not and has to protect her. In exchange, while the rest of the party members have to follow a turn order, you can interrupt the action at any time to have your Squishy Wizard cast spells.
• Amplifier Artifact: Grathnode crystals increase a Reyvateil's power at the cost of great pain and allowing the Tower's energy to cause her more harm than normal, as it throws off the limiter for how much energy they can handle.
• Apocalypse How: Centuries ago, after a catastrophe the surface became uninhabitable and only three towers were left standing above the surface to sustain the human race. Four hundred years ago, a war devastated the first tower and one of the levitation engines supporting the floating continent around it was destroyed, causing nearly half of the land around the tower to fall in to the Sea of Death. In the present, Mir threatens to wipe out humanity in order to bring about her paradise for reyvateils, even at one point attempting to drop the remainder of the land by destroying the other engine.
• Artificial Human: Beta and Origin Reyvateils, unlike the third generation reyvateils, aren't replaced through normal means but rather built. As a result, in this game there's basically only the Origin Shurelia and Beta type Misha and Mir, though of a different category, though setting information reveals a few of Misha's predecessors are still alive in Platina, even if they are never encountered in the game proper.
• Artificial Limbs: Jack has a mechanical arm. With a gatling gun. Which side it's on switches depending on which way he's facing.
• Awesome, but Impractical: Lyner's final creation, the "Ar tonelico?" is a miniaturized version of the Tower in which the characters live. It is meant to be used as a hand grenade. The typical gamer reaction is to expect it to be a regular Slap On The Wrist Nuke. Unfortunately, the game decides to turn logical on you all of a sudden, and using your pocket WMD results in exactly what the description suggests should happen: you get an Ar tonelico Song Magic blasting the whole battlefield, enemies and allies alike. Thus, Death By Genre Savvy for the player unless they have high enough stats to survive the blast.
• Barrier Maiden: Misha and the rest of the Lune Clan were created to seal the source of the viruses by spending a good part of their lives singing Chronicle Key.
• Berserk Button: Lyner seems to take particular offense to Reyvateils being abused, but when Krusche points out how he seems to be particularly nice to them he seems confused, which may indicate that he's reacting to them being treated as subhuman, which is a common attitude in the lower world.
• Big Bad: Mir, the "Mother Virus". All of the game's conflict begins and ends with her.
• Big Good: Shurelia, the tower administrator. She is Lyner's boss and his inspiration.
• Bittersweet Ending: The normal ending where you choose to never awaken Shurelia after she sings Suspend. The villain is sealed, the world is saved and the hero lives happily ever after with one of his love interests, except that Shurelia is effectively dead and song magic doesn't work anymore. At least, it's bittersweet if taken on its own: the ending gets much worse when you consider the plot of the game's sequels. Permanently sealing Mir and leaving down the First Tower in suspended mode would directly cause the collapse of the whole Second Tower, and indirectly The End of the World as We Know It.
• Brainwashed and Crazy: Happens to either Aurica or Misha, depending on who you chose to sing Purger, when Mir invades their Cosmosphere. They recover when the party Dives in to save them with Shurelia's assistance.
• Break the Cutie: Poor Mir; created without emotions but developed them anyway only to be abused. Her first song, Harmonium, is called trash, and she's sealed away for trying to improve the lot of Reyvateils.
• Broken Aesop: At one point Lyner defends Claire from two guys trying to harass her out of her job by beating the muscular one up. Claire is a bit unhappy, telling him that he shouldn't have solved it with violence. Later on Lyner learns the lesson that "violence is bad", and continues using his sword against his enemies. This is justified by the ending. Killing anything in one's way without thinking, as Lyner did earlier, nets you the Bad Ending because while the threat is averted the conditions that led to it still exist. The Good Ending doesn't require Sheathe Your Sword but a certain understanding and mercy.
• Bullying a Dragon: Mir's treatment during the Second Age; one does not abuse a pureblooded Reyvateils with power at the same scale as the Origins. Eventually she had enough.
  • Bigoted humans treatment of Reyvateils in general. These are a race that can magically nuke entire battlefields just for a start simply by singing and yet there's still plenty of humans who go out of their way to antagonize them and treat them like slaves for giggles. Luckily for them the Reyvateils are far too submissive to do anything about it... most of the time.
• Bunny-Ears Lawyer: Shurelia, the administrator of the titular Babylonian tower, has No Sense of Direction, is a Cute Clumsy Girl and she likes bunnies.
