Overwatch is hiding either a big mistake or a hilarious Easter egg

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You know that scroll that hangs on the wall at the final capture point in Overwatch's Hanamura map? The one that Hanzo kneels before while honoring his not-so-dead-it-turns-out brother in the Dragons animated short? It has four kanji characters on it, and if you can't read them, you probably just assumed their calligraphic lines conveyed some piece of ancient wisdom. That's not quite the case, apparently.

According to Kotaku, the scroll bears a maxim that translates directly to "dragon head, snake tail" (ryuutoudabi), which goes along with the serpentine dragons that Hanzo and Genji summon for their Ultimate abilities. But you're not supposed to take maxims literally - the saying means a fast start and a slow finish, or an anticlimax. Like you think you see a dragon coming but as it slithers past you realize it's just a snake, I guess.

Kotaku posits that this was just a slip-up on Blizzard's part, since the studio presumably doesn't want people associating the Shimada brothers' story of betrayal and redemption with anticlimax. But I'm not so sure: the majority of Overwatch's player base can't read kanji, so if they go through all the trouble of looking up each character (there are thousands of them and their strokes are stylized by the calligraphy, so it's not a trivial task) and translating the saying, only to discover that it says "anticlimax"... Well, that would be appropriately anticlimactic.

Given Blizzard's usual attention to detail and penchant for self-deprecating Easter eggs, I'd guess this was very much on purpose.

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Connor Sheridan
Connor Sheridan

I got a BA in journalism from Central Michigan University - though the best education I received there was from CM Life, its student-run newspaper. Long before that, I started pursuing my degree in video games by bugging my older brother to let me play Zelda on the Super Nintendo. I've previously been a news intern for GameSpot, a news writer for CVG, and was formerly a staff writer at GamesRadar.