Ciel no Surge: Song of the Lost Star's Offering - Gust for PS Vita

[briareos_kerensky]

Yesterday Gust (makers of the Atelier and Ar Tonelico series) released a cryptic trailer: Today they unveiled Ciel no Surge, a new game for the Vita that marks the beginning of a new series, called Surge Concerto. Featuring an amnesiac girl called Ionasol (or Ion for shorts), the game is set in the world of La Ciel and Ion can use the magic of songs to control the sun, a dangerous entity in La Ciel. Gust said there will be online connectivity and from the descriptions floating around it seems like that player won't have direct control over Ion but will interact with her through scanned barcodes or similar devices. Will this be some sort of reboot of Ar Tonelico? AT's world is called Ciel and there's song magic there too; AT had its own language (and with language I mean someone created a whole alphabeth and grammar structure for it), Ciel no Surge's trailer shows what look like alien letters. Release date is close, April 26th.

[edit] added subtitle to thread's title

[briareos_kerensky]

Famitsu stated that Akira Tsuchiya, director of the Ar Tonelico series, is helming Ciel no Surge.

[briareos_kerensky]

Siliconera has a nice article with artworks and screenshots. Environments look exactly of what you'd expect from an Ar Tonelico game and one of the focal points of Ciel no Surge will be to dive into Ion's mind to unlock her memories, an other mechanic taken from the AT series.
The game engine looks like the same of the last two Atelier games and it doesn't look bad, though there are a lot of jaggies.

[wakka]

How do these games actually play? Siliconera describes it as a 'communication simulator'. Is it like Hey You Pikachu :|

[briareos_kerensky]

Ar Tonelico and the Atelier series are JRPGs, probably Gust is trying something new with this one. All details surfaced up till now point to some sort of interactive visual novel, probably it's not far Love Plus...or Hey You Pikachu. Infos are released almost daily, in-game videos will surface soon.

[briareos_kerensky]

More details emerge on the game, though every time it's small bits of information that bring Ciel no Surge farther away from a JRPG and closer to Love Plus.

The game runs on an internal, real time clock and turning on the system will open a window on Ion's virtual world where she would cook, create items or sleep.
Players will be able to help her create items by giving tips and if creation is successful, Ion will ask for a date. One of the released screenshots also depicts a biorhythm-like graph that would probably set Ion's overall mood...and there will be DLC to trigger game-specific events.

[briareos_kerensky]

Four new characters have been confirmed: Tabo, Plum, Cass and Terephanken. The latter is a dragon, other than hair color and that Cass is the token tsundere, nothing much is know about their role.

[briareos_kerensky]

First "trailer". It opens with the director speaking about the game and only a glimpse of the actual prodcut. Music in perfect Ar Tonelico style.
Also, Gust said that the Surge Concerto series will be spread among different platforms.

[briareos_kerensky]

Proper trailer this time. Some locales seem taken straight from Ar Tonelico 3 and while there's hardly anything show on how the game will be played, the music alone is making me consider buying it whenever it reaches US or EU shores.

[briareos_kerensky]

Some more screenshots at Andriasang.

Not everything's perfect, Ion's Pajama has some ugly textures and polygon compenetrations.

[briareos_kerensky]

10 min. in-game video.

[briareos_kerensky]

Ciel no Surge was supposed to be a series of games and the second volume is coming out this end of June. The first volume was released in April and there are no details of what vol. 2 will provide.