i was under the impression that towers were a bit of a rarity…
but in the maps it shows many many towers and actually every ruin that you’ve been through was actually a tower… were these actually all towers? or perhaps an inaccurate translation and they are actually just ancient installations (whether ruins or towers).
by the way, thanks for the work on maps, everyone that had something to do with them (lagi webmaster and lance way in particular)… but i guess i’ll thank everyone else while i’m at it…
Surprising as it may seem, those genuinely are meant to be the locations of Towers. This map that appeared in a Panzer Dragoon Saga guide was literally titled “the Tower distribution map”; this was printed on the page above the map, but it’s been cropped off on that image.
If you compare that with the routes travelled in the games, you’ll also see that those Towers are not actually the ruins that Kyle, Lundi and Edge travelled through; they just happened to be quite close by. It would make some sense if various Ruins and Towers were built near to one another, in the way that the ruins of Uru were relatively close to the Tower of Uru; I don’t expect that the Ancients would want to cross half the Continent to get from building to building.
As to why the Empire never discovered (or at least, never tried to reactivate) those other Towers, I guess that’s open to speculation. As lagi said, they could be non-operational Towers, although we do know that most of the world’s Towers were meant to be functional on some level (because the Great Fall still took place when they were all deactivated). Importantly though, all of those other Towers existed out in the regions that the Empire didn’t control, and - given the huge scale of those maps - it’s feasible that they simply never came across them. It’s also quite possible that they were entirely or partially buried, like most Ancient Age ruins we know of.
It’s also worth noting that the Empire never discovered Shelcoof in the seventy years between the Empire’s birth and Panzer Dragoon Zwei, and only many years after that did they locate the Tower of Uru. It can’t be very easy to track things down in the PD world…
The Towers were supposed to control the environment of an entire planet, so you can expect to find a lot of them spread over the surface. Because of this Lagi didn’t tried to destroy them one by one going after sestren directly instead. (If I remember well Gash said something like this in PDS)
This make you wonder where Shellcoof was hidden all these years.
one other thing though… maybe i’m totally forgetting something out of saga or zwei that would explain it but…
how did shelcoof get from being crashed into the side of a canyon wall to half sunken in the sea of ice? did the area in zwei flood later on or did shelcoof get up and find a different place to crash? o_O
i’m considering writing a fan fic, though i’ve never written one before… the idea is to tie the series together even more, but i want to make sure i’m getting it right so i don’t blasphemize anything
I just read through the Map section, nice work Lance! Do you think the lake from Panzer Dragoon 1 could be the same as the Forbidden Sea in PD Orta? There’s also a river flowing into the West Sea from that sea. Also, the mountain area on the Altered Genos map could be the place where the ruin/Tower is located in Episode 6. That was clearly a mountain area.
I’m not sure about the location of Shelcoof , but I think I remember reading a theory that the area was indeed flooded by the Tower of Uru.
As far as I can tell, the most logical explanation is that the semi-repaired Shelcoof hovered from the island where it had crashed at the end of PD2 out over the open sea, where the repair mechanisms set about restoring the ship (which created the tornado seen in PDS).
The idea that the area flooded seems a little less likely to me, as the area of sea around Shelcoof in PDS was littered with Ancient Age ruins and relics; however, there were no obvious Ancient Age leftovers around Shelcoof’s resting place in PD2.
I’m glad the write-ups were of interest; and yes, both of those ideas have indeed crossed my mind. The ruined arches in the lake / sea at the end of Episode 5 of PDO do look similar to the ruins seen in Episode 1 of PD1. Given that those areas must have been in the same part of the world (i.e. near Former Li Vis), it’s certainly possible that Orta revisited the sunken city that Kyle saw in the first game.
It would also make perfect sense if the “Mountain” region on the PDO map was indeed the place where the Episode 6 ruin was buried, as geographically it would be in exactly the right location. (That is, it was in the area beyond the Forbidden Sea that Orta would have arrived at if she was travelling away from the snowfields of Episode 5). I’m surprised that I didn’t mention that in the write-up, as I’ve definitely thought about it; it must have occured to me after I submitted the map work to Solo.
i always figured that that wasn’t her “name” per se… at least originally. she said that it was written on the bed where she was found (i guess that means the chunk of wall). so it’s more like a product name than her designation.
[quote]Megatherium wrote:
how did shelcoof get from being crashed into the side of a canyon wall to half sunken in the sea of ice? did the area in zwei flood later on or did shelcoof get up and find a different place to crash? o_O
[/quote]
I always thought shelcoof changed the weather of the area around it and flooded the area it was in. Probably a lot of reasons why this didn’t happen, but as a piece of continuity, the team of Zwei and Azel must have been working together at that point and did something on purpose- Shelcoof is the only ‘location’ you ever revist in the whole series, I always thought there must have been a specific reason for the changes in where it was situated
On the Towers- A lot of those towers could also be ‘sub-towers’ that are just branches of a main tower, maybe they can’t control things themselves or something.
The Encyclopedia says that the Glacial Plains (the snowlands of Episode 5) froze over at the end of the Ancient Age, but the sea itself (from the end of the Episode) doesn’t appear to be too cold. It isn’t in the same frozen state as northern Georgius from PD2, for example.
I think I theorised in an earlier thread that the frozen region may have been gradually spreading outwards towards that sea, which is why the snows covered those massive pillared ruins at the time Orta passed through them. I still get the impression that those ruins were probably built much more recently than the Ancient Age (because exposed stone monuments barely last 4,000 years, let alone 10,000). As D-Unit has pointed out, however, the pillars probably wouldn’t have been built whilst knee-deep in snow, so this might suggest that the snows had spread over that area only recently.
Alternatively it could just be a seasonal variation (i.e. the snows cover more land in certain seasons), which is probably even more likely.
I think Solo put forward the idea that the Tower of Uru may have been a more important Tower than most - a “central” Tower of some kind - because it’s marked as a large red dot on the “Tower distruibution map”, whilst all the other Towers are small black dots.
That could admittedly just be because it was the Tower encountered in the game, though, and the games never really make any distinction between the nature of the different Towers. Presumably the Towers did have slightly different purposes which we are unaware of, though. We don’t know why it was necessary for Shelcoof to fly, for example - it could theoreticaly have been a Tower charged with regulating the upper atmosphere, but our knowledge of the Towers (and exactly how they carried out their tasks) is unfortunately limited.
i thought that may have been because it was one of the few ruins that has access to the sestren (we do see abadd lead orta into an unknown ruin/tower? that connects to the sestren).
also, the tower of uru melted… maybe the red mark meant that it had melted
