“After centuries of fighting, …the warring factions built this.”
I’m not sure what to make of this, but this seems to suggest that the Ancient factions built the Towers together after the war to heal the planet. However, Lundi’s diaries seem to suggest that it was the existence of Towers that triggered the war in the first place. I’m not sure what to make of this. It’s possible that one faction won the war and decided to build the Towers. The ones that were defeated were left without their technology or army, but perhaps they formed smaller groups of rebels, similar to the Seekers vs. the Empire. Although they may not have been able to alter Azel’s programming, they didn’t have to. The fact that she had a free will was enough.
The"people" who opposed the Towers, according to the diary of Skiad Ops Endow, were enough of a nuisance for the Towers’ creators to safeguard their creations with bio-egineered guardians, but they weren’t powerful enough to stand against the ancients (who were for the sake of argument the people who constructed the Towers) or even survive the downfall of the Ancient Age. Sestren refers to his creators as “the ancients”, so like the Zoah Bibles that separate the gods from the rest of humanity, the ancients were a unique faction.
According to Zadoc the compiler Azel was “given” an enhanced intellect (or her intellect was enhanced) in order to control the Towers, and as a side effect she gained human emotions. It’s unclear if Zadoc is referring to her creators or the people who stole her but a drone with free will wasn’t something the ancients tolerated unless such a drone was absolutely loyal to them (according to the drone record).
Craymen says that Azel’s purpose was to break into the Tower of Uru and destroy it from the inside. The ancients would not have created her to destroy one of their own Towers.
Make no mistake: drones were built as slaves and whoever stole Azel before completion freed her from enslavement. In the end she chose to join in the struggle against her creators, as did the Sky Rider. What are rebel drones if not former slaves?
First a direct reply to Lance:
I don’t think anyone meant the “rebels” wanted to free drones.
I thought that so far we kind of had agreed that these “rebels” were a group of people that opposed The Will Of The Ancients and that’s the reason they stole Azel as well, to use her in order to prevent the rest Ancients from fulfilling their goal.
And now a random little theory:
Ancients see the destruction of the world close from the way mankind is using up the resources etc so they decide to actually Terraform it but this process requires the near complete annihilation of the world beforehand. They decide to go with the plan anyway, always keeping themselves safe inside Sestren waiting for the right time to be ressurected by Abadd and begin a new era of reign on the planet. Rebels obviously don’t want the
"annihilation" bit to happen to they decide to oppose the Ancients’ plans and prevent them from starting the Terraforming process. Stealing Azel was one of their many attempts at that. They obviously failed since the world WAS destroyed but atleast their efforts help today’s mankind to free itself from TWOTA what with Azel and the Heresy Dragon…
Thoughts?
Edit: I haven’t read the two replies after Lance’s post yet, they were posted while I was writing this… Getting to it now…
[quote=“Al3xand3r”] And now a random little theory:
Ancients see the destruction of the world close from the way mankind is using up the resources etc so they decide to actually Terraform it but this process requires the near complete annihilation of the world beforehand. They decide to go with the plan anyway, always keeping themselves safe inside Sestren waiting for the right time to be ressurected by Abadd and begin a new era of reign on the planet. Rebels obviously don’t want the
"annihilation" bit to happen to they decide to oppose the Ancients’ plans and prevent them from starting the Terraforming process. Stealing Azel was one of their many attempts at that. They obviously failed since the world WAS destroyed but atleast their efforts help today’s mankind to free itself from TWOTA what with Azel and the Heresy Dragon…
Thoughts?[/quote]
whether they wanted to or not, they did. :)[/quote]
No, I meant that it was not their primary goal or anything, tneir goal was to oppose the Ancients imo, not to be so “kind” as to not want drones to be slaves like Lance thought people were suggesting when he said:
My point still stands: Azel and the Sky Rider (assuming he was a drone too) were freed from enslavement. Of course this was done to help in the struggle against the ancients, yet no one forced Azel to melt the Tower of Uru into a twisted spire.
[quote=“GehnTheBerserker”]I think we are forgetting something.
The Ancients were intellegent beeings and as such they didn’t all believe in the same ideals.
Drones like the Sky Rider for example could have been done by the “good” Ancients.Heck, the Heresy program could ahve been done by such a group.[/quote]
Sestren refers to his creators/masters as “the ancients”. Pandora’s Box states that drones were built by the ancients, meaning they were a specific group of people. Sestren wasn’t serving the will of everyone who lived in the utopian civilization. Abadd’s masters were the people we call the ancients because they were the people who built him.
Why do you think that they weren’t powerful enough to stand against the Ancients, Geoff? The Ancient Age seems to have ended with both sides annihilating each other; remember that neither the “Ancients” nor this rival group survived the downfall of the Ancient Age. If they weren’t capable of challenging the Ancients, then by definition the Ancient Age wouldn’t have been brought to such a violent close; the “Ancients” would have just ruled on.
