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Games with unique language

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GoodMorningPluto

Member
One of the things many Final Fantasies do to enrich their worlds and make them seem more vivid is the use of constructed languages – either through speech, like Al Bhed, or through numerous texts and signs seen on screen, but not spoken out. Most of the time it's done by replacing one letter with another letter or symbol. See FF13 alphabet for example:

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Kinda hard to read writing like this without the key, right?

In FF10 there are three scripts: Al Bhed, Spiran and Yevon. It's interesting to note that while AlBhed-speak is done by reshuffling of letters, the actual AlBhed-writing is stylized edition of latin alphabet that is easier to distinguish:

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Spiran letters are another take on latin alphabet:

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Yevon script susbtitutes letters for symbols, with some of them being based on kanji.

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It's interesting to see how this alphabets are being used throughout the game, sometimes even simultaneosuly:

12150021_f520.jpg


12151678_f520.jpg
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(Images are taken from this article, that is a part of really in-depth look about FFX language. I highly recommend to read it!)


In FF12 however we have one of the more interesting cases. It has this confusing location called Great Crystal where the names of its different sections appears to be a random set of words. Turns out it's not and there is a system to it. Not only every word have a meaning, Alexander O. Smith even went beyond what was in the original and altered regular words into exotic ones, taking cues from sanskrit.


great-crystal-key.png


Its layers based on geological periods:

Kanbhru: Cambrian
Uldobi: Ordovician
Sirhru: Silurian
Dhebon: Devonian
Kabonii: Carboniferous
Bhrum: Permian
Trahk: Triassic
Jula: Jurassic

You can learn how far you from center of particular layer with this key:
Pis: Pith
Jilaam: Xylem
Phullam: Phloem

And the directions is there the work of O. Smith comes to play. In Japanese, 4 ways are called by their first syllable: I for East, We for West, No for North, Sa for South. In english version that was changed for more unique sounding names, taking ques from sanskrit:

North – Udii – उदीची (udiicii)
South – Avaa – अवाच् (avaac)
East – Praa – पूर्वा (puurva)
West – Pratii – प्रतीची (pratiicii)

Also regular words like Set and Shift were changed for Sthaana (स्थान, position/station) and Vikaari (विकार, change/transformation). A and Dha, that accompanies Vikaari, are also shortened form of first syllable (A for Up, Dha for Down) and indicates the direction of shift. I kinda wish they were "sanskritized" too!

Some may call this work unneccessary and "tainting" of the original, but to me it only adds to the mystery of this place and its unique origins. Knowing the key, you can easily translate the name of section: Dha Vikaari Uldobi will turn to Shift down to Ordovician area, and Sirhru Jilaam Praa'vaa will mean South-east xylem of Silurian area.

In ICO the lack of the communication between Ico and Yorda is one of the key motifs. To create this, Yorda lines, recorded originally in Japanese, were put backwards. In subtitles, however, it was done much more interestingly.
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First of all we have already familiar method of replacing letters with symbols.
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What's interesting here is that the letter that was substituted corresponds to first letter of the thing that the symbol means!

A: ant B: bird C: cage D: daughter E: east F: fall
G: giant H: hide I: eye J: Jiisan K: kneel L: larva
M: moon, mountain N: north O: octopus P: pigeon Q: queen
R: river S: shower T: tree U: union V: victim W: wing
X: xoanon Y: yoke Z: zipper

(You can see that J means Jiisan – that's "old man" in Japanese. Exactly what this icon represents)

After you done finding correct letters, you will have the romaji of what she says – but it will be backwards and missing some letters. So the phrase in picture above will mean ESAD AHTN OKD AR ETI ON and with a bit of tweaking you will get Dare anata doko kara haitte no (あなた　だれ どこから入ってきたの) which will translate to...

FnXbqvi.png


The last example I want to bring your attention to is Solatorobo.
solatorobo.jpg
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It doesn't create any new languages, instead it uses one of the most common – French. Every version of the game (EU, NA, JP) features French voice-over which gives very unique feel to its world. It's not much – just some words and grunts here and there, but trust me, that "Bonjour!" will stuck in your head for a long time.
 
O

oneida

Cock Strain, Lifetime Warranty
Panzer Dragoon, PDZwei and PDOrta. The opening of PD Saga is in panzerese, but the rest is just in japanese.
 
S

Shadow Hog

Member
Panzer Dragoon has a spoken language that's comprised of Latin and Greek words (also German and/or Russian, I believe, forget which) with the syntax of Japanese.

