YMMV / Ar tonelico Qoga: Knell of Ar Ciel

• Complete Monster:
  • Raphael, the Chairman of the Archian Think Tank, appears to be a benevolent man at first glance, but underneath is a wicked man with sinister ambition. First appearing after having his forces rescue Aoto and his friends from the Clustanians, he convinces Aoto to leave Saki and a necklace entrusted to him supposedly out of kindness. Soon afterwards, Aoto learns that Raphael and his company are responsible for multiple disappearances, including the sister of one of his friends. After liberating Saki from their hands, Aoto's party clashes with Raphael's party multiple times as Raphael attempts to massacre the Clustanians and take Saki. They eventually decide to form a truce with Raphael to stop Ar Ru and the forces of the planet from killing them all, but after temporarily stopping it, Raphael reveals his end goal. Having forced the scientist Katene to activate a machine by taking his lover Mute hostage, he uses the necklace Aoto gave him to take some of Ar Ru's power to achieve what he wants: forcing mutation on everyone by mixing the DNA and aspects of Reyvateils, humans, and antibodies, creating Reveroids which Raphael has full control over; the disappeared victims were all people who died trying to make these creatures. His final action was to force Richa to sing a song that would turn everyone into these abomination. Pretending to have humanity's best interests at heart, for him the pinnacle for humanity is powerful monsters under his control like a god.
  • Kurogane is a prideful and selfish scientist responsible for Tyria's Dark and Troubled Past. Responsible for looking after Tyria, the Third Tower, Kurogane only saw her as a tool, despite her love for him as a father figure. Placing her in many painful and dangerous experiments, Kurogane hoped that Tyria would bring the results he wanted, and every time she failed, he would treat her even worse for many years. After failing a very important test, the government closed Kurogane's projects and shifted attention else where. This infuriated Kurogane, who refused to acknowledge that the reason Tyria couldn't do it is because he refused to let her socialize and properly develop her emotions, as well as the fact he kept working under theories that had already been proven as ineffective ("negative feelings are more powerful than positive ones") by the universe itself just to spite Eleno and his grandfather. After pestering the government into giving him another chance, he was only given a fraction of the original budget. And the last straw for him was the remnants of the Sol Ciel leaders of the Planet Regeneration Project trying to abduct Tyria, which he took as an insult to his pride, so Kurogane, as an act of spite, began to make a sinister plan to sabotage the creation of the Tower made to save humanity. Before pushing through with this plan, he left behind the Human Evolution Project, a scheme to mutate people into powerful abominations, as a trap for humanity in the future. He started to treat Tyria kindly, having her love him, but during the critical moment of Tyria creating the Tower, he went to Tyria and committed suicide in front of her to give her strong amounts of trauma as a final act of sabotage against humans, resulting in the Tower not being fully completed. This ended up stalling the Planet Regeneration Project for 700 years, potentially dooming Ar Ciel and everybody living on it, and causing several far-reaching problems in Sol Cluster whose ripples can still be felt during the time the game takes place.
• Crosses the Line Twice: Turning people into cakes? Not funny. Turning entire warships into cakes? Hilarious!
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • East or West, every player's complaint for this game is likely to be "Why won't Akane join us?!" She's a gorgeous Lady of War,Finnel's best friend, and regularly travels with the group in Phase IV. The answer is likely the additional resources to make the FMV for her special attack, making the purged model, making additional party topics, and drawing up the artwork for new weapons and armors. The same applies for any other character that could have joined.
  • Then, of course, there's Cocona, who was guaranteed a role in this game due to her dark horse status in AT 2.
• Inferred Holocaust: Ar Ciel dying one year later after the game unless the AAA Project is carried out successfully. This means that if the player ends the game with any ending but the True ones, the planet will break apart, and everything in it will die. Word of God even went on to write a complete description for this!
• Informed Wrongness: Shurelia has done something that makes Tyria hates her, but they never shows it and Shurelia is just mentioned in 2 lines in this game, Sequel Hook perhaps? Answer in the manual (and the note) ^note  It's because she envied the kind of father Shurelia had: Eleno (Shurelia's adoptive father) treated her with love and kindness, while Kurogane (Tyria's adoptive father and creator) treated her as a guinea pig and forced her to undergo cruel and horrible experiments to bring about her true potential.
