Bringing a full breadth of voice acting to Breath of the Wild with the Complete Story Dub

Here at Zelda Universe, the entertainment team over on our YouTube channel has completed a full dub of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. You may be asking yourself: “Isn’t the game already dubbed?” This question has been thrown left and right in regard to the project, and it is a valid question to ask. To clarify, the Zelda Universe team has provided full voice acting to the Breath of the Wild game, to a degree.

In The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, voice acting was implemented in certain cutscenes, albeit far and few between. Voice acting could be heard in the 23 Memory cutscenes (including DLC), cutscenes with the Champions, Princess Zelda, and certain scenes with the King of Hyrule and a few other principle characters (Sidon, Yunobo, etc.). While this sounds like a lot, there are several scenes and characters not actually voiced. This is where the Zelda Universe dub of Breath of the Wild comes in.

On March 5, 2021, Zelda Universe released Part 1 of Breath of the Wild: Complete Story Dub, playing through the main quests of the game, and providing voices to characters not originally voiced. You know that guy on Proxim Bridge, Brigo? He has a voice now! You know Paya in Kakariko Village? She’s voiced now, too! The list of characters goes on, but it goes from 13 characters to over 100 characters now voiced in this dub. The Zelda Universe dub of Breath of the Wild focuses on the major story quests. Some side quests are included for either story purposes or entertainment value.

Another question was brought up about the dub: “Why are Zelda and the Champions recast? Why did you not include the original? They’re already voiced.” This one is a bit more complex, but there is good reasoning behind recasting them:

1. Those who played Breath of the Wild will remember that Sidon, Yunobo, Teba, and Riju were voice acted. But not all of their lines were voiced. We had to cast our own group of actors for this reason.
2. King Rhoam was only partially voiced. He has three notable cutscenes with voice acting, but there are other times he is not voiced. So he also needed to be cast for this dub project.
3. Princess Zelda (along with the Champions) was one of the few cases where she was always fully voiced. So the question about recasting certain roles revolved around Zelda. Why did we not stick with the original voice actor? The major reason came from the fact that she shares a cutscene with King Rhoam. The difference in vocal performance and portrayal would be drastically different and difficult to edit around. Therefore, we decided to redub the memory cutscenes.
4. The Champions all had to be recast to follow suit with Zelda and the king, as they all share at least one cutscene together.
5. Being a fan-produced project, we do not wish to reuse the official voice acting when the original actors are not directly involved with it, especially for legal reasons that we want to avoid.

This means the project, overall, was redubbed from the ground up in addition to all of the newly voiced characters. In total, there are over seven hours of fully-dubbed characters and in-game cutscenes. This includes the DLC segment, The Champions’ Ballad, featuring song covers by Kass, as well as five additional Memory cutscenes redubbed.

Here at Zelda Universe, this was one of our most challenging dub projects to produce. This project was completed in under seven months total, from October 2020 to April 2021. Bonus videos are still being released up until early June 2021, which can all be viewed from the Zelda Universe YouTube channel.

This project would have not been possible without the hardworking voice cast, project crew, as well as the thousands of auditions received from the casting call. We hope that revisiting Breath of the Wild through our full fan dub of the game is an enjoyable one! Below you can find videos of the main parts of the dub, as well as a list of actors involved with the dub project.

A special thanks to the following people who worked behind the scenes and help make this project a reality:

Jacob Wilson — Assistant Director, Casting
Conner Brownlee — Video Graphics and Design
Noah Copeland — Sound design and effects
Nico Vliek / WhaddupNico — Logo Design
MajorLink — Featured animator
RwanLink – Featured animator
Jacob “Skylord 570” Zeleny — Music arrangement (for the vocal covers)