Here's the kicker: all the spell power numbers are fake, as they're written as plain text (two-byte SHIFT-JIS number) instead of being pointers to the actual numbers that are used in the damage calculations proper (which are written in hexadecimal single-byte numbers). So they aren't trustworthy to determine power alone.
I've removed Frelia's entry for God Is Good. The Hibernation plan was agreed upon four hundred years ago following a war in which Frelia (or Shun and Raki using her authority) declared war on the human populace of Metafalss. She may not be evil, but she's just one more morally ambiguous party in this scenario.
If you want to claim that somehow she was unaware of a treaty her faction signed centuries ago, you're going to need to provide some kind of citation for that.
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Sorry I didn't see this before making that edit.
However, I can affirm with full certainty that she was unaware: Frelia herself says she was asleep in Kanakana Pier ever since the war on the goddess was declared 400 years ago, and even then, she went into cold sleep 300 years prior to these events to conserve energy and because she had nothing else to do with the Conductor Rings damaged by the Grathnode Inferia and unable to continue the creation of the Second Tower.
Shun also echoes this by telling Targana that the "pact was something Raki decided by herself", so in other words, neither he nor Frelia had any say on Hibernation or anything related to it. And we've also seen in the game how by-the-book Raki is when it comes to Frelia's defense and the extreme measures she is willing to take for doing that, even to the point of citing exactly the articles and clauses of the pact Cloche broke when she tried and failed using Replekia to attack Sol Marta, or having killed Nenesha to take back Frelia's D-Cellophane during the failed singing of Metafalica.
And for the final piece of evidence supporting this, we have this little jewel from the Toukousphere: http://artonelico.wikia.com/wiki/ARM_Backup/Ar_Portal_translation/Toukousphere/Issue_75
If you read the Technical Service Center section, you'll see that Frelia flat-out states that she has no memory of the events of the last 700 years, and the knowledge she transmitted to the generations of Maidens of Homura could be chalked up to her just sleep-talking during her long slumber.
If she's done absolutely nothing apart from turning over all her decision making to Raki then how can you consider her 'good?' She doesn't help people. She doesn't countermand policies that hurt people and neither does her most devoted servant. In context, Shun was saying 'I don't have to keep following the plan I've been following until because it was just something an ally made, not something I personally agreed to.'
This just makes her an entirely passive character that is no more good or evil than any other faction. God Is Good requires an active entity. Something like Have You Seen My God? or whatever that trope is called would be more appropriate because then you can talk about how the goddess' side is divided into factions that doesn't always agree or make decisions after consulting her instead of before. Thus, she wouldn't be responsible for their actions, but wouldn't necessarily be a super all benevolent faultless figure in a story that doesn't have a single one of those.
Oh, and just as an aside, but a leader is generally held responsible for actions taken by their subordinates.
Okay, about the song magic. Jacqli gets Ar Tonelico at base 65 and Demon Dance at 56, Luca gets Meteor Shine at 54 and Cloche gets Infel Pira at 56 and Cat Shaker at 58. This makes Cloche the strongest at Cosmosphere 9, barely beating out Jacqli as well as having Replekia.
So Luca is the worst of the the three. She gets the weakest ultimate magic unless I'm missing something and no special abilities. Does the total number of spell hits skew the data? Like 4x54 adding up to more than 3x58 or something?
Edited by Arha Hide / Show Replies