Thanks a lot for the synopsis of those episodes, Taor!
I imagine reading about the wormriders’ village would have been interesting. I would read it myself, if I was fluent in Japanese.
Yeah, I wonder if he had even decided how the dragon was born? Maybe he purposely left it as an unsolvable mystery?
I suppose it’s possible that a crest or cocoon formed around the dragon’s body, and when it hatched the baby dragon emerged. That’s one possibility anyway.
I agree with your thoughts on Orta creating the pup in Sestren; it seems unlikely to me, although I wouldn’t rule out the possibility. How would Orta traveled back to Sestren? She needed the dragon to get past all those guardian monsters in the ruins; they would easily destroy a drone on her own. I suppose she could have taken a Baldor into the ruins, or found some other method of traveling there (Azel must have found a way to enter unharmed at some point), but in our translation it specifically says that the dragon left behind an heir rather than the pup being something that Orta when out of her way to create.
Thank you very much for your hard work and effort in giving us these transcripts, Taor-sama. I hope we’re not putting any pressure on you by asking for them.
Incidentally, Orta does successfully re-enter the Sestren memory banks at some point after the close of the game - and mounted on the pup, no less! You can witness the phenomenon - with elegant re-designed Arrows of Light - in Mission 4 of the sub-scenarios (Quick Shooter 1). You could of course say that as a mini-game, we can’t consider Mission 4 an actual event… but why not? Iva’s Story is considered canonical, and there is nothing to discount Mission 2 as ‘fiction’ - presumably Mobo didn’t expend Episodes 5-7 in a limbo. In fact, the only obvious contradiction to accepted plot in the sub-scenarios is Mission 3, and that’s only because of the Roman lettering on the RETRY cube.
For one, this gives a promising indicator that we will be witnessing a return of Lagi the Second - the pup is endowed with an individual, specifically-designed Bioluminary Oscillator, after all - and it also leaves us wondering - why would Orta re-access Sestren? Her only link to it is Azel’s message - and there we have it. It seems that this innocuous minigame is actually setting the scene for a new Panzer Dragoon game, with Orta traversing the Empire, rearing her stripling dragon back to maturity and searching for her estranged mother…
Wouldn’t it be wonderful if Sega used that as a premise for a new Panzer RPG? HinthintnudgenudgewinkwinkSHOTGUNPRESSEDINTOSTOMACH…
Well, the beginning and ending of that sub-scenario shows an image of only the dragon. I think Orta was just there for gameplay reasons. This might show us that the dragon’s originated from within Sestren, before Orta found him.
Yeah, it’s amazing how a mere shooter can be so thought-provoking. It seems that more than a few things were left unsolved deliberately to give players some food for thought.
Hardcore fans will always scrutinize every last detail to death, and personally, I find nothing wrong with that.
As soon as I read this thread I ordered a copy of it right away. It looks good from the scan Lance Way posted.
Cant wait till I get it. I just hope I filled in everything correctly on amazon.co.jp. :anjou_embarassed:
Oh, what’s a long story… I think that Ms. Godai’s writing style is not bad, but it has too redundant points to me. I wish she could cut some pieces of the dialogues off… (Of course, her works is nice. I wouldn’t like to make a change for the worse.)
<Subsequence of Episode 3>
When Orta is crying, Old Ponta come up there. He is riding on a worm.
He asks her and the dragon to follow him. Then they go an ancient ruin in desert.
He brings Orta to the ruin where Abadd was sleeping once. Old Ponta tells her that Empire’s army took Abadd out of there.
Old Ponta was once a seeker. He tells her the history of seekers, dragons, and the riders. He talks about Azel, too. When Empire’s men carried the drone out of the ruin, young Ponta and his workmates explored there, too. They were found by the army’s men, and killed by them. Only Ponta survived and he was helped by wormriders, but he was paralyzed below the waist (so he is riding on wormback all the time). He wouldn’t come back to seekers. He became a wormrider.
Orta: Why does the dragon help me?"
Ponta: I don’t know.
Orta: Why did I have to grow up in the cage? Why was I imprisoned?
Ponta: I don’t know, too.
Orta: Abadd said that I must save this doomed world from itself. What is the meanings in his words?
Ponta: Yeah, I don’t know that, neither. It’s not good habits that you’re always intending to get answers about everything from anyone else. No one has much knowledge than unknowledge. We seek how to know that, so our lives is interesting…
I think that is the writer Godai’s point of view. The story direction of PDO took a weaving course, and the scenario writer never think deeply about a imprisoned girl. A projector who made a plot of the game, maybe he likes young girls about 13 years old. I guess he thought that bondage fashion with chain things would appeal a lot of gamers’ men. We can imagine an account of the project book. So I think Godai’s Orta takes objection to him. On the other hand, Old Ponta tell her and us, “You can seek your right way on your own.” Yes, she is right. We can seek and imagine our truly PD world without “Official” storyline which was broken down.
