Dhaos (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
whatdeheckisdat) wrote2011-03-01 10:07 pm
whatdeheckisdat) wrote2011-03-01 10:07 pm
Entry tags:
Canon Notes
The Tales of Phantasia Drama CDs and the side novel, Katararezaru Rekishi, are both intended to be completely compatible with the original game canon, and in fact explain a lot of things the game insinuates but never clarifies (ie, how Morrison knew Jestorna's name already, when he and Dhaos met before the war, why Rhea wasn't killed alongside her parents, etc.). The problem here is that the Drama CDs take advantage of not being videogames and add some extra dialogue during fight scenes that were not in the game. These lines are kinda sorta extremely important pieces of my Dhaos' memory, and I realize that if a castmate isn't clear on the differences between recollections, we may end up with an unintentional explosion of violence as Dhaos accuses the party of lying and the party assumes he's just insane, as they have no idea what he's talking about and Dhaos isn't the most stable person in the world anyway.
While it makes for an awesome plot, I have no desire to suddenly spring this sort of thing on another mun who might be unaware of the differences between the Drama CDs and the main game. So I've come up with a small list of the things Dhaos will remember differently (and a whole bunch of other things now too, because let's face it this is just a giant canon dump post), and his possible reactions should he be told that this isn't quite what happened. It's mostly Drama CDs stuff, as KataReki takes place pre-game and is thus largely irrelevent.
If you want Dhaos' KataReki history anyway, just check his page on the Luceti Wiki. I've got a lame summary up there, too. Do beware of NDX spoilers there, however.
1. The Fight Against Past Dhaos (CD 2, Track 2 and Track 4)
The game obviously has this scene as a boss battle, but the Drama CDs are, as mentioned, free to add dialogue to the fight. Cress calls Dhaos out on all the lives he's taken, causing Dhaos to... ask if Cress is a vegetarian. This leads into a giant speech about how humans consume lives to feed themselves, and really Dhaos is only doing the same thing—consuming lives to preserve his own (and those of the people of Derris-Kharlan, but of course the party doesn't know that yet) and it isn't right or wrong to do so, because that's just the way life works.
The rest of the fight basically has the party literally cutting Dhaos off with their attacks mid-sentence every time he tries to get a word in. Cress then tries to unleash his Mystic Arte/Hi Ougi on Dhaos, who promptly goes '...NO YOU IDIOT YOU'RE GOING TO KILL EVERYONE IN THE ROOM.'
Giant speech about why Cress is too inexperienced to use the skill without it going out of control ensues. Cress, of course, ignores him, and the power he's charging for his Mystic Arte does go out of control and begins to rip the building apart. Dhaos laughs at him, hopes out loud that he'll manage to kill the entire army of Midgard with the blast, and teleports away in order to escape death by Hi Ougi. (He literally goes "LMAO SARABA DA" and 'ports away.) Basically the only reason the party survives is because Mint rocks at barriers, and was the only one conscious at the end of the fight (the track is her recollection for Arche, who by the way accidentally hits Klarth with Indignation XD).
Basically, as Dhaos remembers it, the party didn't defeat him in the past: they futilely charged at him every time he tried to talk, didn't listen when he warned them that they were going to kill everyone, laughed in their faces as they proved him right and warped away to avoid their fate. This is... not what happens in the game, obviously, but telling Dhaos that is kind of a bad idea: in addition to being impulsive, now he'll think you're just delusional/in denial, or an outright liar. Dhaos doesn't like liars.
2. The Fight Against Present Dhaos (CD 2, Track 10)
Obviously never happens, as I play Future Dhaos, as opposed to Present Dhaos. Do note however that this track contains evidence of what Dhaos is like when he has genuinely lost his mind, and rather entertainingly he's actually worse than he was in the game. Yes, that is indeed the sound of him trying to wring the life out of poor Chester. It is worth noting, however, that he shuts up and obligingly listens when Mint mentions she can tell he's trying to save the Giant Tree, though of course he cuts her off once she goes off on a tangent about how she still believes humanity is good. Dhaos basically says GUUUUUURL YOU DON'T KNOW NOTHING and proceeds to flip his lid.
