Depending on how you count it and break down the regional differences, Arabic is the fifth most-spoken language on Earth. And yet until very recently, Arabic speakers had no way of officially playing The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, a game released in 2017, in their native tongue.
While the game has obviously been available in English and Japanese from the start, it has also been playable in everything from German to Italian to Russian. Nintendo even differentiated some of the translation work, too; there are sperate localisation tracks for Spanish and Latin American Spanish, and even for French and Canadian French.
Middle Eastern gamers, however, have been shit out of luck. It’s not like there’s a lack of support, either; the Switch has been officially available in the region for years now, and Nintendo has even gone on record crediting sale spikes to their success in countries like Saudi Arabia.
That never translated (I’m sorry) into an official localisation of one of the console’s most important games, though, so a huge team of modders have taken it upon themselves to do it. The end result is this complete localisation of every single piece of text in the game, from dialogue to menus to prompts.
If you want to check the mod out yourself, here’s the project’s page. And if you want to see more of the team’s work their YouTube page has links to trailers for other games that they’ve localised, from Obra Dinn to Luigi’s Mansion.
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