Finally finished the Stormblood story!
And big props to the team of Gaffers who helped both my protagonist Nozomi Dunan, along with the beautifully-named Udon Quixote, get through the final battle. We had plenty of practice in some PUGs before, but add six more Gaffers, and it's an easy win.
Great expansion, lots of fun to play; can't wait for more!
And with the story done, I turned back to what I love to do with every video game I play: decipher the writing system. They made one for the eastern continents, you see. And I think I've got it.
It's an alphabet, though not quite in the sense that you might be expecting.
If you're familiar with Korean Hangul, on the other hand, everything will be perfectly logical and natural (which is nice to see, because there didn't seem to be much Korean influence in the eastern continents' cultures).
So, progress report #1, way back at the beginning:
Seeing what looked like a pictograph of a house on Gosetsu's collar when he comes on the scene in Vesper Bay, I couldn't stop thinking about how
Doma means
house in Greek and Latin -- and that maybe we were going to get an Asian-style writing system to decipher when we visited the Eastern continents!
Then again, maybe it's just an emblem or logo. We shall see.
Well, when we got to the House of the Fierce, home of Doman warriors in exile, we saw it again, looking like a written character, all the way on the right on this banner:
And the name of the location contained the word "house"! In Japanese, too; it's called
Resshi-an, with
an 庵 meaning house. What could be going on here? What do those other letters say?
We'll get back to them in a few minutes -- I had been hoping they would say
fierce or
resshi or something like that. Now I think they say something else, but let's go back to Kugane for now. Here are two screenshots from the Shiokaze Hostelry in the center of town, and the Sekiseigumi Barracks in the northeast.
Looking at these two, we see the same three characters at the top of the left column on the Shiokaze Hostelry sign, and the top of the right column on the red Sekiseigumi banner. We also see that the first and second characters contain a similar element -- an S-like squiggle with a dot to the left of it and that the second one has two dots in its upper right corner, just like Japanese phonetic
kana do when expressing "voiced" sounds. Those dots make K, S, T, and P into G, Z, D, and B. (Today, the P of ancient times has become F or H, and so P sounds have a circle there.)
Perhaps these first three letters spell out
ku-ga-ne?
If we accept
Kugane for those three, we can take a good guess at what's on the rest of the red banner, because we see another
gu second from the bottom in the left column. And the character immediately following
Kugane appears again in that left column: we have that character, then something with a
k, then that one again, then something new, then a
gu, then another new one.
??-k_-??-gu-__.
Look at the people practicing in the barracks and the answer presents itself: that character appearing twice is a
se, and the word is
Sekiseigumi. The red banner thus says, starting in the top right Asian-style,
Kugane Sekiseigumi.
Adding to how sure we can be about this is the fact that both
se and the
ne in
Kugane have a hook on the right side with a dot inside.
We can associate that squiggle with E and the S-with-dot squiggle with K. Let's keep those shapes in mind as we look at some more characters and try to read those as well.
(TL;DR: we're going to decipher the Kugane alphabet. Two more posts to follow!)