3. The Fight Against Future Dhaos (CD 3, Track 10)
Hoo, boy. This here's the big one. This is the main thing Dhaos is going to remember differently if you take a Phantasia character from the game, and is the most important. The party bursts in on Dhaos just after he makes a huge depressing speech of depression, but he abandons it the moment they arrive and makes the usual So You've Come speech, with all the stuff you'd expect Dhaos to say in a So You've Come speech. He laughs, the battle begins, the party uses all their moves only for Dhaos to shrug them off easily (he deflects the Eternal Sword with his bare hands, what even) and basically hand them their rears with a single move (Tetra Assault). He then gives another speech about how much humans suck for deliberately wrecking their world with magitechnology.
Cress goes “Dude, we are not 'humans', we are individual people, and my name is Cress Albane for the love of god.”
Dhaos responds with an Explosion, and Cress loses the Eternal Sword. Crap.
Dhaos does the whole DIE HUMAN thing, attempts to punch his face in, and ends up getting a fistful of metal anyway and wonders out loud what the heck that spear that randomly appeared in Cress' hand is.
Cress goes LOLWUT GUNGIR?
The Valkyrie shows up and explains that yo, here's that spear from earlier, go be awesome now.
Klarth summons Aska, and Cress attacks while Dhaos is busy blocking the attack. He hits true, and Dhaos wonders how Cress was able to hurt him. He then transforms and uses Chaos.
The whole party jumps in front of Cress, saying that he's the one who must defeat Dhaos. They all go down, unconscious except for Mint, who casts Barrier on Cress, tells him that she'll always love him, and closes her eyes.
RAAAAAAAAAAAAAGH DHAOOOOOOOOOOOS
As it happens, “I'll always love you” is also the very last thing Dhaos' girlfriend from Derris-Kharlan said to him before she died, causing him to have a huge Blue Screen Of Death moment where he realizes that because of what he's done, he and Cress have become the same: Cress is about to lose the one he loves in order to save his world, just as Dhaos did. He then tells Cress:
“Cress Albane! If you believe you have the power to change the world, let me see it!”
Dhaos then thinks to himself that all the sadness is not worth it anymore.
Cress goes MEIKUU ZANSHOUKEN.
Meikuu Zanshouken goes RAWR.
Dhaos goes down.
As usual, you are free to point out that this is not what happened. I will warn you this time, however, that if your character informs Dhaos that this is not how it went, he will most likely completely lose his mind: he talks about how uncertain his perception of reality has become earlier in the track, and because of this, he's likely to believe anything Team Phantasia tells him about things not happening the way he remembers. If Dhaos begins to believe that these memories are false, that raises a whole lot of unfortunate implications for him: one, that he really can't tell the difference between dreams and reality; two, that he apparently made up all his redeeming features in his head; three, that Mint's confession never happened and he let himself die and doomed his planet for absolutely no reason. He already feels horrible about having made himself the Demon King and dying with absolutely nothing to show for it: how do you think he'd feel if he learned that the event that made everything 'no longer worth it' never happened? Feel free to break his heart, but be forewarned! Violence is likely to ensue.
4. Past Dhaos Breakdown (CD 1, Track 12)
Not something the party ever saw or will remember, but worth noting all the same. Basically, Dhaos gets a report shortly after the Mana Cannon blast about some kid on a creature called a Pegasus wiping out their air forces. Dhaos goes "...Pegasus?", clearly implying that he has no idea what that is supposed to be and why wasn't he told, that's your job. The soldier explains and apologizes for their failure, stammering, but Dhaos just goes "Hm." and lets the issue go with no further complaint. The soldier then reports that Midgard's forces are on the move and should reach the castle by tomorrow, and Dhaos just orders to prepare their forces for battle.
