From the better-late-than-never department:
I've discovered another one of Mr. Toyama's inspirations.
Back when I was first puzzling this stuff out, I thought I saw this:
At the time it hadn't occurred to me to try reading the
lines from bottom to top. Read from top to bottom, it sounds kind of poetic, but from the bottom it's much more normal:
Take a look as we remember some of our fallen heroes.
Well, it sounds normal enough, but in fact that exact sentence has only, in the vast oceans of the internet, been written in but
one single place.
This gameinformer.com article from April 2011:
http://www.gameinformer.com/b/features/archive/2011/04/27/characters-that-died-under-our-watch.aspx
(I might even have read this back when it first came out! Has anyone else?)
You might be thinking that that doesn't prove anything, and that it's probably a coincidence, but read the article and pay close attention to what's just before the sentence about the fallen heroes: "As the industry's storytelling methods have progressed..."
Yes, that's right there on the map in Pleajeune too:
GOP EVH SDHTM GNLLTYDT / S YRSUNI EH SA; "As the industry's storytelling methods have prog(ressed)..."
What I had thought was a T in my earlier post is in fact a V, so we now know that two of the phrases in the background of the Pleajeune map were borrowed from this same source! And it was written right when this game was being developed!
(Further speculation:
in between these sentences in the Game Informer article is "we've seen several instances of a protagonist's death as a plot device". I do hope that this isn't some kind of super-subtle allusion to Kat having died before the game begins, or something like that!)