• Captain Crash: While Lyner isn't really at fault for what happened at the start of the game, a special mention should be made about his OVA incarnation. He crashes the same ship three times, on the same day.
• Cat Girl: Hama is a tiny cat eared girl representing an ocarina Lyner gave to Misha years ago. She considers Lyner her father as a result and he gives Misha another ocarina later to bring her back following a Cosmosphere event where she 'died.'
• Chainsaw Good: Krusche uses one.
• Costume Porn: Each Revyateil has eight costumes, unlocked by diving into their Cosmospheres.
• Church Militant: That's some spear you got there, Radolf. "It's God's wrath!" Bishop Falss intended to use the Church as a military group to invade Platina, which he does.
• Cliffhanger: All of the "episodes" in Shurelia's Cosmosphere involve this except for the last one.
• Combat Stilettos: Shurelia's Linkage costume takes the cake (granted, she avoids the practical problems by floating everywhere in it...) Misha's default costume and a few others have impractically tall shoes, too. Then again, this is a moot point because the Reyvateils don't actually DO any fighting aside from standing and singing magic.
• Compressed Adaptation: The OVA cuts out a ton of the plot. Even Misha only appears briefly. Granted, for a game so long and involved, it's impossible to pack everything in there without turning it into a long series.
• Cute Clumsy Girl: Due to some flaws in her design, Shurelia will occasionally lose her balance when she fires off a spell, falling flat on her face.
• Defeat Means Friendship: In the true ending, Lyner first convinces Ayatane that he wishes to help and forgive Mir, then together they go and face her, defeating her without killing her and then offering her mercy. As a result she accepts Lyner's good intentions and reforms, after which she disappears until the next game, reappearing briefly to play around with Lyner, Aurica, Misha, Shurelia and a few other people in Binary Field scenarios they make together in the Drama CDs.
• Developer's Foresight: The game has two separate versions for nearly all Phase 3 events depending on if Misha is in child or adult form at the time from the moment switching it is available.
• Distressed Damsel: Every Reyvateil in your party is lost or in need of rescue at various points either because they've been possessed or captured.
• The Dog Bites Back: Bourd is a man who considers Reyvateil as expendable weapons and whose subordinates constantly abuse and berate them. He thought it was a good idea to use a strong Reyvateil that he recently kidnapped as backup in a fight against her love interest. For extra irony points he did it to make sure Lyner felt the bitter sting of Misha betraying him. She blasts him off a cliff, though he lives through it.
• Double Entendre: This scene where Lyner installs for Aurica. That's among many others.
• Dual Age Modes: Misha can change between her child and adult form by adding/removing her D-Cellophane.
• Early-Installment Weirdness: Shurelia's endings aren't really "endings" as much as they're just alternate versions of Misha's and Aurica's where Lyner decides to stay behind with her instead of going off with his new girlfriend. Later games would give the Third-Option Love Interests proper route conditions and their own endings.
  • Routes are determined by a certain important story choice at the beginning of Phase 2, but in either you can go all the way into the Cosmospheres of both Misha and Aurica, including the very romantically-tinted final levels where they show up in wedding dresses. Ultimately the story will default to pairing Lyner with the girl associated with the route, but it can give quite the feeling of two-timing them. Later games would wise up and tie the romantic endings directly to Cosmosphere progression, locking the player out of the other Cosmospheres once the player had made significant progress in one and obligating the protagonist to romantically commit to one girl at most.
• Evil Plan: Three villains acting more like convenient allies than a single group means there are three of these.
  • Mir wants to wipe out humanity to create a world just for Reyvateils because she believes that Humans Are the Real Monsters.
  • Bourd wants to continue the kind of research that's based on the 'Reyvateils are replaceable dolls' idea and believes Mir to be its greatest fruit.
  • Bishop Falss, AKA Kyle Clancy wants to resurrect Mir and take over Platina as the first step to taking over the world and returning it to the prosperity of the first age.
• Facial Markings: Ayatane who is a Virus.
• Faking the Dead: Bishop Falss, then known by his real name Kyle Clancy, faked suicide in order to flee Platina.
• Forgotten Childhood Friend: Lyner, how in the hell did you forget Misha? Would be justified since they were pretty young when they separated, never communicated again, and Lyner never heard of Misha until the start of the game. Except the same applies to Misha and she didn't forget. Lyner finally remembers after he gets the part needed for the ship. Misha doesn't hold it against him since he's been subsonsciously fulfilling his promise to her. As far as Misha is concerned, it's all good.