The soldier then says, in a very soft voice, that he knows this must break Dhaos' heart.
That happens at about 45 seconds in. I don't believe further translation is necessary >__> Claiming that you know how Dhaos feels is a very, very big no-no. Do note that Dhaos doesn't kill the soldier, however. The point here is that Dhaos is very calm in general, doesn't mind if you have an epic fail once in a while, and didn't blow up when the Mana Cannon was fired at all-- not that it didn't completely throw him off his rocker, but it's not immediately evident at first. While he's had even more time to destabilize in Luceti and probably will blow up if Mana Cannons are mentioned, it's kind of important to notice that Dhaos tries not to let things get to him. He, um, tends to fail nowadays.
5. Dhaos' Castle (Future)
Again, not exactly a canon divergence, but something to note, as not having played Narikiri Dungeon or Narikiri Dungeon X a lot of people will miss it. Have a look at what Dhaos' castle in the future looks like, in the original SNES version of the game:
Note the floor pattern, and compare with the PSX version:
Obviously they look reasonably similar, which isn't my point here. This is just, uh, my proof that Dhaos' throne room in the castle has looked like this since the very beginning. Why is this important? Well, have a look at this: a Narikiri Dungeon screenshot of a room in Dhaos' old castle, in a part of a memory world set on Derris-Kharlan:
Gee, doesn't that look familiar? Look, they even kept it in Narikiri Dungeon X!
The speaker is off-screen and the text is of course in Japanese, so it's hard to tell, but that's actually one of Dhaos' subordinates from Derris-Kharlan speaking (Silverberg, whom I will discuss next). Doesn't it look just like the PSX version of the throne room? Here are the stairs from another angle:
You know where I'm going with this, don't you?
The final dungeon of the game? It's exactly identical to his home on Derris-Kharlan.
You are free to interpret this any way you want, but by this evidence, you can see that for whatever reason Dhaos wanted his castle as his base of operations-- whether it is actually his castle or just an enchanted copy. I would like to believe the latter (because while he is certainly crazy enough at this point to summon his actual castle, I think a lot of people on Derris-Kharlan would notice if the whole building just up and vanished), but whatever you think works. You can also come up with plenty of reasons for why he'd do something like that, though I of course must always go the horribly sad route and assume it was because he was just that homesick. If I ever mention Dhaos transfiguring his castle in my tags, this is why!
6. Karion/Silverberg
Karion is probably one of the few side-material-only characters you've heard of: Dhaos' old girlfriend from Derris-Kharlan, who died to give him the ability to time-travel as mentioned above. Let's talk about her for a little bit.
In the drama CDs, Karion speaks in the same archaic, outrageously formal and polite Japanese Dhaos does, while still implying that she is inferior in rank to Dhaos (...duh). She also refers to herself in the third person. One also assumes that since she was part of the sending ceremony, she must have been a sorceress/magic user of some sort-- either included because she was powerful in her own right or possibly because Dhaos is biased (he of course had no idea the spell would kill each of its casters).
Karion is not present in Narikiri Dungeon X, but there is a new character in her place: Silverberg, a subordinate of Dhaos' that reports on the status of the war and the mana problem in the Derris-Kharlan flashbacks. She has a similar voice and similar speech patterns to the Karion of the Drama CDs (though she never talks about herself, so we don't know if she refers to herself in the third person or not), and she blocks the party's way "so you can't reach Dhaos-sama" in the memory-world. She also uses and drops a crossbow, which happens to be Winona's weapon of choice in KataReki. Her existence is probably a reference to Karion, and pretty much just for lols I ended up headcanoning Karion's last name as Silverberg and giving Karion green hair in Dhaos' reminiscences-- though many fans are of the opinion that Karion ought to resemble Mint, the one who caused Dhaos to remember her in the first place.
