I think I'll explain what happened in general, to make the overall picture clear.
The original game was released a year and a half ago, late spring 2008. It was translated into English for purposes of localisation, and got released in Poland. Then, the game was noticed by producers from Atari, who became then rather interested. They proposed not just to translate the game and release world-wide as is, but to work on the game for some time, and make numerous changes prior to releasing it. So we had a new variant of game somewhere in the spring 2009. It was rereleased in Russia, and after some time, in Germany. The English version for some reason was finnally shipped only a week ago, or so (2009, October 23).
So basically there are two variants of game: original Russian (also available in Polish), and "The Void", which was released in GErmany and English-speaking countries, and re-released in Russia. I.e. two Russian versions exist, and I even saw them both in one shop a few days ago
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The major changes are:
- Some changes in mechanics. Nerva doesn't need to be collected now, it is transported into pallete automatically; trees don't die forever after being used once. Use of colour in locations of a certain Sister "destroys" her realm, and some nasty things start to happen there, while the colour income from the trees becomes poor. You don't "charge" golems with lympha now
- new monsters. They represent a domain's damage, i.e. as the domain becomes used up, more hostile abominations appear.
- Mongolfier has finished his plastic surgery, and had the band removed (with all his hair, apparently). A side effect turned out to be his head expanding. Sorry.
- lipsync
- English and German voice-overs. Yay! Now not only people from Russia and Poland can understand the game. Ava in German is particularly good; never liked her as a character, but the acting seems appealing to me.
- Now there are 3 more talk locations for Brothers, not only one gloomy landscape for all 10 of them.
- the story was fiddled with. The general idea is the same, but the layout changed. So-called "quests" appeared, though you don't have to finish them (be prepared for the fight in this case, because the Brothers will punish you for that)
- the game was rebalanced once more. Unfortunately, it has become way harder than original. I.e. in the beginning it is quite simple, but there are numerous challenging occurrences in the second half. By the way, it is, I believe, the only change for the English version (save for bug fixing). The balance in the second half of the game was tweaked yet once more time to make it at least honest and not rely on player being lucky.
- the Colour has now become a character, which partically compensates for difficulty at the end of the game.
The drawbacks as I see them:
- some dialogues were truncated. Well, in fact they were almost completely rewritten... But in general many girls have less text. There was much rubbish in original. Well written rubbish, though. Meaning, that it was well put, pleasant to read and had a nice voice-acting, but made little to no sense. Some people miss it. I do not.
- I don't particularly like Ole's English voiceover, and also Ava's one; though in Russian it is Nameless Sister which turned out pretty undistinguished after her being redone by a new actress.
- the difficulty sometimes is more than it should have been. I mean, it would be OK with several difficulty levels, but when there is only one "generic difficulty for generic player", it is too much.
- I personally did not like what happens in the game in 9-10 cycles, when the concentration of events comes to its maximum. I.e. many characters appear, and for some reason they ALL absolutely ought to speak to you NOW, and not ten minutes later.
The subtitles in the base are tied to their voiceovers, so you cannot easily run voiceovers with subtitles from other languages; you would need to remaster the database manually for that. I mean, techically completely different things may be written in Russian, German and English games. Their voiceovers are independent, each of them has subs of its own with its own timing.