Believe me Abadd, English is the easiest thing in the biz (from those that i do know).Its’ definately simpler than any romance language.
Of course that every language has it’s “poetic” vocabulary (this was just made up :P) and whatnot but if you looks at verbs for example you’ll qucikly learn that Portuguese (the one language i know best and considered by many one of thougest languages to learn) is very difficult to conjugate cause you have a lot of exceptions.
Actually, English is a very basic language… which actually makes it a bit difficult.
Once you get past the grammatical inconsistencies, the exceptions to every rule, etc. it appears to be a relatively stale language. But, because of its “blandness,” it makes it difficult to really make the words “sing,” for lack of a better word.
Actually, Geoffrey, english does have a poor vocabulary compared to a great many languages out there. Even when comparing Japanese to english, I often find that there are more words in Japanese that are nearly impossible to translate directly than vice versa.
Not to say that english is a “lesser” language. It just works on different mechanics. Just as there are certain subtleties in Japanese that are difficult to master, english relies on those subtleties to convey feelings or thoughts that don’t have specific words to describe them.
It allows for great poetic prose, but takes a lot of effort.
(Actually, though, English is easy to learn to speak at a level good enough to communicate, since there is very little reliance on tone, you can get by with a smaller vocabulary, etc., but grammatically, and spelling-wise, english is a complete mess.)
I completely agree that English is very difficult to master, no matter how easy it may be to learn. More specifically it’s easy to learn to speak the language, but it’s very hard to master the language for use in literature. When a skilled author puts it to use though, it can of course have amazing potential.
EDIT: Which Abadd has just pointed out anyway; I really shouldn’t go to make coffee in the middle of writing posts.
In regards to the “should the Towers be reintroduced in the next game” question, my personal opinion is that they shouldn’t be. The Towers were undoubtedly an excellent design and storyline point, but in my view it would just be unimaginative to start re-visiting them again when their entry into the PD mythos has effectively seen conclusion.
It always seems profoubly uninspiring when a sequel resurrects an already concluded storyline aspect simply for the point of continuing, when there’s a whole world of new possibilities out there that could be explored instead. And with a world as rich as the PD one, there’s no real reason for the creators to start inventing reasons to resurrect the Towers and thus not use original storyline aspects in a new game. (In my opinion, at least.)
I can see where Kadamose is coming from about us not knowing the exact details about the Towers and the Ancient Age, though. The question is, should we ever expect to know such absolute details regarding the PD world? More clues and mysterious implications will always be welcome, but I can’t help thinking that if we ever found out what exactly happened in the Ancient Age it would end up being a bit of an anticlimax. The Ancient Age seems to work as a plot device because it is fundamentlly mysterious; because it invites speculation and it invites the player to stop and wonder.
Not that I don’t want to know more about these things, of course; but I don’t think that the Towers have to be the focus of the next game just for us to find out a bit more about them and their creators either.
And hey, nice fiction Abadd; you seem to have created just the right atmosphere in those introductory passages. I’ll look forward to reading the finished product.
But yeah, I completely agree. While this is a horrible, horrible example to use, one of the things I think Men in Black 2 did horribly (okay, stop laughing now, I’m being serious) was that it went back to using Tommy Lee Jones, despite how the first one ended. It was like the marketing folks said, “Well, people liked Tommy in the first one, let’s just bring him back because they’ll like him again!”
You end up with the same jokes, the same story.
Which is why I thought the secrets of the Towers was best done in a fiction piece (my version of the secrets, not necessarily an official one)
That’s just it though…the story of the Towers is NOT concluded. They were just shut down…we don’t know if the shut down is permanent or not…there is NO information which says otherwise. People are simply assuming that the Tower story is over because they weren’t mentioned at all in Panzer Dragoon Orta.
But let’s face the facts here people…as beautiful as Panzer Dragoon Orta was, it is still the redheaded, bastard step child of the series. Nothing will change that, either.
But, the thing is, only you think that it wasn’t concluded. You have no evidence to believe otherwise.
In Orta, the Heresy Dragon says, “I must rest now,” and you use that as proof. Heresy Dragon does not control the Towers, so that sentence has nothing to do with anything.
