Breath of the Wild 2 voice actors offer a disappointing release date update

It has been over a year since Nintendo has updated gamers on The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild 2. The sequel was announced to be in development during E3 2019 last June and now an interview with voice actors Marc Navarro and Nerea Alfonso, who voiced the Spanish dubs for Revali and Zelda in the original game, has given fans hope that BotW 2 might be nearly complete. Or is it?

Both Navarro and Alfonso were featured on a new episode of the Spanish podcast A Coffee with Nintendo released on June 28. The duo’s segment on the show kicked up a whirlwind of BotW 2 rumors that gained traction online Monday, even though the voice actors didn’t actually reveal much about their work on the upcoming game.

Game Reactor published a story Monday morning claiming that Navarro and Alfonso had finished recording their lines for the Spanish dub of BotW 2, which prompted a few other publications to pick up the story. Dubs in different languages are typically done after a game has been fully developed, but the voice actors never quite confirm that they’ve finished their recording sessions. So what's really going on here?

Navarro and Alfonso spend the first few minutes of the show discussing how they often record their lines without any context but are sometimes given snippets of information about the scenes they’re recording. Then around the 17:30 to 18-minute marks, the voice actors appear to almost slip and drop some details about BotW 2, but they quickly backtrack and say they don’t actually know what game they recorded lines for.

Twitter-user and Spanish-speaker Risu responded to one of the news stories about the podcast and said that Navarro and Alfonso never outright confirm they’ve worked on BotW 2 but they imply it. Around 39 minutes into the interview, Alfonso says it’s difficult to tell what part of the story she’s in because her lines blend together without any context.

Risu claims that it sounds as if both Navarro and Alfonso are “tiptoeing around their NDA” and essentially playing dumb to avoid leaking or spoiling anything and potentially running into trouble with Nintendo.

"There's a lot of weird stuff surrounding Zelda in the first game, and also in the second game, which we haven't worked on,” Alfonso says with a chuckle at one point.

The Inverse Analysis — Sadly, the A Coffee with Nintendo interview isn’t hard evidence that BotW 2 is nearly complete. It gave gamers some hints that Navarro and Alfonso might have begun recording portions of the new game, but none of their statements suggest that they’ve dubbed over the entire game.

Yet there’s still hope for BotW 2 this year.

Gamers are currently in the midst of the longest drought ever between major Nintendo Direct announcements. Industry analysts, journalists, and fans are expecting an update on the company’s biggest impending titles. That could mean a new trailer and potentially a release date window announcement for BotW 2. Especially because next-gen Sony and Microsoft consoles are now on the horizon, it's time for Nintendo to weigh in with some kind of big announcement. BotW 2 would be just the thing.

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild 2 is currently in development.