Ar Tonelico: the bad ending

I decided to watch the bad ending on YouTube today (tonight? This morning? The way my sleep schedule is, I'm not even sure what time of day this counts as. ;), because I didn't think I'd want to play through it and because I was curious, in that "I need to stop imagining what it's like and have closure on it" sort of way.

So. A few thoughts below; highlight to read the blacked-out areas, because, obviously, there are spoilers in here. They will show if you choose "show original post" from the separate comments window, so be warned! For those who haven't seen the ending, I do consider it worth watching.


Hearing all the music from the final areas again just stirred up my heart, in an anxious sort of way. I've always been very fond of the music that plays when you're in the heart of the Tower (in the red-circuitry-lined areas, and when you confront Tastiella at this point), and hearing it in this context just made it all the more affecting. I've realised through this that I really like Mir's battle themes, too, in a sense; I find them fitting for the gravity of the moment. I never saw them as Evil Boss Songs, but rather as demonstrating the vastness and horror of the conflict with, and within, Mir. It's just a bad situation all around.

Unfortunately, I couldn't help cracking up at Tastiella's "Dodge this!" in English, thanks to the obvious parallel (and the fact that it really sounds like they're trying to evoke that scene). I did, generally speaking, like Tastiella's English voice, though; it fits her. She sounds both appropriately confident and appropriately aged. I like her whole role in this part, actually; she delivers some wonderfully scathing lines in the vein of "If that's your way of solving your problems, you should have no difficulty, right?" This general theme continues throughout this path; the subtle, and not so subtle, digs at Lyner for choosing violence over thoughtful action.

This makes slightly less sense when it's Mir doing the moralising, sadly. I simply adore her speech with Lyner at the beginning of her final-form battle, but Lyner's kind of got a point; at this point in the game she doesn't have any right to talk to him about peace:

Mir: What good is a sword...?
What good comes from a sword stroke, from a song note...?

Lyner: We can create a world without fear! A world... of peace!

Mir: And you think swords and magic can do that...
Peace won by the sword will fall by the sword.

Lyner: Don't talk to me about peace!

That said, "Peace won by the sword will fall by the sword" is probably going to be one of my favourite quotes for a very long time, in part because I believe in the idea behind it (and often want to share that with people), and I've never before come across such a succinct way of saying it.

But the issue here is that Mir isn't following her own advice at all and hasn't been for a very long time; her moralising here feels fourth-wall-y. I could understand if she'd given up conflict and gone to hide out in a bunker, and Lyner and the others came to flush her out and kill her, but right now she really can't say that without being a little hypocritical. Though I suppose it could be argued that she's having a moment of clarity, wherein she's tired of all this and is realising, as Lyner confronts her hatred with hatred, that everything she's done up to this point has been counterproductive to her goals; and moreover, that now she's been put up against the wall and she doesn't know what else to do but fight, that now that she's finally had a chance to see what she's become, it's at a time when she doesn't have a hope of reasoning with him, when anything she could say would be too little, too late. She's been hoist by her own petard, and that realisation must be fairly sickening. I wish they'd made that a little clearer if that was what they were going for, but I do kind of like that interpretation, if only because I think it's the only way to make sense out of Mir's double standard.

The whole thing ends on a suitably ambiguous note; we've saved the world, and everyone's happy that we've saved the world, but at the same time things feel flat. Lyner's big line here sums it up very well: "When I think about it like that, it feels like nothing's changed. This world hasn't changed..." Yet it's not forced on the player that everything is doom and gloom; yes, we have saved the world, for now. It's just obvious that that there are ambiguities remaining, that there will be questions that Lyner and the others will have to ask themselves after this, that the issue of whether it was right to banish violence with violence lies unresolved.

And I think that's a nice touch; I honestly wish the standard endings of more games would be this way, that everyone wasn't always just "yay, we killed the Big Bad!" but that there was a poignant moment, after it all, of, "...wow, we killed someone. Was that really the right thing to do?" I'd like some acknowledgement, in more games, of the idea that a lot of people are going to go home from this pretty shellshocked, questioning their values, questioning what they've done and whether that makes them good people.

Ar Tonelico manages to convey this idea pretty well, I think, in its bad ending. And for that, I have quite a lot of respect for it.