"Being around Yevon's teachings makes me sick..."

[Nev]

FFX rocks.

I broke the Al Bhed cipher. Not that it's that hard, but I'm only up to Operation Mi'ihen. Kind of neat to be understanding them this early in the game.

It's very cool how they did the Al Bhed speech also - I think they're using some sort of text-to-speech synthesis!

[Nev]

And I will say nothing else, because if I see ONE MORE SPOILER about FFX on this board I will leave and never return. God, this game is good.

[Don]

I think Father sounds like Vader in Al Bhed. Maybe that's where they started with the idea.

The Al Bhed language puzzles is pretty funny in Home when you've half of the language figured out.

[Nev]

It'll be real easy for me. I already got the whole thing figured out.

[Julius Seeker]

Spoilers aren't really that bad for the game as far as Final Fantasy titles go, the only major thing really is the ending.

[Nev]

I disagree, and if you post any, I will fly up to Canada and find you and murder you in the dead of night and bury your body in an unmarked grave near a rusty sewer with a hole to let vermin in to devour your corpse.

(NOTE: Message is meant to convey emphasis and not meant to be taken seriously, so please don't anyone try to get me arrested for threats.)

[Oracle]

Here a spoiler :

The game really isn't that great :o

[Don]

I think it's better without the language figured out because it really does feel like trying to read a new language, since you'd know about half of the alphabet at that point so you get questions like

blah blah Rikku blah blah ?

????
?ell?
?ro??er

Of course all the questions are pretty trivial if you've the language figured out.

[Nev]

Sorry, it'll be a few hours before I stop being an incredible mack, and able to respond to this thread again (see C++ thread under Daily Stuph for reference)

[SineSwiper]

Actually, FFX was one of the better FFs out there.

[Nev]

I think Father sounds like Vader in Al Bhed. Maybe that's where they started with the idea.

I think it may be the reverse. If they are using TtSS, it makes sense to replace phonetics with other phonetics that are similar, because they're using a simple letter-subsitution cypher. Otherwise it would have sounded unrealistic - imagine "Father" being written as "Qwxrth" or something.

Besides, the game was in Japanese first, and the language must have been handled *completely* differently there, so they couldn't have "started" with the idea there.

[Don]

I think they started this with American in mind because otherwise it wouldn't make sense to have just 26 Al Bhed primers (since there are more than 26 characters in Japanese) unless they went back and removed some. Doing the sound substitution would be trivial in Japanese because every character in Japanese is a pronounceable sound, and if you substitute a sound with another sound it's still perfectly pronounceable.

[Nev]

Very little about speech synthesis seems trivial from what I know of it, though you're probably right that it's easier in a language with less fucked up phonetics than English. But I don't think it would be that hard to localize the Al Bhed primers differently on different continents. I don't think any of us have contacts at Square, so I suppose it'll remain a mystery.

[Don]

From my understanding, it is not possible to get an unpronounceable string of letters in Japanese with the exception of the 'n' sound since every other sound in Japanese has the form of consonant + vowel. On the other hand there are plenty of trivial substitution that will produce an unpronounceable string of letters in English.

[Nev]

*sigh*

[Blotus]

*barf*

[SineSwiper]

EDIT: I guess somebody is sore that a low-hit web page like this one is "stealing their bandwidth".

[Nev]

What the hell? *That's* a non sequitur for sure...or am I being too dumb to notice something clever here?

[SineSwiper]

In reply to BL's "barf" post. Sorry, the word "barf" automatically triggers a River City Ransom reference in my mind.

[Nev]

And you didn't notice that it pops up a huge "don't steal my bandwidth"-type graphic message instead of the River City Ransom pic you must have thought you linked to?

[SineSwiper]

Yeah, that's funny considering that it works when linked from Google images.