• Genius Ditz: Lyner is definitely Book Dumb because he is repeatedly harassed about it throughout the game. He also mastered the basics of Grathmelding in less than a day and became the main source of everything the party uses throughout the game. By the third phase, the stuff he cooks up rivals or surpasses First Era technology, he is teaching Grathmelding to the one who created its basic principles centuries ago and his magnum opus is a pocket-sized version of the whole Tower they live in.
• Girlish Pigtails: Young Misha to highlight her childishness.
• Giver of Lame Names: Aurica. Don't ask her to explain her reasoning; it only makes the names sound even worse.
• Good Shepherd: One of Radolf's first lines is reminding those under his command to take care of their Reyvateil partners and his second appearance is coming to the defense of a Tenba Reyvateil being abused by her partner. At all times he's polite and helpful.
• Godiva Hair: Mir is naked and so her hair fills in.
• Goggles Do Nothing: Krusche wears them and never uses them.
• Gratuitous Ninja: Misha's shinobi costume. There's a giant kunai.
• Heel–Face Turn: Ayatane and his mother Mir/Jakuri. Both of them are villains in the first game but join Lyner's circle of friends by the end.
• Hidden Elf Village: The Teru tribe would like to be this and Platina plays it straight until the end of the game.
• High-Altitude Battle: The first game features a battle with a giant dragon while riding an airship. But then, all three games are based on floating continents (and/or a massive tower) due to the Sea of Death covering the world.
• Hollywood Exorcism: When Purger is sung by Misha, it comes across more as a shinto cleansing ritual, purging the evils of the tower via pleas to the eight million gods and references to ceremonial miko dances. In actual effect, it does render viruses vulnerable to purging, though despite the lyrics viruses are not, strictly speaking, actually evil. Aurica's version of the song is quite different, however, in both tone and religious basis.
• Homemade Inventions: As mentioned above, Lyner is the party's only real source of equipment, regardless of variety or technological complexity. Everything, including a pocket-version of the Tower built by ancient superadvanced technology that powers more than a third of the remaining civilization in the planet, is built by him, in a tent, from scraps.
• Hopeless Boss Fight: The first battle against Bourd. Interestingly, if the player is leveled enough they can easily knock his HP down to zero, but Bourd will keep fighting anyway.
• Humans Are the Real Monsters:
  • Elemia, has plenty of characters, especially in Tenba, who treat Reyvateils as easily replaceable property. When one can't get his Reyvateil partner to sing new magic because his physical abuse doesn't grant her any more Power of Trust to make new songs, his teammate suggests getting a new one. Bourd's death brings this policy to an end because he'd only gotten away with it to that point thanks to the president's negligence rather than her malice.
  • This is the reason for Mir's Kill All Humans and why her listed dislikes are humans. She gets over it thanks to Lyner who ironically is the only human that she still hates because he ruined her script.
• Hypocrite: Mir's plans to exterminate all humanity to create a Reyvateil only world would be the actions of a Well-Intentioned Extremist if her methods to do so wouldn't kill all the Reyvateils along with them in the process. Shurelia calls her out on this.
• Interspecies Romance: Human/Reyvateil relationships are commonplace and, in fact, there wouldn't be any third generation reyvateils in the first place if there weren't. Near the end of the game, the human Krusche and Teru Jack appear to be a thing. Hybrids of Teru and humans are shown in the second game.
• In the Name of the Moon: Shurelia's transformation in her Binary Field have her spouting lines that made Lyner blush.
• Item Crafting: Grathmelding is an ancient art invented by Shurelia to replace other dangerous technologies. Why certain combinations of items make completely unrelated items is a mystery to many.
• Kill All Humans: Mir's goal is to destroy the human race and make a paradise for reyvateils.
• Lady of War: When Shurelia joins combat she is both powerful and precise. Then she sings EXEC_SUSPEND/. and finally reveals what she looks like under that armor. When she eventually joins the party, she also begins to act more like her apparent age because taking off Linkage basically reactivates her emotions. Her dignity doesn't survive the process.
• The Leader
  • Leard is the governor of Platina and his conflict with Lyner is based on him wanting his son to succeed him when Lyner doesn't want to.
  • Over the course of the game, Lyner becomes this for his group. There is a point in the game where Lyner realizes that he has become the highest authority in Platina because Shurelia has been hacked by Mir and used by her to abduct Leard. Radolf discusses with Aurica that he isn't used to giving orders instead of taking them.
