morterlust wrote:

That actually makes a lot of sense now, but why is the Arkana so bipolar about addressing the commander then? At one point she'll be like "don't stare at my ***!" another time she'll treat you like a pervert, and then out of the blue she talks to you like you were her master. Granted, this may be part of the localization and if this issue has already been address I apologize for bringing it up, but for someone who was really into the story line, little things like that stuck out like a sore thumb. Of course most people probably just spam-clicked through the story line and engaged the auto-pilot to a quest destination objective, but I strongly feel like that even those people who skipped the story line will eventually return to it after hearing just how amazing and captivating it is. I honestly haven't seen stuff this good since early SNES games (some games had such great story lines, they completely overshadowed any pixalated graphics and pushed the games to great success) On a side note, I feel like dialect directly between your Arkana is a huge plus for this game. It establishes the mentioned symbiotic relationship between her and yourself. However, I found her too ungrateful at times given the predicament she is in. For example, she recognizes that the special dust or whatever it was called, is extremely rare and only Lord Brahmans can obtain it, so clearly she sees that we have something she needs. It would be nice if she recognized that, hey, I may have to shell out real life $$$ to get this stuff and effectively use it to benefit her directly. And there she goes off about "don't stare at my ***", "I'm not your b****" (dungeon 1), and so on. Confidingly at other times she goes so deep as to say she gets wet just thinking about Lord Brahman ( zone 2 o_O ). So this is why I got confused between the two entities and although intuitively I wanted to establish them as one and the same, Arkana's bipolar view of them suggested otherwise. Anyway, just my two cents. I also wanted to thank the localization team for a FABULOUS job that they are doing! I eagerly look forward to this game's next phase!

Mood Swings I Guess (Have not played alpha so can't say much)

I'm sure the Arkana's mood and disposition towards the Commanders will have settled by CBT.

@morterlust: Thank you for the kind words about the localization. I wasn't involved in the quest and character writing for Scarlet Blade myself (I mainly worked on SB's mountain of UI/menu/system text and some incidental text, like the flavor text you see on enemy drop items), but I'll definitely pass your post on to the story team. I can't speak for them here, but I'd take comparison to the SNES greats as high praise.

One of the really interesting things about Scarlet Blade is that while in most games you play "as" a character, SB frames the player and the player character as different entities, which allows the game to have the character talk directly TO the player (which in any other case would be 4th Wall-breaking to the extreme). This required some dexterity in the writing of things like costume descriptions - we had to take into account that the commander, not the Arkana, is the one buying the costume, and phrase things in ways like, "You'll go weak in the knees when you see her rocking this sexy bustier!" instead of "You'll feel like a queen in this sexy bustier!" There were a number of tricky cases like that, but hopefully we pulled it off and correctly differentiated the things directed at Arkana from the things directed at Commanders (that is, you the player).

Now, about the "bipolarity" of the Arkana. What you're seeing there is, as previously mentioned, the midway-state between the direct translation (brought to us by our excellent and very speedy Korean translators) and our localization. In the original text, faithfully translated, the Arkana were very subservient and pandering to their commander, almost to a worshipful degree. The story team decided they wanted to take a different tack and made the relationship between the Commander and Arkana more rocky. When you go into Closed Beta, that tone should be much more consistent, because after Alpha we finally got LivePlex to put a month's worth of localization work into the game.

I'm really curious which type of Commander/Arkana relationship players would prefer. What I would have liked is if we were able to write each class individually, where a class like the Whipper would likely have a more antagonistic relationship with her Commander, but the Medic might actually be very lovey-dovey and the Defender might view her commander as a valued partner working toward the same goal. Seeing a player choose their Arkana based not on skills or stats but on personality would be really interesting, don't you think?

Right now, all Arkana use the same dialogue responses because responses aren't divided by class. We asked LivePlex about that, and while I don't know if they'll create subdivided responses for every class, we may at least get subdivided text that we can change based on whether your character is part of the Royal Guards or the Free Knights. I won't promise anything there, but that's what we would like to do, given the devs' cooperation and the time to do it (in between continuing to do things like new content updates).

I hope you're all looking forward to Closed Beta - it may help answer some of your lingering questions about the story and characters. Cheers~

Oh wow, you guys are actually considering creating different dialog for each class? That would be so amazing! That alone would be worth playing every class to at least alt level. Such an implementation would be huge! And this is coming from someone who in general hates reading.