Although Saga only bothered using it in the opening and ending; the actual in-game parts, everyone just speaks Japanese. (However, if you don't know Japanese, you're likely to just assume they're still speaking the fictional language and shrug it off.)
 
D

Dandy Crocodile

Member
Replacing letters of an alphabet with a new alphabet isn't a language, it's actually a cipher! :)

Alexander O. Smith is one of my favorite localizers, as he does, as you showed, put a lot of effort into his work and researches plausible linguistic evolutions of his languages.

Ciphers can be really cool and do really interesting things.
Off the top of my head, I can't think of a video game that uses a legitimate conlang, but there are MANY films and TV shows that do.
 
N

NinjamicWZ

Banned
Fez has one:

fez21.png

fez-alphabet.jpg
Click to expand...

I didn't play it until it came to Steam and then PSN, so I missed out on the whole meta game from players and fans, but I tried to figure out whatever I could by myself. I could do the Tetris piece tablets but not the alphabet. Stubborn resistance to looking at the alphabet charts and thinking of it as "cheating" is why I never 100%'d the game.
 
R

red731

Member
Star Citizen Vanduul language.

I've recently seen the video with Andy Serkis mocap session where Chris Roberts was talking that they have some guy that is creating artificial languages (even for movies) and that we can learn Vanduul too, when they'll release the game.
 
S

SalvaPot

Member
I have always find it a bit pretentious, but that might be because I am too lazy to look it up and I like to read everything, so I feel like the game is locking me out of interesting texts. Yeah, I know that if I want I can look at the texts online or traduce myself, but that takes me out of the game.

I get over it fast, but its still slightly annoying.
silva1991 said:
Bayonetta? angels speak weird language.
Click to expand...

That is a real language, I think.
 
A

Anno

Member
Playing on the Firiona Vie server in early Everquest was pretty great. No common language so everyone had to either come up with other ways of communicating or try to teach languages to one another. I believe everyone eventually settled on elvish as the unofficial official language.
 
S

silva1991

Member
SalvaPot said:
I have always find it a bit pretentious, but that might be because I am too lazy to look it up and I like to read everything, so I feel like the game is locking me out of interesting texts. Yeah, I know that if I want I can look at the texts online or traduce myself, but that takes me out of the game.

I get over it fast, but its still slightly annoying.


That is a real language, I think.
Click to expand...

It is? I thought it was made up

what about Okami?
 
D

Dandy Crocodile

Member
Most of the writing systems used in games like these suggestions are cyphers, with the spoken bits being sort of a posteriori gibberish, haha.

ItIsOkBro said:
I don't think this is a real language (NieR).
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Emi Evans mixed a whole bunch of languages and used the sounds to create what she imagined to be what language might sound like in the future. Very interesting, and beautiful, stuff.

MattXIII said:
Gravity Rush/Daze has a fictional spoken language and alphabet
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Yeah, it's mostly just garbled Japanese spoken with a French-ish accent. :p
 
D

daveo42

Banned
MattXIII said:
Gravity Rush/Daze has a fictional spoken language and alphabet
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What I came here to say. Love the weird unique French/Japanese blended language the game has.

NinjamicWZ said:
Fez has one:
Click to expand...

This was was more a pain. It was cool, but you had to write everything out just to understand what you needed to do even after you had proven you understood the language. While cool, it ended up being an additional barrier the game didn't necessarily need to solving esoteric puzzles.

The way it is explained in game though is brilliant.
 
A

ayrix

Neo Member
Ar Tonelico /surge concerto win out here by miles.

the song magic (programming/scripting) languages:

Emotional_Song_Pact (construction is like hangul)

http://artonelico.wikia.com/wiki/Emotional_Song_Pact

hymne (written as simple mono alphabetic cypher)

REON-4213 (written like the C programming language)

some example REON-4213

Code: 
QuelI->{

    　　Cls(ethes f ds-b ciol) {

    　　　　EX[zep]->{ciol f koh};

    　　} am {

    　　　　EX[purr]->{ciol f koh fa}

    &#12288;&#12288;&#12288;&#12288;<-{wi-b hymel} am {dite f dit ciol};

    &#12288;&#12288;}

    }->ExeC->{TzW};
That is spoken (well sung) language in game.
 
petran79

petran79

Banned
Captain Blood


https://speculativerhetoric.wordpress.com/2012/06/18/captain-blood-communicating-with-aliens/

captain-620x.jpg


Most of your time is spent in conversation trying to get information. Of course, all the aliens don’t speak the same language, so it’s fortunate that Blood’s ship is equipped with a translation device that utilizes icons in place of words.

