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What happen's to the elemental stars: and are the lighthouses pointless?

Started by zman9000, 10, January, 2016, 06:27:59 PM

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Salanewt

Hard to say, but just for fun I'll say that the world is tiny and everything is relatively short. Mostly because of this:






All four houses are placed on the overworld and are positioned appropriately on each side of that one river, although the two on the left are a tad lower than they should be. However, the point is that everything from the two left-most houses to the far right of the island is a pretty short walk. It would be fair to say that the far left, if it were mapped, would also only be about the size of the far right area.

However, the Rocks are still taller and also have a wider area despite their relatively small sprite proportions. I would assume that the point is the surrounding area is supposed to be incorporated into the level for some dungeons, as is the case for a couple of the tower dungeons and especially Venus Lighthouse. The issue with Golden Sun's overworld art style is that none of the sprites are ever representative of how their actual maps are visualized (houses are often taller than the Lemurian palace for example), but it would appear that they at least put a little effort into scaling Apojii correctly.

The point? Overworld scale is generally a pretty poor indicator of scale, but it can be okay-ish for the width and area of several locations. Lighthouse rooms also tend to be smaller than the total area of the two Apojii maps, so that works out somewhat. As for height, you can probably compare buildings pretty safely. Most houses only have one or two floors, but the house where you fight the thieves in GS1 has a battle background; backgrounds can be assumed to match the closest visions of the developers for their amount of detail alone. The house seems kind of tall, with two floors, an attic (the attic may be a part of the second floor, but it may not be), and a moderately arched ceiling. If you look at the lighthouse backgrounds, they tend to have arched ceilings as well, probably making their floors slightly taller. Rocks tend to be flat.

Okay, now lets look at Mercury Lighthouse. Unless I'm mistaken, it only has about 4-5 floors, minus the aerie, that are roughly the same height as the floors in houses. Maybe slightly higher arches in their ceilings. Zed will know for sure. It's also quite possible that the floors are pretty thick in order to support their non-wooden architecture, so we can assume that the distance between room floors (as in the ground/lowest flat parts) is slightly greater. Also keeping in mind that not all houses will have arched roofs.

So, a house with two floors:
/ \
|  |

A peni lighthouse with five, plus aerie:
  =
/   \
|   |
|   |
|   |
|   |
|   |

Which is fair. There is no evidence to support that they are taller than mountains, which themselves always look pretty short in the first two games.



TL;DR: Overworld sprites are never to scale, but their placement relative to their area can be sometimes if you incorporate their surrounding area with the dungeon maps. This means that you have to look at other sources, like battle backgrounds or comparisons between in-location maps, for a better gauge of relative size. Apojii is probably the map to use for area comparisons given that they lazily tried to put it to scale on the overworld. That being said, the lighthouses are not actually that tall (about normal lighthouse height). They are fairly wide though, maybe the width of Apojii, which is not shown in sprite size... but it never really is anyway. This also means that Weyard itself is actually pretty tiny. Either that or Apojii is much larger than it really is on the overworld.
Oh yeah baby, £ me harder.

Fusion is just a cheap tactic to make weak Adepts stronger.

Yoshi's Lighthouse is a hacking website in progress. Why not check it out if you like Yoshi or the Mario & Luigi games?

zman9000

hm, even still the lighthouses aren't small by any means. they also have slightly taller floors (i think) then most other structures.

Maybe first we should look into the strange level of detail some of the maps have.

something like tret's tree is kinda clear as the shape of the floors are the same making a tree, however something like the gabomba statue where its floors actually shape the the statue and the exits all match up relatively where they are on the town map.

its an odd level of detail to pay attention to when making a basically 2d, room segmented dungeon. its also weird because some dungeons simply ignore this, why others focus on it. for example, jupiter lighthouse's rooms outline the basic shape of the lighthouse, even having higher floors being smaller, however this is the only lighthouse that does this, its also the only lighthouse with rounded rooms. the only exception to this rule is the mars lighthouse's 4 side towers which all end up in their respective places.

another example is in the sol sanctum the sol and luna rooms in the main chamber and in the trap room are directly above each other, and swap luna and sol respectively. however in the same dungeon in the room south of the trap room is the room with the first non reusable psynergy stone, that room doesn't fit because its a few tiles bigger on the inside then the outside. why would everything else have such detail, but one room be completely off.

This is basically what i mean by golden sun having strange level of detail. certain things have a level of detail that on one would even notice if they didn't build it in 3d, however other things are easy to see are messed up or don't match just by playing the game... i'm not sure I understand the design details of golden sun anymore...
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Radamanthys

I think there's merit to this theory, after all there must be a reason they are tall structures, if the intention of the lighthouses was to put a bunch of puzzles as a deterrent then they could just take about any form, a labyrinth underground perhaps? Or some type of fortress? (Perhaps from a business point of view Camelot just wanted something different from the usual temple trope that Zelda games started)

But building on what they've given us, I think that the shape they take as large towers (and the large cylindrical space displayed by OP) could be very well interpreted as a hint on the functioning of the lighthouse, and the puzzles to keep it locked are built around the tower-like structure.

But I'd like to propose to see this from another angle. How did lighthouses come to be in the first place? I don't believe the answer is that simple as "well, they came to be to seal alchemy!" because their existence alone has several other implications; their current function is to emanate alchemy into Weyard but was that always the case? Being man-made, they are artificial means by which the world currently gets it's alchemy sustain so the real question here is how was it before. 

One possibility is that the sites where each lighthouse is installed are special areas (like the Elemental Rocks, but much more prominent) where their respective element is concentrated and exposed into the world and the lighthouse works as a water tap placed on this source of elemental energy that can close or open its flow. But they were made in such a way that if you opened the tap on full, it would cause the energy to shoot at Mt. Aleph to create the Stone of Sages which I believe is the original and main purpose of the lighthouses.

So in this case, it could lead to what OP proposes, the the star goes from the aerie all the way to the bottom and the chain reaction causes the element to flow back into the world.