Remember that these are all just arbitrary names, and “Ancient” is just a retrospective name. I very much doubt that they would have called themselves the Ancients; Sestren is just referring to their long-dead nature. There’s no capital “A” in “the ancients” or “the ancient ones”; they’re clearly just descriptive, not names.
Of course not, I agree; I thought it was pretty well established that Craymen didn’t know she had been stolen… isn’t it?
As far as the evidence goes, it seems that they simply planned to use her as a tool to destroy the Tower. Azel only gradually gained her own free will in the present time; she was essentially Craymen’s servant to start off with. It doesn’t seem to me as if these rebels / rival Ancients gave her any free will. Craymen still had to release her from the duties they had imposed upon her, after all.
Because they didn’t succeed in stopping the ancients from pushing humanity to the brink of extinction. The ancients essentially accomplished their goals by building the planet a regenerative immune system and going into hibernation until it was ready for their return. The ancients won. I do believe the “people” who opposed the Towers posed a threat to the ancients, but in the end, they didn’t survive the ensuing onslaught.
What is confusing is how the Seekers contradict one another in Panzer Dragoon Saga when describing what became of the Towers. One of the Seekers’ Tower reports states that the Towers became dormant over time (that they had worn down) when Gash himself says dragons terminated all of the active ruins and Towers.
What should we believe? Given that humanity has only now grouped together in sufficeint numbers to begin rebuiling its civilization suggests the Towers went dormant recently (within the past few hundred years at least).
Sorry, that wasn’t really my point. I meant what made you think that they were so technologically inferior to the Ancients? The thing is, the ancient wars were obviously very evenly fought. The Ancients’ rivals decimated the city at the Fallen Ground, for example, which would be no easy feat.
There’s also the very obvious point that the stolen Azel was “sleeping” in a ruin as technologically advanced as any other in the Panzer world. It seems that her captors created this sophisticated place and fitted it out with the same kind of pure type monsters that the “true” Ancients could produce. Atolm - who was “prepared for” Azel, seemingly by this faction - was also recovered from these ruins. In terms of technology, Azel’s captors seem to be indistiguishable from the “true” Ancients.
The only differences seem to be that one side created the Towers, and the other was wided out entirely.
I agree that it’s very hard to determine if any of this is factual or not. However, if dragons were attacking the Towers in the Ancient Age, that would yet again confirm that the Ancients’ rivals did have a similar level of technology - a dragon is, after all, a highly advanced pure type monster.
[quote=“Geoffrey Duke”]What is confusing is how the Seekers contradict one another in Panzer Dragoon Saga when describing what became of the Towers. One of the Seekers’ Tower reports states that the Towers became dormant over time (that they had worn down) when Gash himself says dragons terminated all of the active ruins and Towers.
What should we believe? Given that humanity has only now grouped together in sufficeint numbers to begin rebuiling its civilization suggests the Towers went dormant recently (within the past few hundred years at least).[/quote]
Hmm…
I intepreted Gash’s words in a slightly different way. When he said that the dragons terminated all of the active Towers and ruins, I thought he meant that they simply deactivated them from their fully awakened state. Considering that the dragons were the guardians of the Towers, it would make sense if Sestren had used the dragons (and their drone riders) to connect to the Towers and shut down them, without actually destroying them. After this, the Towers would be in a dormat situation, simply looking after the ecosystem until someone came and awakened them fully again (such when Azel awakened the Tower of Uru in PDS).
I’m probably way out here…
A possibility - this ‘device with a serious defect’ that they were going to implant …couldnt’t it have been the impurity itself? Before I had played Panzer Dragoon Orta I thought that the device might have been a bug that caused Sestren to go haywire, however PDO suggests that it was the Heresy Program that was disobeying TWotA. The defect in whatever this device was could have caused the Heresy Program to be released early.
By the way Lance, in Pandora’s Box the plural noun “ancients” when applied to the group of people who built drones and the Towers is a proper noun:
“Theorists believe that the drones were developed in order to perform
dangerous tasks that the Ancients did not want to perform themselves. Therefore, the assumption is that drones were used in battle,
and producing armaments, as well. It is from this purpose of labor that they
have been given their name”.
They are regarded as a separate and unique faction existing within the ancient civilisation. The term “ancients ones” could be referring to all the different factions co-existing in the Ancient Age.
I have no doubt the opposing factions possessed equally advanced technology but that doesn’t change the fact they were powerless to stop the Ancients from wiping them out. If these rebels needed to resort to stealing drones, then they obviously didn’t build them or believe in building them themselves. Now if the Ancients were the only group of people to build drones, they were the only people capable of coordinating and controlling dragons, as drones who tend to be mindlessly loyal to their creators can easily keep them under control.
What Gash said is very confusing. Perhaps the actual Ancients lost control of their dragons.