Alien: Howdy You. Me Croolis-Ulv Dead Genetic. Me Great Warrior. Me Like Kill Enemy.

Blood: Me Blood. Me Search Duplicate.

Alien: Me Search Information Enemy. Me Know Danger Missile.

Blood: Me Want Know Danger Missile.

Alien: Me Like Danger Missille. (Laugh Laugh). Me Search Female. Odoyante Good Female.

And so on and so forth. Each icon represents a word, so in the image above, the alien is saying, “Me Give You Planet Duplicate 234.” Of course, this nouns, verbs, and adjectives also do double-duty as names, so in the above hypothetical conversation, one might think that the alien was a Croolis-Ulv without any possibility for reproduction, a genetic dead-end, but actually his name is Dead Genetic. Same thing with Danger Missile (though I haven’t actually found Danger Missile, so he might just be talking about a planet with dangerous missiles). Planets can have equally puzzling names: Trap 1, Great Fear, Kill You, Insult 4, etc. It’s often difficult to tell (1) if a name is actually a name, and (2) if that name is a planet or an individual. There are some clues in the verbs: individuals go with the verb “kill” and planets go with the verb “destroy” (so far, I’ve mostly been dealing with the Croolis-Ulv and the Croolis-Var, a pair of warring races who really just want to obliterate each other).

Interestingly, though these aliens do not share a language, the icons suggest a shared culture: the fact that a picture of a skull means “dead” across language says something, I think, about a shared cultural experience. Likewise, the image for “pop”, or father, shows one tall stick figure standing next to a smaller stick figure: a father and child. Yet in that icon is the assumption that across alien races the young are always smaller than the father.

At the same time, words don’t necessarily mean the same things in every conversation, especially as speech acts. Some groups of aliens have to be threatened, some have to be flattered, some need overtures of friendship, and some just need to be allowed to whine for a while about how they can’t reproduce. For some aliens, the phrase “Me destroy planet you” (I will destroy your planet) is a great joke, but it strikes fear in the hearts of others. Additionally, each group of aliens seems to have its own set of commonplaces — the Croolis-Ulv want to kill all the Croolis-Var and vice versa while the Buggols are really more worried about their upcoming presidential election. The game also has its own sense of kairotic moments, moments that are predetermined and not always distinguishable: you c ask the same question five times, but until you get to “the moment,” that alien is not going to give you any kind of coherent answer.

In terms of game play, this game is really unique. For example, in most spaceship shooters, language isn’t an issue at all; in Star Control II, for example, you talk to aliens, but there are no translation issues and you’re given a list of predetermined statements to choose from. Likewise, in most point-and-click adventure games, you are given entire sentences to choose from, with the occasional linguistic puzzle; the one that still haunts me is The Secret of Monkey Island‘s “How to Get Ahead in Navigating.” In Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, you have instances of having to pick up on clues in what the NPC is saying and make the correct response. What you sometimes find out in these pre-prepared statements is that your character knows more than you do (this was painfully obvious when I played The Lost Files of Sherlock Holmes: The Case of the Serrated Scapel). Instead, in Captain Blood, your avatar only knows as much as you know (hence the need to actually take copious amounts of notes, because Blood isn’t going to remember anything for you).

Ultimately, Captain Blood provides a immersive illustration of the langue/parole split, making it one of the most frustrating games I’ve played, since you know you’re saying things, but the things you’re saying apparently don’t mean the things you think they mean. Hooray for linguistic uncertainty!
 
P

PSqueak

Banned
Eternal darkness' Magick system had a rudimentary language to craft spells, in game you needed tablets to "use spells" but once you figured what each spell word meant you could discover spells by constructing basic sentences.

it was like [Action] [modifier] [deity] [Target] so you would craft spells like "Bind Big Mantarok Monster" to summon a big purple enemy under your control.
 
A

ar4757

Member
After the community failing to figure out the Apothicon language in Black Ops III Zombies Treyarch hid hints in one of their trailers

UJibng6.jpg
 
M

malboroking

Banned
Anno said:
Playing on the Firiona Vie server in early Everquest was pretty great. No common language so everyone had to either come up with other ways of communicating or try to teach languages to one another. I believe everyone eventually settled on elvish as the unofficial official language.
Click to expand...

Yes, I really liked this about Everquest. You had to train the language, and when you started out everything came in as gibberish. The more you talked in that language you would gain points in it, and more and more of the text would come in correctly. Most servers had everyone with the ability to speak common, so everyone could understand everyone else, but they had a couple of servers where I believe common was not an option, so only people of the same race could understand each other until they got their language skills up.
 
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