I wanted this story to be primarily Keele's from the beginning. But for
it to be his story, it can't be in his voice alone - you need other
characters to narrate their own versions of events. I considered
letting all four of the central cast of Tales of Eternia
have their chance at narration, but quickly came across two problems:
Reid's already had "his" story told, and - a more shallow excuse -
Meredy is extremely hard for me to write… of which more below.
Reid does not play a huge role in this story. As I said, it's Keele's
story to tell. But Farah, as you'll quickly notice, has worked her way
in pretty deeply, until it's almost as much hers as Keele's. Really, in
the end, that's only fair - Reid and Meredy were at the centre of the
game; they could
have achieved their ultimate goal without Farah and Keele along. It
might have been much more difficult, but it wouldn't have been
impossible. Substitute Keele for Reid, or Farah for Meredy, and Eternia
would have been toast.
So the primary narrators of the story are Keele and Farah. I've tried
to give them distinctive styles in their narration - Keele tends to let
his mind wander off into speculation about all sorts of nonsense; Farah
is more straightforward and to-the-point, and spends less time
analyzing her own feelings about a particular situation than Keele
does. She considers, but she doesn't dwell. Keele goes off on tangents.
Keele's inner struggle is at the very heart of the story, so an
introspective mindset was essential - fortunate that he's clearly of
the internally-focused sort himself! But when the action needs to move
along, or when Keele needs to be seen from an external viewpoint, or
when characters need to be in two places at once, that's when Farah
comes in. It doesn't hurt that she's incredibly fun to write.
Writing as Farah seemed to come most naturally to me. It's easy to get
into her head, at least as I see her. As I said above, she's
straightforward. She's one of the strongest female characters I've ever
come across in a video game, and it was a challenge to try to do her
justice - but an interesting
challenge. Her flashbacks, in particular, were fun to write, although
writing the scenes set immediately after the death of her father were
rather draining. I had to step away from the story for awhile after
those.
Keele got harder to write as the story went on. It was simple enough at
the beginning, but I didn't want him to spend the whole story in a
whining inner monologue - but I also wanted to make it clear that, no
matter what was happening, he hadn't forgotten those things that had
been worrying him before they left Celestia. Overall, though, I liked
writing in Keele's very introspective mind a lot, if only because it
was a good excuse to have those inner monologues occasionally.
I did want to try to get into Meredy's mindset
sometimes, but it was very difficult to do so. I wasn't sure where to
go with her narration, or how extreme to make the wording. In the end,
I decided to go with grammatically correct sentences, but try to give
them a more lyrical, flowing feel than that of Keele or Farah. Meredy's
narration doesn't move the story along, but I used it to fill in
back-story that wouldn't have made it into flashbacks. I still wasn't
brave enough to give Meredy any full flashbacks to childhood of her
own, but if I feel like, in the end, I've done her justice here, I
might give it a try in future.
Meredy's dialogue, on the other hand, gave - and is still
giving - me fits. The game is completely inconsistent in the way she
talks - her use of nouns/pronouns, verbs, and articles is all over the
place. Sometimes her speech is broken English, sometimes it's correct
except for her referring to herself and those she's talking to in the
third person, sometimes she speaks almost "normally." I finally just
went for something near the middle ground of both extremes, and so she
refers to herself as "Meredy" and usually to others by their names
rather than "you," but she uses "to be" and most other verbs correctly
for the most part (something else that came and went in the game). She
rarely uses contractions, particularly with verbs, and I truncated her
sentences somewhat, splitting what would in normal speech be one
sentence into two or three, to try to establish a speech pattern that
resembled somewhat the way she spoke in-game… some
of the time. So if you don't like the way Meredy talks, feel free to
let me know, but lay most of the blame on game inconsistencies! (That,
and the fact that I don't speak/read enough Japanese to tell how
consistent her speech was as it was originally written and performed…)
I do hope her dialogue, at least for the most part, reads in a
Meredy-esque-realistic kind of way - that's all I really wanted to
achieve.
All the science Keele thinks about/reads about/hears in lectures is, of
course, completely made up. I don't know a damn thing about science;
I'm a medievalist. But it's a fantasy world - they do things
differently there (to paraphrase a quote beloved amongst historians). I
do, I promise, have the correct definition of grobule distortion. I
copied it directly from Keele. And who would know better than Keele?