Ar nosurge: Ode to an Unborn Star is a Japanese turn-based RPG developed by Gust. This game is actually a direct sequel to a much lesser-known game called Ciel nosurge, which was never released outside of Japan but serves as the foundation for the entire story.

People often say that this can be played without knowing the Ciel nosurge story. That may be true, but let's be honest here. My experience involved playing Ar nosurge first on PS3, then playing Ciel nosurge later on PSVita, and finally returning to Ar nosurge recently on PC. Yes, you can play it without the other, but you will be puzzled about a lot of the world elements and characters that the game assumes you already know.

Ciel nosurge is a particularly interesting type of game that could be better defined as a visual novel mixed with dating sim elements. The story follows you (the player) connecting to a remote device in the house of a girl called Ion. She is an amnesiac who doesn't remember much about her life. Your job is to help her remember by building special items and diving into her memories to drag out elements one after another.

The story unravels through these events, unlocking pieces of her memory and revealing the long and hard journey Ion has taken up to this point. The game itself ends when Ion remembers her purpose and objective, which leads directly into the beginning of Ar nosurge, where she serves as one of the protagonists.

Ciel nosurge contains one of my favorite stories, as I really connected to the characters and the world they are living in. Ion is an extremely sweet girl who has been pushed by external forces into a role she didn't want, in a world that shouldn't be hers in the first place.

I am going to go deep into spoilers now, so if you haven't played, I suggest you skip this section.

Ion is actually a human from an Earth very similar to ours (probably a parallel universe of some sort) and she was summoned against her will to Ra Ciela in order to save the world from destruction.

She was just a kid with a passion for constructing things and a dream to live her own life, all of which was shattered by the transportation. The body she is inhabiting is not her own, but that of the real Princess of that country who was sacrificed for the summoning (she ended up in a fairy body and goes by the name of Nay).

Despite this, Ion kept trying her best to fulfill the role assigned to her while dreaming of a possibility to go back home. The journey is full of emotional moments and culminates with the destruction of the planet and the survivors escaping on a spaceship toward a possible future on another planet.

She usually puts on a sweet and calming face, but her deep inner thoughts (once explored in Ar nosurge) show all her resentment and pain for having her life destroyed by being summoned to this decaying world. The range of the Japanese voice actor in some of these scenes is downright amazing (see the attached video).

She is usually put in contrast with Nero, another girl summoned like Ion who has been trapped in this world for thousands of years. Nero is completely fed up with the world and will do whatever it takes to regain her freedom and return to her own world. I often resonated a lot more with Nero than Ion, especially in the early parts when Ion was still too naive to understand the reality around her.

In Ar nosurge, you have two protagonist pairs. The first pair is, of course, Ion with a robot controlled through the interface that we used during the first game. The second one is two returning characters from the first game named Casty and Delta (called Ta-bou in the first game) as they have grown up and are now adults. Casty is still in a teenager's body because she used an item between the two games that halted her growth. Delta is amnesiac due to being kidnapped by the Church of Genomirai before the story began.

Alternating between these two pairs, you will try to solve issues between the two major factions that have formed in the spaceship. One is the survivor humans guided by Nay (acting as the Divine Empress) in Felion, and the other is the Genom together with hordes of Sharls that try to kidnap humans to use as power batteries for some "unknown reason". Almost all the characters you'll see in Ar nosurge are returning characters from Ciel nosurge.

The final objective is reaching an understanding between the two groups and safely finding a place to live in peace. Various antagonists will try to stop this from happening because they have their own conflicting views on how to solve the situation, including Kanon (temporarily guiding the Genom group), Zill, and Nero.

The game doesn't shy away from breaking the fourth wall, as the premise is that we are connecting to the remote device in their world through our game console. I was really surprised when I played Ar nosurge the first time and was completely blind to this element.

There is a moment where Nero asks Delta to "come and catch me and I'll tell you the truth," and then she disappears. At the same time, she goes to the Robot and tells him, "the code for the room I'm hiding inside is xxxx." Of course, I was like, "Okay, let me switch to Delta and go open the door with that code." Once inside, she starts saying, "How did you know the code? Don't you realize that someone is controlling you?" It left Delta speechless and starting to understand his current situation.

The gameplay features turn-based combat similar to all the Ar Tonelico games, in which a defender (either Delta or the Robot) protects the singer (Ion or Casty) while she charges a super Magic Song that will destroy waves upon waves of enemies. There are various songs that can be unlocked through the story, each with custom animation and sound.

There is also a small cameo arc in the story where Casty and Delta go to another world to find a place to live. This turns out to be Ar Ciel, the world of the first Ar Tonelico game, where they find a child version of Shurelia. If you played the original game, it is a really nice sub-story to experience.

There are multiple endings to this game. Once achieving a particular set of conditions, you will unlock the True Ending, which is the "happy end" for everyone.

It closes the story with Ion and Nero returning to their home world, back to the exact time when they disappeared to continue their lives (while forgetting all the memories of their journey).

I really suggest you give a shot to both games if you can, as they contain one of the best narratives I have seen in the recent past. Ion deserves your attention!