I've had a very specific reason for wanting to play Heaven's Dawn, an obscure adventure made by a Taiwanese developer. Simply put, it's one of the very few adventure games, if not the only one, that was officially dubbed in Finnish. It might actually be the only non-Finnish game to have been dubbed. A good many have gotten Finnish subtitling, but to actually hear Finnish in a game is very, very rare. Besides Heaven's Dawn, I can only come up with the character of Ahti from Remedy's Control.
You'd think, that when such a venture as dubbing a game is embarked upon, the chosen game would be a kind of a title that would greatly benefit from being dubbed, for example, if the game is aimed at children who don't know the original language. That's really the main reason why anything is dubbed in Finland: any movies or series aimed at children are most likely dubbed, everything for adults or teens only get subtitles. So that in mind, I was pretty surprised, that Heaven's Dawn is anything but a kids game. Sure, it might look like it at the first glance, but it's really not that kid-friendly story at all.
Heaven's Dawn was released in Finland with a subtitle Viimeinen Toivo, which translates to The Last Hope. I guess that fits the overall story pretty well, as that really is the hero's main purpose in it: he is the literal last hope of humanity.
In another dimension, the deities of the realm decide that they've had enough of humans: of their arrogance and their sinning. The main god decides to place a curse upon humanity in order to punish them, but not all are happy about it, they want to help humans get better. So they send a messenger to our realm, where an artist, Jeremy, becomes the chosen saviour of humanity. He is sent to another dimension through the portal opened up by a mysterious pendant.
After his arrival at a castle, which Jeremy finds almost deserted. The only people around are a gardener and his wife, who have no idea where everyone has gone. The forest around the castle has dried up and is dying. All the animals have deserted it.
The story has quite a bit going on. While the writing is rather simplistic, or it might be the fault of the translation as well, the subject matter of god punishing the world is quite a heavy one. It's far from being traditional subject matter for kids stories. Or at least European kids stories. I can't really claim any special knowledge on what constitutes a "kids story" in Taiwan.
Stylistically, Heaven's Dawn owes quite a bit to the Legend of Kyrandia series, which was already on its 3rd game by when Heaven's Dawn came out. Oddly enough, while Art 9 borrowed heavily from the aesthetics, they didn't do as much in terms of gameplay and a big portion of the screen, which could have been used as the inventory, is just a bland resemblance of an artists easel. The inventory itself is behind a right mouse click and is somewhat cumbersome to use.
Technically speaking, the game has quite a few issues especially in what comes to click detection. At times, it's very hard to hit the right hotspot and the game can register a wrong one despite you are aiming at a hotspot at an opposite side of the screen. Occasionally, Jeremy can even block some hotspots, or his nearness to one can trigger the wrong hotpot response altogether.
Another odd thing about the hotspots is, that some are labelled, some are not. Usually, the important ones have labels, but in some locations, they do not. Generally speaking, unlabelled hotspots are not important, unless they are. I can't say if this is a result of a buggy code or if this is by design.
The puzzles are mostly fairly simple. Some traditional inventory combining, using the right item in the right place and so on. Nothing really taxing, beyond figuring out a couple of moon logic puzzles, where you have to use the right item in a place that hints very little. Perhaps the worst puzzle of the game is a caterpillar game you play with a dwarf. It's simple enough of a game, but you need to play it several times because for some reason you need to win by 50 points. And getting a 50 point upper hand can be a daunting task. Some puzzles don't explain themselves at all, so there's some heavy trial and error at places. And finally, the most annoying puzzle is the curse lifting, as you need to find several symbols hidden in the game world. These symbols are then used at a temple to form a spell that reverses the curse, but obviously, you need to find out what the symbols mean before anything else. It's more or less a puzzle asking you if you can write down symbols and words on a paper sheet so that you can copy them in a game. Riveting, for sure.
One reason, or the main reason really, why I played the game, is the Finnish dubbing. After watching some Youtube clips of the English versions of the game, I do have to admit, that the Finnish translation seems to be pretty verbatim. While it does, at times, feel a bit clumsy, the translation doesn't take huge liberties with the text. And while the Finnish voice acting does leave some room for improvement, the overall Finnish voices are better than the English ones. Also, it seems to me that the English version doesn't have voices in-game, whereas the Finnish version is fully voiced. The voices do lean towards more towards meant for kids direction, but again, the story doesn't really read out like a kids tale.
I don't think Heaven's Dawn made a big of an impact in Finland. It was, at the time, more of a novelty and an experiment in bringing games to a segment of Finns who weren't fluent enough in English. The problem is, Kidsoft, the translator of Heaven's Dawn, chose an obscure game for their experiment. It's not a terrible game as such, but I can imagine a game with a bit more notable pedigree being a better choice. I can only imagine a Lucasarts or Sierra title being treated with a Finnish translation, dubbing and all. Besides, Heaven's Dawn was already dated when it came out in 1995, when the Finnish version was released in 1996, it was flat out archaic.
Heaven's Dawn is an odd duck. A Taiwanese point and click game made in the mid-90s, which for some reason caught the interest of Kidsoft as a candidate of being translated into Finnish. I don't know, maybe they got the rights for cheap and decided to go for it in order to see what would happen. Or perhaps they knew someone from the developer or publisher side and imagined a brand new set of wallets to conquer. Whatever their reasoning was, Heaven's Dawn still remains something of an obscure game, that not that many people remember, not in Finland at least. And I doubt it is much more remembered elsewhere either.
Comments
Post a Comment