I've only played the third, and I found it incredibly amusing.

I should point out that that's just because I have a twisted sense of humour. I do NOT recommend Ar Tonelico to anyone with normal thresholds for good taste when it comes to sex humour.

Amen. I need to get around to getting the other endings for ATIII someday. (Seriously, why'd they call it Qoga and not just give it a III? It's always bugged me but no biggie. )

As for Ayesha, I'm happy that it's being released at all of course, but so far it seems like we're not getting our awesome NISA-store exclusive LE for it. It's good to know NISA is still handling the localization side, but if the Tecmo-Koei side is pretty much putting their foot down on "Standard edition only, we ain't paying for some LE crap" and "English audio only, we ain't paying for no licensing the Japanese audio crap too", then I'd MUCH rather NISA handle everything on their own like they always have been.

Obviously, when Tecmo-Koei BUYS Gust, they can do whatever they want with their subsidairy. But NISA set a standard and it's hard to let go, I guess.

Aren't you based in America? I am fairly certain the American release has a Japanese audio track.

I agree that it sucks that TK is not putting as much effort into the special editions and the like as NISA did, but at least the games are getting released at all. GUST is such a tiny developer it would have been very easy to say "this is just not worth the effort"

No one's sure what the hell's going on anymore about the dubs...

I always thought of gust as a weak move in Pokémon..

The good thing to come out of this is Tecmo Koei is very quickly learning how committed GUST's fans are in the West. I've been following the Twitter for Chin (community manager at TK England) and tecmokoeieurope and... it's not pleasant.

I suspect that the next GUST game will not be cheaped out on, regardless of what happens with Ayesha

My only contribution to this thread is I heard some music from Atelier Iris: Eternal Mana like 7 years ago and decided it was one of the best JRPG soundtracks I had ever heard.

Even on the off chance I ever got a PS2 or 3 or anything I'd probably be too distracted by lots of other games to ever somehow get to it, so I should just listen to the whole soundtrack someday...

I haven't played Iris, but GUST games do generally have great soundtracks. Ar Tonelico Qoga has some brilliant tracks.

A lot of the "battle" music from Qoga were....um.....yeah. The rest of the game was pretty great though, along with AT1 and AT2. ^_^

There were battles in Qoga? Lol, I have blocked that out of my memory. I just loved the rest of it

Yeah, those "battles" where you mash the square button till they all die.

Man I miss AT2's battle system. So much fun and actually engaging!

It really does have a fantastic soundtrack. Here's the ost if you want to listen to it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PVSasjMB4PQ&list=PL8C3288C...

Yeah, I loved Iris' soundtrack. Though for whatever weird reason I never got around to playing 2 or 3, even though I have them.

I should have a nice surprise for Gust fans for next week.

Stay tuned ^_^

So GUST took the time to do an interview with me. In fact, it was the executive director of the company to be precise. I do love GUST <3

You can check out the interview on my site, but here's my favourite bit:

DD: Now that GUST is part of Tecmo Koei, a lot of your fans would love to see you develop a Dead or Alive RPG. What do you think the chances of that are?
TI: That’s an interesting idea! The chance of it happening is not zero…

I think I would have the happiest kind of heart attack if that happened.

I've never played any of GUST's games, but that does sound pretty awesome!

You like JRPGs, right?

Time to introduce you to GUST, methinks.

I still don't get how Gust games are supposed to appeal to any JRPG Fan. I love most JRPGs I've played, admittedly even some Gust Games (Ar Tonelico 1 is pretty great). Most Gust games, though, are about as far away from my idea of a normal JRPG as I've ever seen.

For the record, I've seen several people say what Bankai's said. I still really don't get it.

GUST games aren't JRPGs? They're like Dragon Quest games - they don't try and do anything but be traditional JRPG experiences.

Yes the Atelier games have the alchemy thing going on, but everything else about the game - from the simple, happy music and story, to the old-school turn-based battles - it's all as traditional as JRPGs come. The only time I've seen GUST do anything that is remotely progressive for the genre is Ar tonelico Qoga, and given the fan's reaction to that game I doubt there's going to be and more attempts to be innovative in the future.

GUST also does stuff on a reasonable budget, unlike, say, Compile Heart, so the production values are typically right up there. Atelier Meruru might not be as pretty as Ni No Kuni as a cel-shaded game, but it's in the same ballpark. It makes them much easier to get into than, say, Mugen Souls, which is a far more acquired taste in terms of visual aesthetic.

Most importantly, though, they're fun games to play.

I've become increasingly alienated from the Final Fantasy games and the other big-budget attempts to modernise the JRPG genre to keep it relevant (Xenoblade, I am looking directly at you there). I still enjoy them, but I find myself coming back to the likes of GUST and Compile Heart over and over again because those games, in terms of theme, style and mechanics, are much more like the SNES and early-era PlayStation games that really got me hooked into this hobby.

But the Atelier games are time magement games. Everything seems to be built around factoring in the time it takes to do something. It's really a huge aspect that differentiates it from other RPGs. And that's a really big thing that people seem to be forgetting about. You can't go about things at a leisurly pace like you can in every other JRPG. Ar Tonelico is different, and more in line with traditional games, but I can't stand the Atelier games because of the time factor. That doesn't have anything to do with whether or not I love JRPGs.