By your logic, we could also assume that Return of the Jedi wasn’t the conclusion of the story, either. There could be yet another Death Star in production, and since the emperor can clone himself, he might yet still be alive!
There’s always something you can do to bring an enemy/object/etc. back, but it doesn’t make it a good idea.
If you bring back the Towers, what was the point of Edge’s sacrifice at the end of PDS, then? It makes that chapter completely pointless.
But conversely there’s nothing to suggest that the Towers can be brought back online, either. The Heresy Program’s destruction / deactivation at the hands of the Divine Visitor is never suggested as being a reversible event; the implication was that it would free the world from the Towers permanently.
Not even a new RPG set entirely in the “new” world of Panzer Dragoon Orta? At the end of the day that’s the most likely route that a new RPG will take. Although a story directly related to the old Saturn games (such as one involving the Towers) might be of interest to hardcore fans, a new game will undoubtedly have more widespread appeal if it has an original plot, or one that carries on from the end of PDO (which was set up perfectly for a sequel, after all).
[quote=“Abadd”]But, the thing is, only you think that it wasn’t concluded. You have no evidence to believe otherwise.
In Orta, the Heresy Dragon says, “I must rest now,” and you use that as proof. Heresy Dragon does not control the Towers, so that sentence has nothing to do with anything.
.[/quote]
The Heresy Program/Dragon WAS the cause of of the Tower shutdown by removing the Sestren AI. My theory is that it’s now a part of the Sestren system, much like how the Sestren AI was apart of the system.
Many people commonly think that the Dragon is the one who is narrating the cutscenes of Panzer Dragoon Orta…but that’s not the case at all…it’s actually the Heresy program in Sestren - the eyelid you see in the opening sequence is the Heresy program’s ‘astral form’ observing the world through the Sestren circuits.
[quote=“Abadd”]
If you bring back the Towers, what was the point of Edge’s sacrifice at the end of PDS, then? It makes that chapter completely pointless.[/quote]
Depends on how you look at it. The Towers were malfunctioning due to old age - if they weren’t shut down, they would have continued to control the ecosystem for possibly another century or two and no one would have taken notice, until they finally stopped working on their own entirely.
Edge’s ‘sacrifice’, however, has only brought the world closer to its inevitable demise. So far, I have seen no benefit of the Towers being shut down…other than mankind now having free will - but that’s already proven to be a double edged sword.
Still though, nothing in the games actually suggests that the Heresy Program is still active: the theory may be appealing, but ultimately it does seem like very wishful thinking.
To the best of my knowledge Lagi was the narrator of Panzer Dragoon Orta in the original Japanese version of the game, and this aspect was simply modified for the western localisation. (If anyone can confirm this as being definitely true it would be appreciated, by the way).
The environment doesn’t actually seem to be any worse off following the Towers’ deactivation, though. As I think Geoff pointed out earlier, the environment seems to have become stabilised; if anything it looks more healthy now that it has been freed from the Towers’ control.
[quote=“Kadamose”]
The Heresy Program/Dragon WAS the cause of of the Tower shutdown by removing the Sestren AI. My theory is that it’s now a part of the Sestren system, much like how the Sestren AI was apart of the system.
Many people commonly think that the Dragon is the one who is narrating the cutscenes of Panzer Dragoon Orta…but that’s not the case at all…it’s actually the Heresy program in Sestren - the eyelid you see in the opening sequence is the Heresy program’s ‘astral form’ observing the world through the Sestren circuits.
Some people can be so naive…no offense.[/quote]
I can tell you for a fact that it is the dragon doing the narration.
And just because Heresy shut down the Towers, why does it mean he became a part of Sestren, and just because he rests means that the Towers suddenly have the ability to spring back to life?
As for the Towers “malfunctioning” due to old age, not quite. They were functioning quite fine, thank you very much. Yes, part of their function was to help stabilize the environment, but I believe somewhere in Orta, it may say that the great time of environmental change had passed.
Indeed, “dragons ended the Ancient Age by terminating all of the active ruins and Towers”.
It would make sense if some rival/rebel faction with its own dragons disabled the Towers’ abilities to remove pests from the environment, but still left the Towers intact to prevent the world from dying.
