@ashogo said:
Catching some of the Japanese dialogue, one guy at the end says basically something like "This world is rotten", which means the situation may be similar to Nocturne in that someone instigates the apocalypse as a way to "cleanse" society. There also seems to be a mix of voices which speak in more formal, ancient speech (one chick mentions something about samurai techniques?) and more lax, modern speech which seems to suggest some sort of mashup of characters from the past and present (which the locations in the video seem to confirm).
Regarding the samurai stuff specifically, she's still speaking in modern Japanese, but just seems to be referring to something in the past in general. Here's what I caught:
「父上教えてくれなかった侍の死因・・・」 (For English speakers, this is a sentence fragment in Japanese, so it's hard to be certain without more context what all is being said, but she says something along the lines of, "My father never told me how the samurai died out...")
She inflects that last audible part a little bit weirdly, but I'm 99% certain that's what she said and it makes sense, all things considered. 父上 is certainly a more formal way of referring to one's father than what most people use today, but it's not completely unheard of in modern society to use it. It doesn't make your theory less valid, but if they wanted her to really sound like she was from the past, her Japanese would likely be significantly more obtuse and possibly even go into classical mode. If she's from the past, it's, at the earliest, after the Meiji Restoration and, much like 19th century English, Japanese from that period has its differences, but is still largely comprehensible with today's knowledge.
Some other things to note:
- Right before the guy declares that the world is a hellhole, another one mentions wanting to save the world since it's seemingly about to be destroyed the next day. I bet everybody who's already well-versed in the series could guess that there would be factions to pick, but just in case, that was probably a reminder.
- The ongoing theory regarding the scenery is that the game actually takes place in a world that's sufficiently degenerated to the point where "modern society" has been put in containment zones. The time travel theory was posited before when the site initially went live, but the skyline behind that main wall still has modern Tokyo buildings and, likewise, the ruins of actual places in that city more or less resemble their modern counterparts.
Obviously, all of this is more or less conjecture, so I could be wrong on all of this, too. I just thought I'd throw it out there for more stuff to discuss, especially for non-Japanese speakers here.
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