you go up into the clouds, but they are strange looking clouds… and there does not appear to be anything around other than the clouds. abadd’s mare continually submerges into a seemingly liquid dimension that does not interact with this one.
are you in the sestren?
does abadd go into the sestren when he disappears?
or is the sestren not involved at all?
lets assume the environment was related to the sestren; that and abadd’s god-like projection in the sestren as well as his seemingly limitless knowledge and control of the sestren lead me to believe that his importance has been underestimated.
i’m beginning to think that abadd was more powerful than azel. perhaps it was just that she was uneducated as to the extent of her abilities at the time of saga. but abadd had demonstrated so much within the sestren, and possibly… the ability to freely move between the real world and the sestren.
I know what you mean about the sky during that battle; it looked quite odd and liquid-like, but I suspect that might just have been stylised graphics rather than a sinister implication. As for there being nothing below you but more sky and clouds, Episode 4 did use that approach too, so it likely doesn’t signify much in itself.
The question of what Abadd was actually doing when he disappeared is a tough one though, as nothing quite like that has happened elsewhere in the series. If we could be sure what Sestren was really meant to be it’d be easier to say if it was involved or not, but as it is it’s unclear what Abadd was doing even in general terms - could his dragonmare dive in and out of dimensions, or was it just becoming invisible with some kind of ancient cloaking technology? Personally I don’t think that Sestren would have been involved, but then I have pretty unimaginative views on these things.
I’m not so sure about Abadd having “limitless knowledge and control” of Sestren, though; In PDO he seemed to sneak into the system when it opened to allow Orta and the dragon in, or at least that seemed like a very real possibility. (He wasn’t able to properly contain Orta and the dragon in Sestren either, although that really doesn’t prove much.)
yeah, he wasn’t exactly sestren exis, but he seemed a like suitable heir.
it very well could have been flashy effects for the battle, but i don’t think it was a form of cloaking device- there was a clear event horizon that he was popping in and out of and it seemed to encase the entire area.
i assume that azel reprogrammed the sestren to accept orta as the master, but i think abadd clearly knew a lot about it. if creating an enormous astral projection of himself, teleporting to wherever he wanted to be, and summoning power ups wasn’t enough, he also planned to possess orta’s body through some obscure function.
although it may have come down to orta just having to issue the order to the sestren to not obey abadd
Yeah, on second thoughts the cloak explanation doesn’t seem so likely, at least not in the normal sci-fi sense; maybe it’d work in the manipulate-reality-to-hide-yourself-in-another-dimension sense, though.
I’m pretty sure that the dragon itself was meant to be the master; at least, the “gene base code 12” thing seemed to imply that. (I expect it would have been appointed master by the Heresy Dragon / Program when it destroyed the Sestren AI.)
While most people seem to believe that Abadd followed Orta into Sestren, I don’t think this was the case. Unlike Orta, Abadd was clearly transformed within Sestren, which I think showed that he was indeed meant to enter the system. Also, Abadd himself activated the Cradle from within Sestren, again indicating that he was far from powerless within the system.
I’m not sure if there’s any explanation behind the “liquid clouds” in the final battle. Like Lance said, it could have simply been a nice graphical effect Smilebit wanted to use. I also considered the possibility that Abadd actually jumped in and out of Sestren, but we’ve never seen any proof that a portal to the Sestren could be opened from any location. As far as we know, Sestren can only be entered through the gateways inside the ruins. However, if he did enter Sestren through these portals though, that might explain how he could transform his dragonmare so quickly.
In saga Atolm could teleport around (out of battle he did that really cool things where the sky seemed to shatter, in battle there was a flash and he was suddenly behind you) , maybe Abbads mare could do a similar trick?
Actually, I’d completely forgotten about that. We can definitely rule out any Sestren involvement in Atolm’s case, and as Abadd’s mare seemed to be dropping in and out of existence in a similar (albeit much more high-budget) way, it looks like the Ancients simply had some strange teleportation / warping technology that they could build into their dragons.
Yes, it does seem like there’s some kind of dimentional warping involved, remember how Atolm seemed to “break out” of it at the end of the second battle with him? I also think that some things in the older Panzer Dragoon games did the same thing, I think that’s how the Dark Dragon made his exit after the Episode 2 boss fight (or did he simply fly away without teleporting?), or what about Shelcoof in the icy ocean level in Zwie (where there was a flash before and after it appeared)? If nothing else it’s a cool effect, but I’m not sure we’ll ever find a really concrete reason for it.
Although it might not be the kind of reason you mean, I’m pretty sure the real-life explanation for that Shelcoof example was the Saturn’s limitations. Shelcoof had to appear far ahead of the dragon, but as the limited draw-in distance meant that it would literally pop out of thin air, the programmers masked its appearance and disappearance with the white flash. I suspect that it’s only meant to be the blizzard getting thicker though, rather than a warp effect.
