You're certainly going to enjoy act 3. It's going to be a bit crazy. Really, I feel as though the first two acts are aimed more toward those who've played Ciel nosurge (which is basically worse than the minority everywhere but Japan) and already know exactly what everyone's going on about.
That wasn't the issue I was having, the issues I was having was, among other things, Turbo being a godawful character and his half of the story being pretty banal, the villains ranging from being frustrating assholes to being absolutely horrible people that shouldn't be empathized with (compounded by my roomie crushing on Zill (which she's probably doing just to annoy me)), and the crafting. The godawful, boring crafting.
Oh, and the obvious decline in quality and ~*~effort~*~ from Ciel nosurge to Ar nosurge. Ciel nosurge had pretty good character animations and at least attempted to direct scenes to be coherent and interesting to look at (though they sort of went overboard with the boob physics). Ar nosurge has some of the shittiest directing I've ever seen: staring at a single character while there's other characters reacting to a drama bomb off screen is the laziest and most wasted opportunity I've ever seen, and defies everything known about directing a scene.
Which really sucks, because there are some
fantastic scenes that actually have good scene direction that actually sent chills down my spine, in particular
That, and coupled with Turbo's character improving after they start having him stop being a complete moron and the honestly touching romantic moments between him and Cass
shows that they could have made this into a fantastic game that could have possibly given Ar Tonelico 2 a run for its money. But instead, they went all ~*~zero effort~*~ with the game, because I guess their technical juices were eaten up by Ciel nosurge or something.
Also, Prim. Prim is the absolute worst character. I thought that Zill was my least favorite character but no, Prim takes the cake and shoves it down her cakehole. I've been wanting to throw Prim off the side of the ship for a long while, and she's been getting worse about it.
That said, holy crap there's a sudden jump in the quality of the story in the last third of the second act. Shame the technical aspects don't jump up, but I'll take what I can get. Also, totally shipping Ion and Kanon.