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A while back, a reader named Dhillon521 submitted a question about Zero Wing’s ending text:

Hello, A little while ago I saw your article about Zero Wing. I decided to look in the game. So I got a Japanese rom and looked at some of the endings. Apparently the Japanese version has 4 endings while the English only has 3! And more interesting the fourth ending is the only one with text. Maybe the bad translations had something to do with laziness? Do you think you could do a article on it? Here is a screenshot of the ending Just in case.

I was all set to translate the line when I decided to do some double-checking to make sure that the screenshot was real and that the Japanese really did have another ending. It turns out that not only is the screenshot 100% real, the Japanese version of Zero Wing has 35 endings! In contrast, the English version only has 3. For those not familiar with Zero Wing , the ending changes with each loop through the entire game.

Anyway, after learning this, I went and documented each Japanese ending, organized them into a table, and tried my hand at some simple translations. You can see all 35 endings below, but there are a few things to note first:

From Ending #4 and on, the villain character starts to talk in very unusual Japanese. Most of the time he speaks in a very effeminate way, but sometimes he speaks in heavy dialects. Sometimes he talks normally, and sometimes he talks like a kid. His speech style is all over the place and is pretty silly.

Due to a limited character font, some of the writing in the endings is presented unusually.

Many of the extra endings feature references to old comedy routines, music, anime, and more. A lot of this information isn’t well-documented on Japanese sites, and it’s even harder to find info on it in English. The age of the references suggests this text was written by someone who grew up in the 1960s or 1970s. Some of the references seem to elude Japanese players, so I’m sure I’m missing a lot of them myself.

After Ending #35, the endings simply loop around and start with Ending #4 again.

First, if you’re a video person, you can see all of the endings in this video compilation:



If text is more your thing, see below:

So there we go, all 35 Japanese Zero Wing endings. Again, most of this text is so silly, is filled with unusual speech patterns, and is brimming with pop culture references that I’m sure I’m missing something or gotten something wrong. If you can help fill in the blanks or correct anything above, definitely let me know in the comments or on Twitter.