• Long Hair Is Feminine: There are four playable female characters in this game and the only one with short hair is the tomboy mechanic and she had long hair pre-series when she was still a Girly Girl.
• Love Hurts: Lyner can get killed in the Cosmospheres, or kidnapped, or brainwashed. Yes, loving a Reyvateil can be painful.
• The Magic Goes Away: During Elemia, the tower administrator Shurelia sings the hymn EXEC_SUSPEND/. and shuts down the magic-generating systems of Ar tonelico, putting herself and the antagonist into a coma and rendering all other Reyvateils near-powerless. Depending on the player's actions, the game may end at this point. If a player chooses to continue the game than the Tower starts up and The Magic Comes Back.
• Magical Girl:
  • One of Misha costumes is pink, frilly magical girl cosplay. She attracts creepy fans and wants to stop wearing it.
  • Shurelia is one in her Binary Field with all the trappings-In the Name of the Moon, transformation sequence, Power of Love etc.
• Mayfly–December Romance: Shurelia, the third potential love interest, is the immortal tower administrator while Lyner is a human who will die of old age within a century at most. For a lesser example, Misha will also probably live about twice as long as Lyner, who will in turn live about twice as long as Aurica.
• Meido: One of Shurelia's costumes in her cosmosphere is a maid waitress outfit from her part time job.
• Miko: One of Aurica's costumes is a miko outfit, however, she dislikes it because she feels that with her more European appearance it doesn't suit her the way it would Misha. Lyner's disagreement with her is pretty token, so he might agree.
• The Mole: Bishop Falss and Ayatane; the former infiltrated the Church and the later Platina
• Momma's Boy: Ayatane. Everything he does is for his mother's sake (i.e Mir's), for better or worse
• Mineral MacGuffin: Lyner searches for Hymn Crystals to save the world. This includes Purger, Chronicle Key and Re: Nation.
• Moral Event Horizon: In-Universe, Jack declares that Bourd had crossed this after finding more about his research in Phase 3 by declaring, "Even if I'd killed him 100 times, it still wouldn't be enough."
• More Friends, More Benefits: Diving past about level three in a Cosmosphere is very rare and requires a great deal of commitment, but Lyner can completely finish Misha and Aurica's, which end with symbolic weddings even if he can only end up in a relationship with one of them or possibly neither! In the sequels, you can't progress this far in a Cosmosphere without a real commitment, generally keeping the player from completing the other Cosmospsheres in that playthrough.
• Multiple Endings: Each heroine has a few endings depending on when you end the game and which version of act two you play. There are also other endings such as facing the final boss before you understand her or allowing her to stay sealed, which can both be considered bad endings.
• Musical Theme Naming:
  • Harmonica and Flute are Teru Tribe Members.
  • Everything involving the technology. "Silver Horn," "Plasma Bell," "Symphonic Corridor". Justified in that it's Magic Music From Technology.
• Music Soothes the Savage Beast: Both variations of Harmonious have soothing effects by design.
• Never a Self-Made Woman: Krusche says she got into engineering to be closer to her boyfriend, Luke. However it's downplayed to the point that it might as well not exist. 1.) Luke is mentioned three times and one of them is in a bonus area. 2.) She was already "grathmelding missiles for fun" before she met him.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: Lyner, nice job forcing Shurelia to wake up and thereby waking Mir up. She herself calls him on it. She's happy he did it but says it was the wrong decision.
• No Sense of Direction: Shurelia finds herself lost easily in her own tower because she wasn't programmed with a map of the tower. Outside it she's just as bad.
• One-Winged Angel: Shadow Mir. They're just Mir's viruses/servants that she can summon. She can summon them as song magic in Metafalica.
• Only Known by Their Nickname: All There in the Manual Shurelia. See Replacement Goldfish
• Organic Technology: Reyvateils. The Origins in particular, during high-level grathmelding, Shurelia will make comments about some of them. In one case, she'll comment about one product being "her brain."
• Person of Mass Destruction: Centuries ago, Mir plunged the tower into a civil war that nearly sank the entire structure into the sea of death by destroying one of the engines keeping it aloft. In terms of personal strength and speed, she's stronger and faster than even the reyvateil Origins, who are considered to be goddesses by the human populace.
• Punny Name: You should be suspicious if your Bishop is named 'false'.
• Power Perversion Potential:
  • Misha's "ability" to go from a pre- and post-prepubescent ages by adding/removing the Chronicle Key.
  • Everything about the Binary Field. It allows you to insert yourself into any story setting and do anything.