[quote=“Solo Wing Dragon”]I intepreted Gash’s words in a slightly different way. When he said that the dragons terminated all of the active Towers and ruins, I thought he meant that they simply deactivated them from their fully awakened state. Considering that the dragons were the guardians of the Towers, it would make sense if Sestren had used the dragons (and their drone riders) to connect to the Towers and shut down them, without actually destroying them. After this, the Towers would be in a dormat situation, simply looking after the ecosystem until someone came and awakened them fully again (such when Azel awakened the Tower of Uru in PDS).
[/quote]
What Gash said seemed completely out of place and for the want of a better word, inconsistent. If his words were true though, the Towers couldn’t have worn down over time. I see way to reconcile the two viewpoints.
I would’ve thought that 10 000 years was a sufficient amount of time to heal the planet if the Towers were active for all that time (the fact human beings were merely beginning to rebuild their civilization suggests they were active during that timespan though). Did the Towers struggle to repair the damage inflicted on the world by decades of strife, or wasn’t 10 000 years enough time to complete the task?
Hmm, well - strictly speaking, anyway - they are not really being classified as separate or unique. The people of the present world just seem to refer to anyone that existed in that era as “the Ancients”. They never differentiate between the different sides in the Ancient Age wars, which is what we’re really getting at here. To anyone alive in the present world, the people of either side are thought of “the Ancients”, as far as the evidence seems to go.
The people don’t use the word “Ancient” to signify those in a certain alignment; they use it to signify those in a certain time period.
Hmm, well the entire planet did get annihilated; it didn’t seem like much of an easy victory. I’m sure the victorious Ancients would have preferred to just win by standard military might. The fact that the whole planet had to be decimated in order for them to overcome their foes does suggest that they put up a hell of a fight, surely?
I wouldn’t say they obviously couldn’t build Drones because of this. Remember that they didn’t resort to stealing Drones, they resorted to stealing Azel. The only obvious fact is that they couldn’t build a Drone to take over a Tower, which would make sense because they would have no access to a Tower and so they’d have no idea how to build something to control one. As I pointed out earlier:
"The Towers were only built by the other Ancient Age nation, of course. So how could the rival Ancients build Drones to operate something that they would not have access to? Ancient Age technology seems to be far beyond rocket science, and if they didn’t have the blueprints for the Tower I don’t see how they could make a Drone that could operate it. The technology just seems so ridiculously complex. It’d be like trying to make software for a piece of hardware that you didn’t know the first thing about."
If the Ancients’ rivals had pure type monsters, white/black structures, and probably dragons of their own, I think it’s at least feasible that they could make Drones as well.
I once believed that an opposing faction decimated the world in a desperate attempt to combat the bio-weapons unleashed upon it by the Towers. Even if the people who opposed the ancients built their very own bio-weapons they weren’t mass produced on the same scale the Towers were capable of churning out.
You’re right about the Ancients being citizens of the Ancient Age (this is how Pandora’s Box defines the Ancients in fact). The Seekers’ Tower function report states that the Towers were built by the “rulers” of the ancient civilization, which falls in line with what Craymen said about the warring factions of the Ancient Age building the Towers in a combined, concerted effort to regenerate a planet suffering from decades of war.
The Empire sought to control the Tower of Uru because it was rumoured to have destroyed continents overnight. Perhaps no one, with the exception of a few small rebellious groups, resisted at all.
The rulers of the Ancient Age – the people Abadd was meant to revive – were clearly insane.
The ancient civilization was indeed destroyed by its own bio-weapons as is stated in various parts of the English Saturn Panzer Dragoon trilogy, only the rulers were the people responsible. Abadd is going to kill us for figuring this all out you know?
Hmm, I think I might be missing your point Geoff. Is your theory that:
Different Ancient Age nations (of similar power) waged war on each other, decimating the environment
After the wars, they got together and made the Towers, to try and repair the world
The rulers of the world then turned the Towers against everyone else and went into hibernation / stasis so that they could inherit the Earth?
(And Azel was stolen by actual rebels who wanted to stop the rulers and their Tower-related plan?)
If that is what you mean; well, it’s a very nice theory. I can’t help thinking that it’s contradicted by a few bits and pieces of info, though…[/quote]
Well thanks to our conversation I’m certain I’m close to the truth. I need to give it more consideration though.
Just for reference, here’s my (very unimagitive) interpretation of how the Ancient Age came to an end:
In the Ancient Age, two (or more) factions - that were at similar technological levels - waged war on one another. The wars were primarily fought with living weapons (made by both sides), and the conflicts laid waste to much of the planet.
Still during the wars, one side built the Towers. The Towers were massive weapon (monster) production facilities, but at the same time they served to sustain the ravaged environment. (Their creators wanted to make sure that there would be a planet left to claim, should the wars ever be won).
Realising that the wars were escalating into a global cataclysm, the rulers of the side that made the Towers went into stasis / hibernation in order to save themselves. They left the Towers running.
The wars did indeed end up in a mass nuclear armageddon / cataclysm which decimated the planet, and the Ancient Age ended.
I know it’s dull, but that’s the most straightforward version of events I’ve been able to come up with…
