Lost In Translation: Following The Plot In Noah's Heart

There's only one reason I wish Noah's Heart was on Steam right now and that's so I could tell you just how many hours I've put in. I honestly have no idea but it has to be a lot. 

At some point I'm hoping I'll be able to say I know what I'm doing but right now that moment seems a long way off. One thing I can say is that I'm having a lot of fun. There's very little about the game I've seen that I don't like. I like the way it looks, the way it plays and the way it sounds. I even like the story.

About the only thing I don't like is the translation.

It's not terrible. I've seen much worse. I've played imported mmorpgs where the localization was so poorly done I could barely understand what the questgivers wanted, let alone follow the nuances of the backstory. That's never the case in Noah's Heart but somehow it almost makes things worse.

What irks me about the way the translation has been handled is how it offers just enough to suggest both the story and the telling were likely much more entertaining in the original version. There's a lot of plot and even more lore and it seems like it would all add up to quite a rich and detailed background, if only it was easier to follow.

As for the dialog, it's all too easy to see where the humorous asides, ironic comments and snarky backchat would go in a naturalistic, idiomatic version. I'd lay odds it's genuinely witty in the original language, which I assume would be either Mandarin or Cantonese, since the developer, Archosaur Games, is based in Beijing.

That's ironic even in the translation. I imagine it was very dry indeed in the original.

 

The game launched with an impressive five language choices: Thai, English, Chinese, Vietnamese and Bahasa. I had to look the last one up. It's "a form of Malay, spoken in Indonesia." I wonder if the other South-East Asian translations are better than the English? I hope so for the sake of the players using them but I guess there's no particular reason why they should be. An English game localized into Dutch wouldn't necessarily get all the nuances right just because the two countries are geographically adjacent and share a language group.

A bad translation doesn't put me off if the gameplay is good, anyway. One of my favorite imported titles of all time, Dragon Nest, is barely comprehensible at times but it's beautiful to look at at and wildly entertaining to play so I put up with the clunky dialog.

Noah's Heart is another game where I really wish someone had done a better job with the translation, all the same. While it might be fair to characterise a lot of SE Asian mmorpgs, particularly the anime ones, as having a certain, generic similarity when it comes to plot, I've found the narratives of many of the ones I've played to be more involving than some of their Western counterparts. 

It's hokum, sure, but it's often pacey, zippy, lively hokum that doesn't take itself too seriously. Western fantasy all too often tends to adopt a portentous, overblown style that refers back to a whole tradition I neither respect nor admire. I'd rather run around with a gang of emotional, excitable kids than trudge along with some grim hero carrying the weight of the world on their shoulders.

Everyone we meet seems to have some kind of history with Hughes.

 

It doesn't help that I can't even work out what the central narrative of Noah's Heart is. There's a main storyline I've been following that involves Hughes and his organization, Gale Force, who also turn up in the other narratives, but I really couldn't begin to tell you what it's about.

There's a good reason for that: I haven't touched the main storyline for ages. Instead, I've been investigating a serial killer in Gulf Stream City and trying to find a missing scientist, who's been abducted by terrorists. 

Those are the two, entirely separate and unconnected (Or are they?) plots of Season Zero - Light and Shadow and Season One - Scarlet Mark Mystery. I didn't even realise there were seasons until the second one, confusingly numbered #1, turned up but fortunately you can go back and play catch-up, which is how I came to be doing them both at the same time. 

I'm going to have to get a move on with my investigations, too. As I type this, the game is down for an update, after which it seems we'll have not just a whole new zone, the Olmec Rainforest, but yet another Season, "Soul Inspired Art". As with just about everything else in the game, there's no real introduction or explanation. New things just appear, it seems like every day. If there's one thing Noah's Heart isn't short of it's content.

Ave comes clean about who she really is. There's so much lore. I wish there was a guide.

I've been thundering through the twin stories as fast as the mechanics will allow. There's a time-gated element, as I mentioned in a previous post, where you have to accrue various clues by doing unrelated dailies for story points but because I have two tales on the go at once I've been able to stagger my progress so one or the other is always in play. That's going to get even easier with a third season, always assuming one of the others doesn't vanish before I've finished it.

I hope not. I want to find out how the stories end. As the screenshot at the top of the post shows, I'm close to finishing Season Zero and almost half way through Season One. It's taking a while. They're really long, not least because of the recursive format they both employ.

In order to progress you need to make mistakes. At every nodal point in the narrative - and there are many - you're faced with a binary choice, only one option of which is available. You can see there is another but you don't have sufficient information to take it. 

The way you get that information is by taking the only available option and failing. Sometimes you die, sometimes everyone dies. Sometimes you accuse an innocent suspect and get them killed. Sometimes you just make a fool of yourself. 

Proof that not everyone in Noah is seventeen years old. Or even looks like they are.

Whatever happens, things don't work out and you have to go back a stage. Time literally resets. You click an icon on screen and there's a montage flashback in reverse, spooling you back to the bad decision you made. Then you get to do it again, making a diferent choice by using what you learned from getting it wrong.

I really like that. It confused the heck out of me to begin with but now I understand it I'm fascinated to see the alternate realities my reckless choices create. And sometimes the fail states involve huge chunks of playable content you really wouldn't want to miss.

To get to the correct result, I think I saw the spectacular air raid on Darkmist Citadel five times and the best action sequence that followed it was one of the failures. That one involved a crazy car chase, a bunch of exciting fights, a desperate race to a waiting galleon for a daring escape by sea and finally a terrible storm in which the ship went down with all hands. 

Coming from a Western mmorpg like Guild Wars 2, where you're expected to make do with a couple of hours of new story every three months or so, the sheer amount of narrative and non-repeatable gameplay involved in these Seasons is mindblowing. Any one of them would keep ANet going for half a year and we'll have had three in a month!

Tell me about it!

If only someone had taken the trouble to hire a native English speaker to turn the literal translations into the kind of language people actually speak, everything would be perfect. Any passing American or Australian student on a gap year would have done. Archosaur could have crowdsourced it, even. It's a certainty there are people playing the game who could do a better job. Probably hundreds of them 

I do think companies hoping to go big in the West are missing a trick when it comes to translations. There's often a big hoo-hah about localized gameplay or costume or gender options (Rightly so.) but there seems to be some kind of assumption that Google Translate is good enough when it comes to the written word.

It's a pity. I know the conventional wisdom is that no-one reads quest text but not reading it isn't the same as not seeing it. A bad translation probably creates more of a bad impression than you'd think.

Then again, as I say, it hasn't put me off. I just know someone, somewhere is getting all the subtleties I'm missing. It's annoying, but what can you do?