Carillon, the French word for windchime, is pronounced generally the same way as Karion, which is interesting given that there are windchimes in the background during Dhaos' post-death conversation with her in the Drama CDs. The association kinda stuck in my head, and while I will always refer to her as Karion, I may end up using the sound of windchimes as an excuse to trigger Dhaos' memories of her. Ehe.
If you need any explanations for things I mention in my tags or Dhaos' behavior, you can put them here or on my HMD. Thanks!
While it makes for an awesome plot, I have no desire to suddenly spring this sort of thing on another mun who might be unaware of the differences between the Drama CDs and the main game. So I've come up with a small list of the things Dhaos will remember differently (and a whole bunch of other things now too, because let's face it this is just a giant canon dump post), and his possible reactions should he be told that this isn't quite what happened. It's mostly Drama CDs stuff, as KataReki takes place pre-game and is thus largely irrelevent.
If you want Dhaos' KataReki history anyway, just check his page on the Luceti Wiki. I've got a lame summary up there, too. Do beware of NDX spoilers there, however.
1. The Fight Against Past Dhaos (CD 2, Track 2 and Track 4)
The game obviously has this scene as a boss battle, but the Drama CDs are, as mentioned, free to add dialogue to the fight. Cress calls Dhaos out on all the lives he's taken, causing Dhaos to... ask if Cress is a vegetarian. This leads into a giant speech about how humans consume lives to feed themselves, and really Dhaos is only doing the same thing—consuming lives to preserve his own (and those of the people of Derris-Kharlan, but of course the party doesn't know that yet) and it isn't right or wrong to do so, because that's just the way life works.
The rest of the fight basically has the party literally cutting Dhaos off with their attacks mid-sentence every time he tries to get a word in. Cress then tries to unleash his Mystic Arte/Hi Ougi on Dhaos, who promptly goes '...NO YOU IDIOT YOU'RE GOING TO KILL EVERYONE IN THE ROOM.'
Giant speech about why Cress is too inexperienced to use the skill without it going out of control ensues. Cress, of course, ignores him, and the power he's charging for his Mystic Arte does go out of control and begins to rip the building apart. Dhaos laughs at him, hopes out loud that he'll manage to kill the entire army of Midgard with the blast, and teleports away in order to escape death by Hi Ougi. (He literally goes "LMAO SARABA DA" and 'ports away.) Basically the only reason the party survives is because Mint rocks at barriers, and was the only one conscious at the end of the fight (the track is her recollection for Arche, who by the way accidentally hits Klarth with Indignation XD).
Basically, as Dhaos remembers it, the party didn't defeat him in the past: they futilely charged at him every time he tried to talk, didn't listen when he warned them that they were going to kill everyone, laughed in their faces as they proved him right and warped away to avoid their fate. This is... not what happens in the game, obviously, but telling Dhaos that is kind of a bad idea: in addition to being impulsive, now he'll think you're just delusional/in denial, or an outright liar. Dhaos doesn't like liars.
2. The Fight Against Present Dhaos (CD 2, Track 10)
Obviously never happens, as I play Future Dhaos, as opposed to Present Dhaos. Do note however that this track contains evidence of what Dhaos is like when he has genuinely lost his mind, and rather entertainingly he's actually worse than he was in the game. Yes, that is indeed the sound of him trying to wring the life out of poor Chester. It is worth noting, however, that he shuts up and obligingly listens when Mint mentions she can tell he's trying to save the Giant Tree, though of course he cuts her off once she goes off on a tangent about how she still believes humanity is good. Dhaos basically says GUUUUUURL YOU DON'T KNOW NOTHING and proceeds to flip his lid.