A wormrider man comes there, he tells Ponta that a group coming back from a trade brought a captive…
She is a woman, a captain of dragonmares’ unit.
And yeah… the Japanese narrative for PDO was quite confusing, and frankly, the idea of the dragon narrating the game was a bit odd. The English translations were meant to be a little more concise, but the story still lacks a lot of explanation…
Excuse me, but I was just talking about the character of PDO.:anjou_embarassed: Nice to meet you, Abadd-san.
I suspect that the idea was added latterly, and maybe someone told the script writer(s) to explain the scenario in more detail. I think that a shooting game doesn’t need to speak about the “story” itself. The narrating blocks up the game’s atmosphere. We felt that the dragon was too talkative to us. Anyway, I value the PDO novel written by Godai Yu, because her dragon doesn’t talk with his lips.
On the other hand, I think that the script writer who wrote the narration attempted to make a rhetorical impact. In the beginning of the game, we saw a lunate window. It’s the dragon’s eye…(and the dramatic interpretation intends to the “Devine visitor”, it’s our eyes, too.) Unfortunately, he doesn’t have enough time or talent to be a good storyteller. I love PDO, because the game is a bone factory of many ideas which have potential. I believe that people can learn from their failures.
It just would not be a Panzer Dragoon game if it did not leave us with lots of unanswered questions that make us analyse the crap out of the story. Kind of makes PDO pretty successful then.
It’s Occam’s razor. If you see both of high-quality things and low-quality ones in one game, probably the game has experienced some problems in the developing process. And there’s a high possibility that the low-quality things were added on later in the development. In addition, if you find that the same persons did both of high-quality works and low-quality ones in a game, there’s a possibility that they didn’t have much time to make low-quality ones. Many of creatures of PDO were beautiful, and the cut-in movies(the opening, before Episode 4, and 5) were nice. On the contrary, the narrative scenes were like card boards and the writings were not elaborated very well.
ありがとうございます．英語に自信がないので，心強いです．
ですがここでは，他の多くの皆さんには日本語がわからないと思いますので，私はできるだけ英語で書き込みしようと思います．変な部分や誤解を招きそうな表現がありましたら，どうぞ御指摘ください．
(Thank you for your kindness. I feel reassured that you’re be able to understand Japanese. However, there are many of persons in this forum are not fluent in Japanese, so I’d like to write in English as much as possible. If you find my poor English and some mistakes, please tell me that.)
That’s interesting, I like the way she’s fleshed out the existing characters more; in the game people like Ponta and Evren (and even Mobo) only played relatively small roles, so it’s nice to see someone writing up some backgrounds for them. I wish I could read the novel myself!
But in all seriousness, some of the cutscenes that are considered relatively high quality were also added on toward the end of the development. Like the scene with Elder Ponta, all the scenes with Evren, and even the scene with Abadd attempting to revive his Ancient Masters.
And don’t worry… your English is fine. Like I said, though, if you simply have trouble saying something in English, just write it in Japanese, and I’ll try to help you out.
Turns to the chapter on script in his ‘Teach Yourself Japanese’ textbook
TWO THOUSAND kanji just to read a newspaper?!
" " does not even begin to convey the slightest inkling of my reaction.
Oh well, I promised myself I’d learn it - best put my nose to the grindstone…
Incidentally, whilst at first I was incredulous when Taor-san revealed that Captain Evren was a woman - after all, (s)he doesn’t sound female in the game - I’m currently replaying Orta (I’ve just traversed the 50%-unlocked boundary for Pandora’s Box! Yipee!) and just chanced across a tidbit of evidence which might just grant legitimacy to Evren’s ‘changed’ sex. In the closing cutscene to Episode IV, “Gigantic Fleet”, you all know that Evren’s dragonmare self-destructs in a last-gasp effort to erase Orta and Lagi. As the infernal energies raging in the dragonmare become ever-more unstable, Evren enjoys a final, manic cackle - and if you listen carefully, that laugh sudden adopts a high-pitched, tinkling, feminine tone.
Perhaps Evren’s presentation as a woman wasn’t an example of the novel’s author’s artistic license, but was specifically intended right from the start - the masculine tones Evren speaks with prior to the end of Episode IV are due to the distortions caused by the radio.
I think Evren was always meant to be a woman. If I remember correctly her voice in the Sestren memory cells also doesn’t have the static radio effect it has in-game.
Any chance that the encounter with Mobo at the end of Episode 2 was one of the early scenes?
Fear not Robert; although it’s not immediately obvious, it’s accepted that Evren was a woman in the game itself. She does have quite a masculine way of speaking, but if you listen carefully to her lines throughout the game you’ll start to notice the feminine intonations on the end of her words.
It seems that more than a few things were left unsolved deliberately to give players some food for thought.
Anyway, I value the PDO novel written by Godai Yu, because her dragon doesn’t talk with his lips.
" does not even begin to convey the slightest inkling of my reaction.