As for relationship between your Arkana, that's a tough one. I would prefer her to be submissive. After all, it is me controlling her and the way I see it, me going out of my way to make sure she is well equipped and taken care of. In that sense, it would feel gratifying rewarding her loyalty. This is no news however as it works similarly in real life too. The twist comes with people'd different preferences however. As you may imagine someone with opposite of alpha-personality would want the Arkana to take charge. This is where the other brilliant idea comes into play, span out the relationship tone based on class. Sentinel may be playful or a brat. Definitely more combat-direct for a defender, and submissive for medic. Whipper, sheesh, I don't even know where to begin with her. She could go from dominant to kinky in a sheer thought of one's imagination. Alas, this is just my take and I definitely cannot speak on everyone's behalf here because to each their own.

Ittoujuu, please give translation team my whole heated thanks for their dedicated and devoted effort; I tip my hat to their astonishing accomplishment. Also to anyone involved, my personal thanks for putting such a degree of attention to detail for items throughout the game. Believe it or not, sometimes an item's name alone can sway a person to hold onto it just because it sounds cool. That or to spam the chat by linking assorted items in succession to create an unwarranted phrase or sentence, lol.

Lastly, I wanted to comment on the profanity in this game. I !@#$ LOVE IT! Hahaha! Seriously, thank you!! Many people who will speak against it will no doubt agree that it's merely unorthodox, but frankly unless you live in the Vatican, profanity will catch up to us to remind us that we are adults. I welcome it! I mean, how silly is it to not have it? NPCs in game are such hard-asses and you want to tell me that even after loosing their home world to some alien scum they won't even shed a single vulgar word? Yyyeah right! That's almost more fictional than the setting. Let's get real... show me one guild in a game that doesn't cuss. Show me a channel that isn't spammed by some sort of profanity sooner or later during a player's adventure. Yet suddenly when NPCs do it in an adult rated game it's supposed to be a no no? How pathetic is that? LoL. In fact I feel like the profanity was a bit light, however I understand that NPCs saying such ilk is a new concept, however when taken outside of the scope of the NPCs, it's very common. Besides, the localisation team used it well. It was used to heighten a perceived state of emotion from an NPC to the player. It sets the tone and puts an accent mark on it, sort to speak. It conveys your Arkana's or an NPC's distressful predicament they have found themselves in. It separates villains wannabe's from ruthless nefarious NPCs. It's funny -oh now many times I laughed my *** off reading the story line.

Once again, thank you Aeria Games for this gem of a game. I eagerly look forward to beta should I make it in.

ittoujuu wrote:

In the instances where you see "Lord Brahman," that's text where we're still awaiting the implementation of our localized version. In all our localized text, we've changed "Lord Brahman" into "Commander", so they're one in the same (much as we localized "Elkana" to "Arkana"). As large chunks of complete text are finally slotted into the game, you should hopefully see all the "Lord Brahman" dialogue be replaced by text the localization team has gone over, instead of the raw English translation that's been in there placeholding for us.

LOL Ittou, I was wondering if you were doing localizations for this. Bet you had fun working on this game.

Just curious why "Lord Brahman" was the place holder? Does "Brahman" has some significance to those over seas?

TBH every time I saw "Lord Brahman" appear in game I kept thinking of the 2 headed cows in Fallout.

After face palming at a lot of the "lazily" done story elements in Alpha, this restores my hopes at a chance to be more immersed in the storyline of play itself. Thank you, Ittoujuu. This is a lot to think over and... by the way... I sincerely hope you'll continue the fight for quality scripting. As a writer, I'm very OCD about things like that so knowing at least one (probably more) localizers have our backs on this issue is reassuring. <-- because there's no hug emoticon.

ittoujuu wrote:

Seeing a player choose their Arkana based not on skills or stats but on personality would be really interesting, don't you think? s~

to be honest, that's one of the reasons I decided to choose a Defender, basing my choice on the wik iand aeria site class overwiev description.

I would like to see the different classes have different responses/ relationships. It would make more sense and add a reason to play all the classes. If that can't be done, it would make more sense for the RG Arkana to be more submissive, and the 2nd-3rd generation Arkana (FK) be more rebellious.

Never got the chance to play alpha, but I like the Idea of the player as a character in the game

I have an idea about the different personalities of the Arkanas. What if their behaviour towards the Commander depends on choices you make in the game. Basically, you make two or more different personalities that the Arkana alternates between based on choices. Like I said, I haven't played the alpha, so I don know about all the mechanics in the game. But assuming the Arkana gets rested xp in certain areas, if you log out in such an area the arkana will be more positive towards you.

That was just one bad example, I'm sure there could be many other ways to change her attitude

BUT, I'd rather have the Arkanas be submissive. If I'm gonna buy stuff for her, I don't wanna have to deal with taking crap from her

I think it would be great if the arkanas changed reaction based on how the commander handles things.