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The culture of Phantasy Star Online


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I always find amazing how much culture some games carry with them, many hidden meanings and messages that sometimes get lost in translation.

 

How about we discuss some culture references from the Phantasy Star series, or simply discuss if such things could be related?

I'm not the best with words but I love to discover little things in the games i love :3

Starting with the first, origin of the names of the following weapons:

Fire Scepter: Agni

BB-FIRE_SCEPTER_AGNI-TEKKER-2.jpg

"A legendary magic cane containing the power of fire. It's special attack adds fire damage."

Assumptions:

With some research we can find easily on wiki that Agni was a Rigvedic deity of fire also a god of divine knowledge, who leads the man to gods. 

We could conclude that the name came from that origin.

Agni is second only to Indra(oh what we have here? Familiar name right?) in power and importance attributed to him in Vedic mythology, third being Surya(another familiar name??).

Sadly as I look at the weapon he carries that would've been a Staff, could've this been a mistake by SEGA?

  • "Agni is represented as red and two-faced, suggesting both his destructive and beneficent qualities, and the black eyes and hair, three legs and seven arms." - Guess it was premeditated after all, the weapon's design matches nicely the description!

Heres a picture: 0e990693185c1e8c00a943bdf45e83a3.jpg

 

In buddism Agni is one of 12 devas, as guardian deities:(starting to see many familiar names!)

  • Indra (Taishaku-ten),
  • Agni (Ka-ten),
  • Yama (Emma-ten),
  • Nirrti (Rasetsu-ten),
  • Vayu (Fu-ten),
  • Ishana (Ishana-ten),
  • Kubera (Tamon-ten),
  • Varuna (Sui-ten)
  • Brahma (Bon-ten),
  • Prithvi (Chi-ten),
  • Surya (Nit-ten),
  • Chandra (Gat-ten).

 

Storm Wand:Indra

 

STORM_WAND_INDRA-WITHBARS.jpg

 

"Legendary magic cane containing the power of lightning. Adds lightning damage"

 

Assumptions:

The weapon stats as confirmed are a little bit better than Fire Scepter:Agni.

Indra is the leader of Devas and the lord of Svargaloka or a level of heaven in Hinduism. His weapon is a thunderbolt known as vajra(cof cof "The Sigh of a God").

He is also represented as a god of war, constantly waging war against the opponents of gods.

Indra is sometimes described as gold-bodied with golden jaw, nails, hair, beard.(it's a bit hard to visualize so lets research some more)

In Rigveda one passage calls him both brown and yellow.

Here's a picture/some of them he had green(?)skin, unsure if that influenced the design:

INDRA.jpg

Rudra(ohh another familiar name) would've been the one uniting the destructive aspects of nature, storm and fire, this one being associated with wind/storm.

 

Ice Staff: Dagon

 

ICE_STAFF_DAGON-WITHBARS.jpg

 

"Legendary magic cane with the power of ice. Has the ability to freeze enemies"

 

Assumptions:

Dagon was originally an East Semitic Mesopotamian fertility God, who evolved into a major Northwest Semitic god.

Dagon/Dagan is also called ti-lu ma-tim, "dew of the land" and Be-ka-na-ba, possibly "Lord of Canaan".

"Jewish Bible commentator Rashi writes of a biblical tradition that the name Dāgôn is related to Hebrew dāg/dâg 'fish' and that Dagon was imagined in the shape of a fish "

Here's a picture:

dagon1.jpg

 

Conclusions:

Due to lack of wind element in game (it actually exists but.. it's nothing special), and I think in order to keep a logic of Fire, Ice and Thunder, Rudra was replaced with other deity that related to the water/Icy element. I'm still not totally pleased with the third deity maybe something else inspired Ice staff:Dagon's concept. 

 

What do you think? 

Is there some more to speculate about this 3 weapons?

 

 

 

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My that's a lot of information! I did assume those scepters did have a background of India/Eastern mythology. The developers (japanese, in general) get a lot of their creativity by drawing from historical information. I'll definitely have to read this later, skimmed a little bit for now.

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Honestly I don't think there's much more behind their basic appearance and what their name means. But I know some weapon names and such mean things in other languages. Like Girasole is Italian for sunflower, Yamigarasu means dark raven(from what I've looked up at least). Le Cogneur means The Whomping, according to google translate at least. There's probably more out there, but honestly those are the only ones I can thing of. I just find it interesting knowing what certain weapon names mean or what their background is.

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I really like some of the technique names in PS(O). They are obviously based on German words which I always found fascinating (don't know how this is with other translations as I only know the English one)

Ryuker - is kind of like the word "Rückkehr" which means "going/coming back"

Hinas (a tech used to exit dungeons) - is very similar to the German word "hinaus" meaning "go out/leave"

Foie - simillar to "Feuer" the Word for fire.

There are probably more that I don't remember right now, just off the top of my head.
I remember some other language influences as well, and even the above examples probably work with other languages as well. Or maybe I'm just imagining things...

Edited by Ogni-XR21
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Hinas is not in PSO I think

Then between Foie and Feuer... I only see the F as common. If you're doing such comparison, then what about fire (en), feu (fr), fuoco (it), fuego (es) ? Na seriously it's just a F thing and that's it, nothing to do with german in particular.

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On 19.7.2016 at 1:15 PM, Misombre said:

Hinas is not in PSO I think

Then between Foie and Feuer... I only see the F as common. If you're doing such comparison, then what about fire (en), feu (fr), fuoco (it), fuego (es) ? Na seriously it's just a F thing and that's it, nothing to do with german in particular.

I know it's from the 1-4 games, hence my "PS(O)" remark. But it shows where some of the inspiration comes from.

The Foie/Feuer thing is probably not very obvious, but it's pronounced almost exactly the same. If you would add an R to Foie you would end up with the same word, phonetically.

 

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Hum ^^ we could begin to argue on how Foie is supposed to be pronounced in the first place.

Because you know, in french we pronounce Foie very simply (something like "Fwha" in english I guess). So I guess that you guys pronounce Foie => "Foye" (with the "ye" part a bit detached). Which makes sense for Feuer can be pronounced kinda "Foye-r" so yeah, it would be Foie with a R at the end.

Now, since PSO is japanese, we're probably both wrong in our ways of pronouncing it ^^

It would be interesting to know how japanese pronounce PSO's stuff

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Phantasy Star has taken inspiration from many different cultures so I would not be surprised if a lot of stuff has some meaning that we just don't understand. I remember reading about Megid being some reference to some "end of days" scenario.

Fake Edit: http://www.psalgo.com/myths.html

Megid: The most powerful offensive technique draws on the name of Megiddo, a hill in Israel. This hill has been the site of many historical battles. According to some interpretations of the Bible, this area will be the location of the final battle between God and Satan, better known as Armageddon, which signals the end of the world.
 

 

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