Futhark alphabet

[Vorbei]

Found some on some textures. They use an odd variant of it, though. Some letters don't match up. (one that looks like katakana "to" is used as a "k", but Futhark "k" is more like a "<". Among others I can't begin to identify.)

From Gorre's textures

morning musume
mitoma koutarou
to the hassomani
niizatohirototin

Mitoma Kotaro and Niizato Hiroto were both staff members. Not sure what the third line means. It could be cut off.


book of twilight (one of those letters I can't recognize, but hey, context.)


uzofr kh rdjlix w (????????)

It looks like it might be written on the circular runes that show up a lot, but they're either too small or obscured to read. From what little I can make out, it looks like copypastes of the above nonsense anyway.

Somewhat off topic, but could someone please rip the audio clip of Cedric again? (The isolated clip of the distorted voice played in the Net Slum BGM) The person who originally did so seems to have let their domain expire, and I have no idea how to rip audio.

[Kuukai]

That's awesome! It's interesting to see more stuff I learned in Scandinavian mythology class appearing in the games. The Lost Ground names (and the English version "translations") are all from the Alvissmal (again with mistakes/interpretive spellings), and now we have this. Ito is really into European mythology and history and we get a lot of that in .hack.

-tin is the way Japanese native speakers would spell "-chin" (-ちん), an affectionate and whimsical personal suffix. Since the names are in Japanese order, it's fair to this is probably what that is. Niizato later went on to direct .hack//Link (and cameo in the manga)!

Hasso might be "hassō" (八相), the term for the Eight Phases in Japanese. "Mania" is a common loan word/suffix in Japanese (think Edgemania), so assuming it's cut off, it could be "To the Hassō-mania" which seems like an appropriate thing to write on Gorre.

The Morning Musume reference really dates this game...

Awesome work! I'd be curious to see if anything else says something intelligible...

[Vorbei]

I'm just glad they actually say something here. Futhark is all over the Renegade bases in Tales of Symphonia, but it's just keyboard mashing. I think it's good to put these kinds of things in games. It's subtle and has really inspired an interest in other cultures in a lot of people.

While eight phase mania would make sense, that'd probably be inconsistent with the other lines. They spell out "ou" for the names rather than just putting "o" like they did in "hasso". Then again, consistency is no company's strong point. I like it.

First thing I thought with Morning Musume was "Someone on staff must really like them" since the last time I remember them being mentioned was .hack//4koma.

There's one more texture with random letters floating around, but it's basically alphabet soup.

Hackstract turned up with a bunch of black textures after I got so far down, and gave me nothing but black for GU, so if there's anything else, I wouldn't really know.

[Kuukai]

While eight phase mania would make sense, that'd probably be inconsistent with the other lines. They spell out "ou" for the names rather than just putting "o" like they did in "hasso". Then again, consistency is no company's strong point. I like it.

I thought of that, and came to the same conclusion. The romanizations in .hack//analysis (basically written by CC2) have the same inconsistencies (leading once to an argument that Tsukasa's real name was "Ann").

First thing I thought with Morning Musume was "Someone on staff must really like them" since the last time I remember them being mentioned was .hack//4koma.

In the early 2000s, everyone liked them, and it was hard to imagine them ever going away. Now they've been eclipsed by AKB 48, and now it's hard to imagine them ever going away...

I could believe there's something in G.U., there's a lot of runes. In .hack//Legacy, the floating rune lines from the Lost Grounds in G.U. were retconned into R:1. I'm no expert on extracting, though. Iirc if you have a container opener for PS2 (I think this is a common utility, or maybe you can use an unziper) you can get access to some of the files. The audio tracks for the original games weren't separate files, but one giant PCM file iirc, which plays on most audio players.

[Xu Yuan]

Just found this thread, awesome work Vorbei! I always thought that said "Book of Twilight" since it made the best amount of sense and I had wondered what the runes on Gorre had said.

Also is there something in the Net Slum song? I know the distorted voice but what is "Cedric" in this case referring to?


In addition what is .hack//Legacy? This seems like something I should have heard about somewhere, heh. (Oh wait, was it that short story about the Vagrant AI that may have become Zelkova?)

[Kuukai]

That's what it is. I've been too lazy to edit it but I might be able to release a translation of it soon.

[Xu Yuan]

That is good news indeed. Though the West seems to have been completely abandoned by CCCorp (likely more Bandai Namco since Piroshi has grudgingly spoken against their treatment before) aside from daily Naruto games (which I've heard are really good by the way which gives me hope they may get the next .hack// right) I am glad to see that there are still people like you Kuukai that are willing to bring the later iterations to us.