• Random Encounters: The monster and viruses Lyner encounters appear out of nowhere.
• Really 700 Years Old: Shurelia (Eoria), Frelia, and Tyria are the Origin Reyvateils, and are as old as the towers they administrate, though they look like teenage girls. Mir is also coming up on her four hundredth birthday - her life presumably extended by being locked in the Binary Field for a few of those centuries. She looks maybe fourteen.
• Red Eyes, Take Warning: Mir's true form has bright red eyes.
• Red String of Fate: Lyner can craft a red string to boost relationship strength (read: dive points) and seems to get that it's meant to be attached between two people. However, nobody in the present actually has any idea what it means apart from Shurelia, who is centuries older than everyone else. Lyner's ignorance to its meaning embarrassed Shurelia. His suggestion to use it to enhance Radolf and his "unity" freaked her out.
• Refining Resources: Some grathmelding recipes involve a number of stages, particularly the airship parts. Fortunately, you can select the final item in the production chain, and the game will automatically walk you through the production of any intermediate items you don't currently have.
• Retired Badass
  • Ayano used to be an adventurer but now she's content to run Tenba. She gives her old sword to Lyner.
  • Claire is a reyvatail who retired from singing spells, and she was considered a Class-B during the time she worked for Tenba. This is expanded upon in her Hymmnos Musical, and it also gives the reason why she stopped singing Song Magic.
• Replacement Goldfish: Shurelia was seen as one man's substitute daughter after his real one died, which bothered her for awhile but she eventually embraced to the point where she doesn't even use her real name anymore.
• Robot Girl: Mei Mei and Kanade are more obviously robot than the Origin/Beta Reyvateils, which are more organic in nature even if they're also artificial.
• Saintly Church: The Church of the Trio of Elemia. They are introduced as such and are consistently helpful through the game. There was a period where they attacked Platina and tried to raise Mir, but only because Falss mislead them into thinking they were calling The Trio.
• Serious Business:
  • Lyner's love for Funbun may equal his love for this world.
  • Mir takes the scripts that she writes a little bit too seriously. She can forgive humanity for all the pain they caused to her and Reyvateils in general but not Lyner's sin of ruining her script.
• She Cleans Up Nicely: Krusche has this opinion of herself: "If I wore a dress, your (Lyner's) ass would be knocked out." However, she never changes out of her engineer clothes.
• Short Tank: Krusche, although she doesn't get much sexual tension due to not being a Reyvateil, and hence, not a romantic option. (Something she lightly pouts about at one point, asking if Lyner'd be in love with her if she were a Reyvateil. She gets paired with Jack/Harmonica.)
• Shout-Out: The end of Misha's and Aurica's Cosmospheres are from different games.
• Shrinking Violet: Aurica is shy and lacking in self-confidence. This hinders her song magic and so she hasn't been assigned a partner before Lyner.
• Sinister Minister: Bishop Falss inspires the Church to invade Platina and raise Mir.
• Smug Snake: The majority of the villains and thus making it all the more fun to slap them around. Bishop Falss and Bourd Rade from the first game are egregious examples because they hoisted by their own petard.
• Stocking Filler: Older Misha's standard and shinobi costumes include stockings.
• Stripperific: Misha, Claire, Shurelia, Krusche, the president of Tenba... easily two-thirds or more of the female cast of the first game is dressed quite provocatively, with Aurica being the only one who's somewhat modestly dressed... and the player has the option of making her fight in nothing but a towel.
• Stupid Evil: Bourd and his cronies actively treat their Revyatails like garbage, are even physically abusive with them, and dispose of them when they no longer can make use of song magic. This would be bad enough on it's own, but Revyatails' song magic runs of the Power of Trust and everyone is well aware of that fact, which makes what these people do not only evil but extremely counterproductive. Bourd and his boys seem to do these things solely to Kick the Dog as much as they can.
• Stylistic Suck: Shurelia's "cosmosphere" is a story instead of delving into her psyche since she does not actually have a cosmosphere. In it, Lyner and Shurelia go through a cliche magical girl story with a completely different tone from the rest of the story. The parody nature becomes even more obvious in the second game, which has several similar events.
• Take a Third Option: The true endings to all three games in the trilogy are fueled by this. The first one, for instance, is neither killing Mir nor allowing her to succeed but striking a balance.
• Their First Time: Misha and Lyner react to their first dive with shyness, awkwardness, and Misha saying it's her first time. Diving is not sex but the level of intimacy is the same.
