A few hours ago, a tweet showing a clearer look of the flavor text on the comm devices popped up with some interesting info. As anyone can see, the text is in English, however, it seems to have just been put into a translator such as Google translate and pasted into the game, as evidenced by the rather hard to follow English. While it probably won’t take a genius to decode all the information, I think it’s safe to say someone with a Japanese background might have better luck at conveying all the information in these texts. In addition, there are some concepts such as the DM engine/organization (more on that in a second) that many parts of the Japanese audience are not going to be able to fully follow, let alone overseas, and I feel like I can point people into the right direction when it comes to that kind of thing. I will reprint the text below, cleaning up the grammar and whatnot to make it more coherent.
But before I begin, I want to talk about this DM engine/organization thing at the top, rather than have a huge footnote at the bottom. The DM engine is never mentioned in the actual game, Japanese or English (to my knowledge), obviously aside from this datamine. The first time it was mentioned was in part 2 of “Forging BLADE”, a short story for Xenoblade X that was posted in the run-up to the release of X. Translation courtesy of Gessenkou, here are the relevant quotes, part 2 and onward:
1.) “…Was it while I was in geosynchronous orbit above the planet during the DM engine orientation exam, or during my observational visit to the lunar base? Or maybe it was…”
2.) “…thanks to the development of the Skells and the DM engine power source…”
3.) “Although the chief engineer had not braced himself for impact either, instead managing the auxiliary engine and broken DM engine during the crash, he had still woken up first.”
4.) “Such accommodations were very taxing on the ship’s resources, but with the new DM Engine technology, they were able to manage.” (talking about how resource heavy the White Whale is)
5.) “…the DM engine sector…”
6.) ” Although the primary engine was seriously damaged, they still had the auxiliary engine. Shelter and energy would be indispensable if they wanted to live on as a civilization.”
7.) “The DM Engine that was supplying energy to the entire Sector was seriously damaged.”
8.) “The White Whale’s main engine, the DM Engine…”
9.) “The DM Engine, made up of the auxiliary and main engines… If they could obtain that high-output, high-efficiency power reactor…”
10.) “The DM Engine was incredibly compact and lightweight compared to things like nuclear fusion reactors….”
Although the name “DM engine” is not used, there is a second time, I would say, in which the DM engine was indirectly mentioned. In the short story in Art of Mira (which I’m currently working on), skells use the DM engine to operate (strongly resembling a Slave Generator-ish relationship, by the way), but when they landed on Mira, some interference between the skells and the DM engine was making the supply intermittent and unreliable, and BLADEs find and harvest Miranium as an alternative fuel source for when the DM engine supply gets cut off. Relevant quotes from the short story “Skells Reborn” describing the DM engine are as follows (translations by me):
1.) “…Skells receive energy via transmission from a mother ship or base. “Out of gas” is just not something that can happen.”
2.)”The energy transmitter from the White Whale was working properly in NLA.”
In the datamined text, there is mention of a “DM organization”. While it’s possible this could be something entirely different from the engine, the surrounding context makes it pretty clear in my opinion that “organization” is a mistranslation of “engine”. The word in question here is “機関”, and this is a tricky word that interestingly can mean either organization or engine. Organization XIII from Kingdom Hearts, for example, is “XIII機関”, but on the other hand, the DM engine is “DM機関”. Lastly, as to what the acronym DM stands for, this is no doubt Dark Matter. Here is a cleaned up version of the text (do note that a lot of things that I change are guesses based on my knowledge of the Japanese language and what makes the most sense to me):
540 meters in full length; a classic battleship. The blueprints [for the battleship] were drawn up in the second half of the [Earthlife] Colonization Project*1 integration plan and was designed from the beginning to be fully capable of combating Ghost. it hosts two small DM engines made up of dark matter that was brought by Ferrell and carried in (by?) Kazumot (Kazumoto?) to the bow of the ship. The central hull portion has a docking area with 4 spaces and tactical landing crafts which can be used to eject Skells for deployment individually or in groups of up to 16 per craft.
The ship makes use of an active stealth system to fulfill its duty of traveling the dark matter seas without being detected from any enemies (think invisibility shield that Solaris and the interplanetary invasion system use from Gears) and also sports a phase transition cannon that was developed thanks to the harvesting of the technology in Elma’s phase transition gun. This advanced technology is part of the [Samaarian] federation*2 control mechanism (process?), and the gun’s power compares to the cannon that was created by humans (not really sure about the last part). Its offensive capabilities are equal to or even greater than it’s sister ship the Orion, which Ernst boards. The Orion is missing, however, and is not part of the [Earthlife] colonization project integration plan, and is a warship that was built by Sakuraba Industries to be uniquely different from the Dreadnaught*3. So, the thing in which many of… (text cuts off here)
*1It’s in kanji for the text probably because Google translate couldn’t spit out a translation for a unique word they came up with. the “integration plan” part is curious, but I’m not sure if it’s just bad translation or if there is actually something aside from the actual Earthlife Colonization Project that was taking place.
*2 “star cluster” is a really weird phrase, but upon putting it through Google translate, it was pretty clear to me that original word was 星団. The only time this word comes up in the Japanese is for the Samaarian Federation, so I think it’s safe to say this is talking about Saamarian Fed tech. Perhaps a policing weapon to control their own people or something.
*3 The ship mentioned throughout the text is probably the Dreadnaught. This might seem totally out of the blue, but there’s actually art of the Dreadnaught in the unidentified materials section of Art of Mira, and I think it’s safe to say the Dreadnaught was going to be the main hub for an earlier version of the game.
Image credit: @TorchicFlame
Mira 