3. The Fight Against Future Dhaos (CD 3, Track 10)
Hoo, boy. This here's the big one. This is the main thing Dhaos is going to remember differently if you take a Phantasia character from the game, and is the most important. The party bursts in on Dhaos just after he makes a huge depressing speech of depression, but he abandons it the moment they arrive and makes the usual So You've Come speech, with all the stuff you'd expect Dhaos to say in a So You've Come speech. He laughs, the battle begins, the party uses all their moves only for Dhaos to shrug them off easily (he deflects the Eternal Sword with his bare hands, what even) and basically hand them their rears with a single move (Tetra Assault). He then gives another speech about how much humans suck for deliberately wrecking their world with magitechnology.
Cress goes “Dude, we are not 'humans', we are individual people, and my name is Cress Albane for the love of god.”
Dhaos responds with an Explosion, and Cress loses the Eternal Sword. Crap.
Dhaos does the whole DIE HUMAN thing, attempts to punch his face in, and ends up getting a fistful of metal anyway and wonders out loud what the heck that spear that randomly appeared in Cress' hand is.
Cress goes LOLWUT GUNGIR?
The Valkyrie shows up and explains that yo, here's that spear from earlier, go be awesome now.
Klarth summons Aska, and Cress attacks while Dhaos is busy blocking the attack. He hits true, and Dhaos wonders how Cress was able to hurt him. He then transforms and uses Chaos.
The whole party jumps in front of Cress, saying that he's the one who must defeat Dhaos. They all go down, unconscious except for Mint, who casts Barrier on Cress, tells him that she'll always love him, and closes her eyes.
RAAAAAAAAAAAAAGH DHAOOOOOOOOOOOS
As it happens, “I'll always love you” is also the very last thing Dhaos' girlfriend from Derris-Kharlan said to him before she died, causing him to have a huge Blue Screen Of Death moment where he realizes that because of what he's done, he and Cress have become the same: Cress is about to lose the one he loves in order to save his world, just as Dhaos did. He then tells Cress:
“Cress Albane! If you believe you have the power to change the world, let me see it!”
Dhaos then thinks to himself that all the sadness is not worth it anymore.
Cress goes MEIKUU ZANSHOUKEN.
Meikuu Zanshouken goes RAWR.
Dhaos goes down.
As usual, you are free to point out that this is not what happened. I will warn you this time, however, that if your character informs Dhaos that this is not how it went, he will most likely completely lose his mind: he talks about how uncertain his perception of reality has become earlier in the track, and because of this, he's likely to believe anything Team Phantasia tells him about things not happening the way he remembers. If Dhaos begins to believe that these memories are false, that raises a whole lot of unfortunate implications for him: one, that he really can't tell the difference between dreams and reality; two, that he apparently made up all his redeeming features in his head; three, that Mint's confession never happened and he let himself die and doomed his planet for absolutely no reason. He already feels horrible about having made himself the Demon King and dying with absolutely nothing to show for it: how do you think he'd feel if he learned that the event that made everything 'no longer worth it' never happened? Feel free to break his heart, but be forewarned! Violence is likely to ensue.
4. Past Dhaos Breakdown (CD 1, Track 12)
Not something the party ever saw or will remember, but worth noting all the same. Basically, Dhaos gets a report shortly after the Mana Cannon blast about some kid on a creature called a Pegasus wiping out their air forces. Dhaos goes "...Pegasus?", clearly implying that he has no idea what that is supposed to be and why wasn't he told, that's your job. The soldier explains and apologizes for their failure, stammering, but Dhaos just goes "Hm." and lets the issue go with no further complaint. The soldier then reports that Midgard's forces are on the move and should reach the castle by tomorrow, and Dhaos just orders to prepare their forces for battle.
The soldier then says, in a very soft voice, that he knows this must break Dhaos' heart.
