‘Legend of Zelda: Breath Of The Wild’ Subtitles: You Can’t Play With The Japanese Voices

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild release date is now less than a month away—the game launches with the Nintendo Switch on March 3—and it’s going to be a pretty amazingly epic experience. It’s also going to be the first Zelda game with full voice acting (except for Link, of course). And, based on the Nintendo Switch trailers, that voice acting will be available in at least two languages, English and Japanese. One problem: You won’t easily be able to switch between them (Sort of takes the switch out of Nintendo Switch, huh?).

Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild Voices: English Or Japanese, Not Both

Zelda: Breath Of The Wild is huuuuugeeee.
Zelda: Breath Of The Wild is huuuuugeeee. Nintendo

Here’s the good news: you can access both voiceover tracks on any version of Legend of Zelda, according to IGN Portugal. But there’s a big caveat— in order to play Breath of the Wild in Japanese, you have to switch the Nintendo Switch system’s language preference to Japanese, which is a global decision that will put all the text on the game and the Switch into the language. And the real rub: You can’t display English subtitles with Japanese voiceovers.

That means that, if you want to enjoy the game with the original Japanese voices, you’d better get ready to enjoy reading it in Japanese too. Or accept that you won’t understand a damn thing. In short, if you don’t speak or read Japanese, you’re pretty much stuck with playing the game with English voices. And based on the English trailer, those voices sound just fine—but maybe not quite as authentic and soulful as the Japanese voices, which sound really great in the initial trailer.

There’s a petition to get Nintendo to revamp our options so Western players can enjoy the original voices, and if that’s the sort of thing you care about, I suggest you give it a quick scrawl. But it doesn’t look good—we’re going to be stuck with the English voices. Luckily, those don’t sound too bad either. It’s just a little blip for purists, but shouldn’t really detract from our enjoyment of Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild otherwise. The game launches March 3.

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