• Magnificent Bitch:
  • Soma the Will of Violence and Catastrophes is delegated by Ar Ciel to maintain the balance of nature, as a figure of death and destruction. Accompanying Ar Ru to the surface world as her bodyguard by occupying the body of Finnel, Soma found herself among the ranks of Clustania as an assassin, becoming Clustania's deadliest killer. Growing fond of Finnel, when she realized she was slowly dying and the only way to save her was to take her back to Harvestasha, she forced her by using her love for Aoto and then forcefully possesses her to make Cocona make a deal to save her. When Soma learned Harvestasha and Luphan were going to sacrifice Finnel to summon Ar Ru, Soma fully changes sides and fights to protect her, even going as far as to support Aoto in Finnel's Cosmosphere to free her from their influence. A Professional Killer, Soma will do whatever it takes to see her duty through and protect those she cares about.
  • Ever since she was born, Akane was destined for greatness, becoming the Supreme Commander of the Clustania Army at the age of fifteen and led them to a new era. A cold and calculating woman, Akane is such a capable general that she seems unstoppable, invading most of humanity's lands, countering the Great Fangs, and capturing the party and her predecessor Richa by deactivating her nation's defenses to lure them to a trap. However underneath her iron mask is a principled woman and when she learned Harvestasha and Luphan were planning to sacrifice Finnel to create a twisted world, she turns on them and allies with her to restore the world, playing a vital role in resurrecting Tyria. Now the new leader of Clustania, Akane uses her nation's full support to assist the party and unite with the other nations to fix the mistakes Clustania made in the past.
• Memetic Mutation: Buri Hamachi
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • XaaaCi...or a Tear Jerker, if you read the last few lyric lines and what the song is supposed to represent: Gaia's Vengeance at its finest. Few things are as tear-inducing as getting told by the Planet itself how much damage you have done to it, and if you still remember the days in which she gave you so much.
  • Soma's costume.
• Not Badass Enough for Fans: Saki is one of the more divisive heroines in the fandom because of her Apologetic Attacker nature and not supposed to be her "main" personality despite her Songs being just as powerful and destructive as any other heroine's in the series.
• Player Punch: Fail to defeat the tower Guardian and awaken Tyria then later stop Saki's Song? Congratulations, you've just earned the bad ending because you weren't strong enough.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: Besides the complaints with the combat, they really dropped the ball with a few of the characters.
  • Sakia Lumei is the original personality of Saki's body. Instead of exploring her past, feelings about her only purpose to be a vessel, and possible conflict between her and Saki, the game never brings it up. Instead, Sakia becomes the designated big sister while the main conflict in Saki's Cosmosphere is her Refusal of the Call. However, in the second light novel it becomes apparent she never had any intention of regaining control of her body because she didn't want Saki, who had a much more fragile personality than herself, to go through the same experience of being forced to sleep indefinitely without anyone being aware of her existence.
  • Luphan/Ayatane is another wasted character. He's a descendant of the Teru Tribe who caused the Grathnode Inferia (AKA the reason the surface is destroyed). Rather than go into his background or have him join the party as the designated Teru with dual katanas, all he gets to do is become the first game's Ayatane pre-Heel–Face Turn and die praising Reyvateilia. Granted, there was no way they could have gotten him to join the party as he felt a burning hatred for the humans due to the fact his family and all the other Teru were massacred by Archia several decades prior to the start of the game, and that unlike the first game's Ayatane who was only following Mir's orders, this Ayatane actually wanted them dead out of his own will.
• Woobie:
  • Aoto, at least in Tyria's True ending. The girl that he loves is going to die within a year and there is nothing that he can do about it just so the world will be safe. ^note  At least until the light novels and her Drama CD came around, which shows that Tyria was indeed saved, although that cost the very existence of the Third Tower and almost all of the Second Tower's Rim.
  • Finnel, who is put through a ton of suffering from birth to near the end of the game.
  • Tyria herself also counts as while she didn't think anything of it, Shurelia considered her upbringing the very definition of hell. Also, in the novels she suffered a lot due to the life extension treatment she was forced to undergo, and finally her life ended right when Sasha was completing the song that would have allowed to undo her Tower transformation and continue living without suffering. Luckily she got better, but before that point, it was an endless series of painful events one after other.

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