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Real Language In Jade Empire
HamOperator writes "Tho Fan is a made-up language spoken by unreal people in the XBox game Jade Empire. The New York Times has an interview with the creator of the language." From the article: "...they wanted to avoid using Chinese or any other Asian language that might shackle their invented universe to actual historical events. At the same time, they did not want to resort to unintelligible nonsense."
One of the main reasons they made up this language is so that they didn't have to pay different actors to speak every single line of dialog for every piddling NPC. They just have a few different tracks of gibberish for different moods, genders, races, etc. and loop those depending on the character and the way the conversation is going. Drove me nuts in KOTOR, and was well on its way to doing so during the time I played Jade Empire.
Don't blame me, I voted for Durga.
Hell, there are probably conlangers out there who would do something like this for free.
To me, a cost of $2000 over four months sounds like free with a rounding error. Small price to pay for some professional work I think.
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
It means that they're going to be selling the game in asia, and they want to make sure they don't offend everyone in a certain country (by "mocking" their history).
2. Elven
Elvish. Or if you want to be technical, Quenya and Sindarin.
My Karma: ran over your Dogma
StrawberryFrog
Hell, the language of the ruling class of Rome was Greek, and since Byzantium was Rome and in the East there is no probably about it, they spoke and wrote Greek.
The point isn't China, the point is that they're trying to sell it in Japan.
Ever noticed that many Japanese RPGs take place in a very slightly altered version of the real world and/or real mythology? Many identifiable things, familiar names and themes, but it's never quite authentic. Things aren't quite as they would be normally. In Valkyie Profile, Odin was half human, Frei was a woman, and Freya wasn't a slut. In the Final Fantasy games, Shiva has somewhat fewer arms than you see in tradidtional statuary. In Xenogears, God was a giant world killing weapons system and bishops fed little boys into a machine that processed them as food. There's enough there to identify the source, but not enough there to say it's true to that source.
Jade Empire is doing the same thing. There's enough there to see that it's primarily Chinese mythology, but there are elements of Japanese (I've only seen multi-tailed fox spirits in Japanese myth, anyway), Indian (those elephant demons look an awful lotlike Ganesh to me), and even Jewish (golems) mythology, and a good deal of creative thinking thrown in, and well as a movie-theater treatment of martial arts. It's not a faithful treatment of Chinese mythology, but it is a lot like Valkyrie Profile's treatment of Norse mythology or Xenogears treatment of Catholicism.
They spoke both but in the later centuries Greek was by far prevalent.
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