u/drThuganomix

I'm near the end of my first Breath of the Wild playthrough, which I'm playing in Italian, my mothertongue. While I've found most shrine puzzle solutions to be rather simple, there have been a few instances where I just couldn't wrap my head around the solutions, namely Keo Ruug's "Fateful Stars" puzzle and the "Secret of the Snowy Peaks" shrine quest.

Since I've almost finished the game, I decided to google some of the puzzles I was missing (in English, in order to find more results). However, by simply reading the English version of the hints of those same puzzles I noticed that they were slightly different, in a way which made the solution much more obvious. Here is the comparison between the English, Italian and Japanese versions.

Keo Ruug Shrine (ENG) = "Look to the stars for guidance. The constellations are the key."
Keo Ruug Shrine (ITA) = "Guarda le stelle. Il numero delle stelle aprirà il sentiero del destino." (lit. "Look at the stars. The number of the stars will open the fateful way."

The solution for this puzzle is to count the amount of constellations of each type on the opposite wall and put the orb on the correct number. The Italian version does not mention constellations, it says to "count the stars", so I kept getting the solution wrong because I was counting the amount of stars WITHIN every constellation.

When we look at the original version, it states: "Hoshi wo nagame yo. Sono kazu ga unmei wo hiraku michishirube to narou". A simple translation would be "Look at the stars, their number will open the fateful way". While "their" makes it a bit more vague than the Italian version, it never openly mentions the japanese word for "constellation" ("seiza").

Secret of the Snowy Peaks (ENG) = "When the snowy mountain pedestal glows, cast a cold shadow onto its core."
Secret of the Snowy Peaks (ITA) = "Quando il piedistallo sul monte innevato risplende, accendi le tenebre." (lit. "When the snowy mountain pedestal glows, turn on/light up the darkness").

The solution is to make a big lump of snow and cast its shadow on the glowing pedestal when the sun is in the right position. The English version makes this very obvious with the phrase "cast its shadow", the Italian version not so much, as "light up the darkness" may be intepreted as something that involves the use fire.

The Japanese hint states "Yukiyama no daiza ga hikaru toki, daiza no chuushin ni yami no katamari wo tomose". The Japanese verb "tomosu" meas "to light something using fire" (such as a lamp or a candle), and so the original hint is literally telling you to "turn on the lump of darkness". Very cryptic, no reference to casting any shadows whatsoever. However, dare I say the Italian hint is even more ambiguous, as it makes no reference to the "core" of the pedestal - mentioned in Japanese as daiza ("pedestal") no chuushin ("core") - nor to the "lump" (katamari) that you are supposed to make.

I have been studying Japanese for six years, but even when asking a native Japanese speaker, I was told that the Japanese hints are quite cryptic and hard to interpret, but fitting to the puzzle-solving nature of the game.

As a student of Translation Studies that hopes to translate videogames in the future, I found this to be incredibly fascinating. I wonder what made the english translators decide to simplify the puzzles so much, and wether it was a choice made by the translators or maybe by Nintendo itself. I also wonder if the Italian translators actually had access to the solutions of the puzzles, given to how ambiguous and even contradictory they are.

Anyways, next time you are struggling with a puzzle in this game, try playing in English.