I might have given the wrong impression on this one, but I’m not just trying to be funny here or bash legaiaflame; these are really my honest opinions. Now I don’t think the idea of an interactive section like this is bad by any means, but I’m sure it could be so much more interesting if it didn’t just recycle existing content; so much of legaiaflame’s site seems to fall into this same category that I felt I should just be honest about it and post something.
For example, take the “characters” page on the site: the descriptions are just copied word-for-word out of the awful English instruction manual. Why not take a couple of minutes to write original descriptions? Or if the descriptions out of the manual are definitely going to be used, at least indicate that they’re not your own work.
Then on the “books” page, all the text is literally copied-and-pasted from The Panzer Place website, except the text for the Drone Report book, which is copied-and-pasted from panzerdragoon.net. Legaiaflame hasn’t even bothered changing the formatting or layout of the text from the two different sites, so his page looks inconsistent anyway, and the copy-pasting stands out like a sore thumb. And then legaiaflame has left in the descriptive text that Stephan Dolby (creator of The Panzer Place) added for Book 8 (the picture of the Tower): “Please look at the background of this page for a good idea of how the Tower looks”. That line doesn’t even make sense in the context of legaiaflame’s page, because there isn’t a picture of the Tower there; the only conclusion I can make is that he was too lazy to read through what he was copying, and that seriously doesn’t impress me.
Not only is it pretty cheeky to copy content from other sites without permission or credit, even if it is official content, but why bother doing it at all? A similar thing goes for the “Juba’s Bar” section, as I said above, and most of the other sections of the site as far as I can tell (the enemy information pages and so on)…
The whole impression I get is one of very little effort; the site successfully edits a bunch of existing content together without providing anything genuinely new or thought-provoking. The only really original section of the site that isn’t taken or recycled from another source seems to be the PDS review; but as people pointed out in the other thread, it really just outlines all of the game’s obvious strengths with barely an objective critique or a word about its shortcomings. The fact that the author didn’t bother to run this original content through a spellchecker doesn’t add to the atmosphere…
Now of course, a site like lagi’s (The Art of Panzer Dragoon) is ultimately an archive of official content too, but the difference there is that it’s content that mostly can’t be found elsewhere; it’s useful and interesting because of that. On the other hand, legaiaflame’s site isn’t providing anything that people haven’t already seen; much of it is just taken from other sites anyway. The site seems to exist for the sole purpose of drawing attention to itself, something that isn’t helped by the fact that legaiaflame starts a new forum topic for every single update; garnering attention hardly seems like a worthwhile reason to put a site together. I’m sorry if I sound harsh here, but I’m trying to be honest and I at least think these criticisms are justified…