That happens at about 45 seconds in. I don't believe further translation is necessary >__> Claiming that you know how Dhaos feels is a very, very big no-no. Do note that Dhaos doesn't kill the soldier, however. The point here is that Dhaos is very calm in general, doesn't mind if you have an epic fail once in a while, and didn't blow up when the Mana Cannon was fired at all-- not that it didn't completely throw him off his rocker, but it's not immediately evident at first. While he's had even more time to destabilize in Luceti and probably will blow up if Mana Cannons are mentioned, it's kind of important to notice that Dhaos tries not to let things get to him. He, um, tends to fail nowadays.
5. Dhaos' Castle (Future)
Again, not exactly a canon divergence, but something to note, as not having played Narikiri Dungeon or Narikiri Dungeon X a lot of people will miss it. Have a look at what Dhaos' castle in the future looks like, in the original SNES version of the game:
Note the floor pattern, and compare with the PSX version:
Obviously they look reasonably similar, which isn't my point here. This is just, uh, my proof that Dhaos' throne room in the castle has looked like this since the very beginning. Why is this important? Well, have a look at this: a Narikiri Dungeon screenshot of a room in Dhaos' old castle, in a part of a memory world set on Derris-Kharlan:
Gee, doesn't that look familiar? Look, they even kept it in Narikiri Dungeon X!
The speaker is off-screen and the text is of course in Japanese, so it's hard to tell, but that's actually one of Dhaos' subordinates from Derris-Kharlan speaking (Silverberg, whom I will discuss next). Doesn't it look just like the PSX version of the throne room? Here are the stairs from another angle:
You know where I'm going with this, don't you?
The final dungeon of the game? It's exactly identical to his home on Derris-Kharlan.
You are free to interpret this any way you want, but by this evidence, you can see that for whatever reason Dhaos wanted his castle as his base of operations-- whether it is actually his castle or just an enchanted copy. I would like to believe the latter (because while he is certainly crazy enough at this point to summon his actual castle, I think a lot of people on Derris-Kharlan would notice if the whole building just up and vanished), but whatever you think works. You can also come up with plenty of reasons for why he'd do something like that, though I of course must always go the horribly sad route and assume it was because he was just that homesick. If I ever mention Dhaos transfiguring his castle in my tags, this is why!
6. Karion/Silverberg
Karion is probably one of the few side-material-only characters you've heard of: Dhaos' old girlfriend from Derris-Kharlan, who died to give him the ability to time-travel as mentioned above. Let's talk about her for a little bit.
In the drama CDs, Karion speaks in the same archaic, outrageously formal and polite Japanese Dhaos does, while still implying that she is inferior in rank to Dhaos (...duh). She also refers to herself in the third person. One also assumes that since she was part of the sending ceremony, she must have been a sorceress/magic user of some sort-- either included because she was powerful in her own right or possibly because Dhaos is biased (he of course had no idea the spell would kill each of its casters).
Karion is not present in Narikiri Dungeon X, but there is a new character in her place: Silverberg, a subordinate of Dhaos' that reports on the status of the war and the mana problem in the Derris-Kharlan flashbacks. She has a similar voice and similar speech patterns to the Karion of the Drama CDs (though she never talks about herself, so we don't know if she refers to herself in the third person or not), and she blocks the party's way "so you can't reach Dhaos-sama" in the memory-world. She also uses and drops a crossbow, which happens to be Winona's weapon of choice in KataReki. Her existence is probably a reference to Karion, and pretty much just for lols I ended up headcanoning Karion's last name as Silverberg and giving Karion green hair in Dhaos' reminiscences-- though many fans are of the opinion that Karion ought to resemble Mint, the one who caused Dhaos to remember her in the first place.
Carillon, the French word for windchime, is pronounced generally the same way as Karion, which is interesting given that there are windchimes in the background during Dhaos' post-death conversation with her in the Drama CDs. The association kinda stuck in my head, and while I will always refer to her as Karion, I may end up using the sound of windchimes as an excuse to trigger Dhaos' memories of her. Ehe.
If you need any explanations for things I mention in my tags or Dhaos' behavior, you can put them here or on my HMD. Thanks!