Zelda: BotW's Ending Is Slightly Different in Japanese

The English and Japanese offer conflicting takes on the final battle.

By Sam Stewart

Warning: This article contains spoilers for the ending of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild.

The English dialogue during the final encounter with Breath of the Wild's Beast Ganon implies that defeating him will destroy Ganon once and for all, but in Japanese the line tells a different story.

The line in question, spoken by Zelda as Ganon assumes his beast form, goes like this in English: "Ganon was born out of a dark past. He is a pure embodiment of the ancient evil that is reborn time and time again... He has given up on reincarnation and assumed his pure, enraged form." That final line makes the encounter sound final, but the Japanese text seems to say the opposite.

On his blog Legends of Localization, professional translator Clyde "Mato" Mandelin breaks down the Japanese text, providing this basic translation: "He's an embodiment of hatred and grudge that arose in distant antiquity and revives again and again no matter how many times he's destroyed. This form was born from his obsessive refusal to give up on revival..."

As such, the lines don't seem to agree on whether or not Ganon will truly be defeated. So which is correct? Mandelin admits it's hard to say, pointing out that the scripts for big-budget games are often written in multiple languages simultaneously, so it's impossible to know which came first.

If you need a little help seeing that ending for yourself, check out IGN's Breath of the Wild wiki, which now includes tips for The Master Trials DLC. Nintendo also just recently launched a new update for Breath of the Wild, which includes a new feature that rewards players items for visiting the Switch's news feed.

Sam Stewart is a freelance writer for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter. 

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