That Mysterious Scroll in Besaid Temple

[mintywolf]

I got some bigger pictures of that wall hanging I was puzzling over. It's a bit more legible now, but its meaning isn't any clearer.





Trying to read this is like trying to read an eye chart and needing glasses, and unfortunately, as far as I can tell, it doesn't translate into anything. The big letters are A and Z, which show up paired at the top and bottom of things in several places throughout Spira to represent Yevon and Sin, respectively. I thought it might be the Hymn of the Fayth, given the way the characters are spaced like words if you read them vertically, but when translated it just came out as gibberish. :(

I deciphered (to the best of my ability) the top line going horizontally and then a few lines vertically and didn't get much out of it:

A

E M B D O U U H G I
N H N
? ? V
- I ?
H G K
F L
Z - Y

Z

Here's the Yevon alphabet, if anyone else wants to try translating this.

Hopefully we'll get a clearer look at it in the HD version. Until then I'm going to assume it was meant to be a prayer or the Hymn and they developers just didn't bother putting in accurate characters because they didn't count on it actually being read.

Comments

[auronlu]

Wow. Congrats on digging even that much out of it; I'd thrown my hands in the air.

This is the sort of the thing the HD remaster should help with, even if Blandly Handsome Tidus is not to our liking.

[stealth_noodle]

Oh nice! Yeah, I have no idea how to make any kind of meaning out of those translated letters. Maybe it is an eye chart. :P

[cumuluscastle]

I just looked up a comparison of regular Tidus and remastered Tidus to see what you two meant and I agree 100%. I never thought I would even have an opinion on him one way or the other, but it's like the remaster sucks out 99% of his cuteness!

[stealth_noodle]

They smoothed all the doof out of him! It is tragic. ;_;

[mintywolf]

The doof was the best part! :(

[mintywolf]

Yeah! And it's a problem with ALL of the new models, although Tidus and Yuna got hit the hardest. They all have these too-polished, expressionless faces now. :(

New Yuna bothers me even more than Tidus. :(

[cumuluscastle]

She doesn't look like herself either. I find it so odd when these kinds of things happen!Why did changing the quality of the images result in this?

[auronlu]

They had to rebuild the 3D models with more detailed texture maps, so it's more than just changing image quality... it was adding data that wasn't in the original.

My hunch is that they started with the running-around-town, in-battle, lowest-quality 3D models, which probably had the most associated animations...



...and then redrew them, boosting the complexity of the polygons and redrawing their texture maps

I think they used those as a starting point rather than the higher-quality, lip-synched models seen in cutscenes when a character is the focus of a shot:



Also, I've read somewhere (I can't find it now) that Squeenix may have originally farmed out the remaster to a third party studio, as they did the iOS version of FFV that ended up with Faris and Lenna a bit Gumby-fied.

I'm not sure whether that's true, but even if it isn't: in the past year or so, Squeenix has had to redo their FInal Fantasy XIV flagship MMO after the original release came out to mixed reviews (take two seems to be doing much better), plus they were trying to finish FF Versus, stuck in development hell for seven years, and Lightning Returns. So I'm sure the bulk of Square's animators and designers were working on the new titles.

[cumuluscastle]

I see exactly what you mean from those images.

Ah yes, FFXIV, Versus, Lightning Returns. None of which I am interested in. Oh well, I think Squeenix lost me years ago when my husband came with an XBox rather than a PS3. ;)

[auronlu]

yeah, no more rubber ducky lips. It's so sad.