• Title Drop: Many of the hymns sung in the games say their title near the beginning or the end. Example, Chronicle Key and Implanta say their names within the first line of singing, and Sublimation says it's own in the chorus.
• Token Mini-Moe: Misha in Elemia until she gets her adult form back because she looks like a young child with Girlish Pigtails.
• Trademark Favorite Food: Lyner and Funbuns.
• Trailers Always Spoil: The game's intro movie when first booting it up shows both Shurelia without her armor and Misha in her adult form.
• Videogame Cruelty Potential: Diving is consensual, but the Reyvateils aren't consciously aware of what goes on in their Cosmosphere. (Through dialogue, they reveal that they feel subtle effects as you clear their mental blocks by helping them overcome fears, grudges, jealousy, and the like.) In order to progress past a certain point, you have to force them to relive the most traumatic events in their lives which destabilizes their psyche irreversibly into a crisis from which only you can save them and give closure. There is nothing stopping you from leaving them at the brink of mental meltdown indefinitely.
• Visible Silence: Almost every scene in the game has at least one character doing this.

• Warrior Prince: Lyner is the son of the ruler of Platina but chooses to be a knight.
• Warrior Therapist: Lyner. It's not just the Cosmospheres. As of the second game, Mir still doesn't know what hit her.
• Welcome Back, Traitor: Welcome back Ayatane, the guy who was the reason why everything turns crazy in Phase 2.
• "Well Done, Son" Guy: Defied by Lyner. It's not that he can't win Leard's favor, it's that he's actively refusing to do it, and doing something that makes Leard happy with him is one of the few things that actively annoys Lyner. This makes sense, given that most of the things that make Leard praise Lyner in the early game aren't nice and Lyner may resent him for what happened to Misha. In the scene where Leard finally says he's So Proud of You, it's noteworthy that the other characters are far more excited about it than Lyner is. The extent of Lyner's Character Development is not rejecting Leard's feelings: even when Lyner asks Leard to help craft the hymn at the end of the game, it still feels as though Lyner is making the effort because Leard is his father. Their relationship is still rocky.
• Wise Prince: Despite being the heir of Platina, Lyner rejects that power and prefers to be a common soldier. This may be because if he becomes Leard's heir, it will be his job to train Misha's daughter and continue the cycle of useless sacrifice, as well as tensions with Leard.
• Why Did It Have to Be Snakes?: Misha and heights which is odd when you notice that (When you meet her) she lives in a man-made flying island just below a flying continent, all of which are one Creative Virus away from crashing down.
• Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds: Mir's first song, Harmonius, was meant to express her hope for the human race. However, since she was created with the hope of making an emotionless Reyvateil, it led to her being tortured and locked up. Nevermind that to be told "Your song's no good" would be an incredible insult all on its own, considering Reyvateils' songs are born out of their deep, heartfelt feelings. It's no wonder she started hating humans. It only got worse after that while connected to the tower, she is keenly aware of the Fantastic Racism against Reyvateils, and her inability to do anything else to stop it leads to her (understandable) declaration that Humans Are the Real Monsters.
• The World Tree: The towers seem to be an analogue. There's also the fact that tonelico is toneriko, the Japanese word for ash tree, which Yggdrasil was in Norse mythology.
• Wrench Wench: Krusche, the airship engineer.
• Yandere:
  • Most of Mir's songs are like this - you could make a bit of a leap to say her role as the Big Bad of Elemia was a Yandere reaction to humanity. Harmonious Fusion doesn't contain any kind of Yandere-ness in its feelings (and arguably, in the lyrics eeither), and Colors is no more than an image song for her, illustrating the development of her feelings.
  • Almost every Reyvateil attempts to kill their partner at some point in their Cosmosphere. Aurica tries to kill Lyner and herself because of her self-loathing, jealousy, and fear of him abandoning her. Misha believes that Lyner's presence is complicating the struggle between her desire for freedom and her fate of becoming the seal for Mir.
• Your Princess Is in Another Castle!: This game has one of the more elaborate (if still fairly obvious) fake endings out there, even going so far as including a credit roll after Shurelia's Heroic Sacrifice. You have the option of ending the game there and living happily with the girl you chose to be with at the start of the game's second act (which could be called a Nonstandard Game Over) but to continue on to the real end you have to choose to bring Shurelia back. On top of that, early in the third act you're given the choice of killing Mir and earning the bad end there, or going on a subquest that ends in Lyner deciding that he wants to save her, which is the game's true end.

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