Nintendo Removes Final Sword From Switch Eshop Over Copyright Issues

At the time of this writing, Nintendo has now officially removed the RPG “Final Sword” from the Switch’s eShop for ripping music straight from The Legend of Zelda. Sources claimed that Final Sword was using a song nearly identical to “Zelda’s Lullaby” by Koji Kondo. Clearly Nintendo didn’t catch this before okaying the game for release onto the eShop, but since then it appears Nintendo has caught wind and taken action. Final Sword was originally a mobile game published by HUP Games. The song “Zelda’s Lullaby” was originally released in The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time.

A Twitter user who goes by the username “MossarilyOBJECT” originally noticed the song in the game and tweeted about his findings how “Zelda’s Lullaby” somehow seemed to have made it into Final Sword. He then posted a video of the game on Twitter which showed footage of the song playing in-game. 

How the developers thought they could get away with this is not clear as the song is prominect in the Zelda franchise and has been featured many times. Some might even go so far as to say that it is one of the more popular Nintendo songs. MossyOBJECT’s tweet quickly spread and was seen by over 400k others. Some of those viewers seem to have been Nintendo employees considering the removal of Final Sword from the eShop today. The game sure got a lot of free publicity from all of this, but not exactly the good kind.

It’s unclear if the game will make a return to the Switch sans the copyrighted song, but one thing is certain: it’s probably not a great idea to use copyrighted Nintendo materials in a game that you publish on the Nintendo Switch.

Are you surprised this one snuck through the cracks and onto the eShop? Let us know in the comments below.