Melnics, on the other hand, doesn’t use the exact same sounds as English, but instead maps each letter to a different sound or phoneme, much like Japanese. It sounds fittingly foreign, but it being a cipher doesn’t make sense within the setting and often results in words filled with bizarre consonant clusters. It’s impressive in how well it was adapted when the game was released in English, but Al Bhed starts to fall apart once you try translating various English words and end up with unpronounceable phrases. Like Melnics, it’s just a cipher, with each Al Bhed letter corresponding to a different English or Japanese character, something players can unscramble by finding dictionaries scattered around the world. Perhaps the most well-known JRPG example of a constructed language is Al Bhed from Final Fantasy X.
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Though the party eventually embark on a quest to collect elemental “craymels” and stop Inferia and Celestia from crashing into each other, much of the early game involves searching for a way to communicate with Meredy and understand the Melnics language. The story begins with Reid encountering Meredy, a dark-skinned, purple-haired Celestian girl who drops out of the sky and starts speaking in the foreign language of Melnics. Tales of Eternia takes place on two parallel worlds separated by a barrier: protagonist Reid’s home of Inferia and the more technologically advanced civilisation of Celestia. Although the script looks like fantastical wingdings at first, it’s possible to decipher Melnics so let’s break it down and see how this language helps Tales of Eternia to stand out.
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One aspect that really impressed me was the fictional language of Melnics.
Shin megami tensei synchronicity prologue dialogue english series#
I’d comfortably call Tales of Eternia my favourite game in the series and the setting is a big part of that. This time we’re taking a look at Tales of Eternia, an early instalment that’s rarely talked about by Western fans, but one that had a huge influence on the direction of the series. Our seasonal look at the Tales series continues, now with a fancy page collecting all these articles in one place.