Yesterday I gave Risen a try and without thinking I started the English version of it. After watching the intro, which I thought a bit weird, I remembered that this was developed by German studio Piranha Bytes, so I decided it would make more sense to play it in German. Imagine my surprise when I realized the spoken text of the intro was quite different from (what I assume is) the English translation ...

English intro: German intro: Now, I don't really know anything about the game's story yet, so I can't tell whether the English version is in tune with the lore that you might discover later on, but it's kind of weird how much these two versions differ from each other (e.g. Have the gods abandoned the humans or did the humans banish them? Did the gods enslave the humans or did they enslave the monstrosities that are now threatening humanity?). Makes you wonder whether the translators got a different script from the developers or whether they thought the original was not dramatic enough yet or needed to be more positive for an international audience (humans are not abandoned and doomed but freed and master of their own choices). Heh.

Have you ever experienced something similar in other games? I'm not talking about clumsy translations but about translations who actually change the meaning of the text they translate. If you don't know any languages other than your own but you did play a game that was translated, did you ever suspect that the translation caused the game to feel weird, that it somehow altered the nature or at least some aspects of it?

That's a bit hard to answer because to find translations that change the meaning of a narrative, but do so in sentences that don't hint at a careless translation process, you really need to have played both versions.

My favorite example for a careless translation that completely turns the narrative upside down is from a movie, "The Wizard of Speed and Time". It's a movie about an idealist indie movie maker who, in one scene, basically speaks for the movie's real-life director and states: "I want to make a movie with special effects that really mean something, that are not just icing on the cake." This is the core statement of the entire movie, everything else happens in relation to it. The German translation turned that into "I want to make a movie with special effects that are real hits!" ("Ich will einen Film mit Spezialeffekten machen, die richtige Knaller sind!")

With regard to games - the few times when I'm playing a game that was translated into German, I often stumble across phrases that clearly make no sense unless you realize that they are literal translations of English idioms. But that's not what you had in mind, if I understood you correctly.

Well, you can talk about that, too, if you like. I just thought that nonsensical literal translations are probably a quite common occurrence in videogames, while I can't remember noticing anything like in the OP before; I mean something that isn't just a bad literal translation but feels like they just picked out a few words and ideas of the original and went creative with them (e.g. both versions feature the word "slave", but in in significantly different contexts). You're right though, something like this is kind of hard to spot, as you could play the English version without ever noticing that it doesn't match the original text, which makes it all the more curios. But feel free to discuss anything related to game (or movie) translations.

Noticed a couple of dodgy parts in the Daedalic games I've played - in The Whispered World there's a depression in the ground it calls a 'gloomy dip' for example

And of course there's countless 'All your base are belong to us' Engrish examples but, being English myself, I am, of course not multi-lingual enough to find anything quite like your example...