Honkai: Star Rail is a space comedy from Genshin Impact developer Hoyoverse, out now on PlayStation 5. The development process encouraged the localization team to add memes and other jokes.
Honkai: Star Rail has a refreshingly silly air to its world. In the game, players can go rummaging through the trash or flirt with characters while texting on their phone. Flavor text for achievements or items might reference anything from games like Pokémon to popular media like Breaking Bad. Its internet-savvy and self-aware voice brings a specific flavor of comedy that, as it turns out, was in part due to the freedom given to localizers in the development process, developers told Polygon.
Honkai: Star Rail is a free-to-play sci-fi roleplaying game from Hoyoverse, the developers of Genshin Impact; it’s already available on Windows PCs and mobile devices, and it was recently released on PlayStation 5. Polygon spoke to the game’s developers about how they brought a unique voice to its sci-fi world. They gave us a deep dive into the process of how the game was brought stateside, and specifically how they empower localizers to add memes and specific cultural references.
While Hoyoverse has offices across the world, the Honkai: Star Rail team writes the first script in Chinese. The team told Polygon that there’s a methodological approach to the localization process with “creative text,” a category of text that includes dialogue options, character lines, interactive dialogue, mission names, Eidolon names, and more. By giving localizers the freedom to add in entirely new references, those translators can craft a faithful adaptation of the source material written in Chinese for an English-speaking audience.
“Our goal is to empower our localization team with a higher degree of creative freedom that they need to not only preserve the original flavor of the authorial intent but also to craft a reading experience that feels authentic and natural to our audience as if all the texts were originally composed in their native language,” a member of the development team told Polygon in a written Q&A.
