A port of The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess for Nintendo 3DS is in the works. Unofficially, of course.
Following the release of the epic Nintendo game’s decompilation project, which brought Twilight Princess to PC, the 2005 action-adventure game is coming to 3DS as part of an ambitious fan project.
The Nintendo 3DS has been a haven for recompilation projects following the system’s abandonment by Nintendo. In recent years, fans have made complete ports of Super Mario 64 and other titles based on decompilations of original software.
YouTuber Game of Tobi, the mind behind the ambitious ports of Super Mario 64 and Minecraft to the Game Boy Advance, announced that they are actively working on a port of Twilight Princess to the Nintendo 3DS based on the decompilation source code.
Currently in the early stages of development, the homebrew developer explained that the port will be released “when it is ready and I feel like it”. At the time of writing, the game is in ‘an early state and there are a lot of visual bugs”. However, despite very limited functionality, it’s a proof of concept that this port can work with enough time.
“It is already recognisable, it can already be played in some areas,” the developer said. “What it comes down to right now is just the work of fixing the bugs and of actually optimising the game. Because, so far, I haven’t done a lot of optimisation work, and there are incredible things you can accomplish if you actually do the optimisation work.”
Game of Tobi hopes that the port, when finished will also be able to make use of the system’s 3D features, although this feature is sometimes disabled in official releases that push the system too hard. “If this project advances further, we will be able to play Twilight Princess in a very unique way that is not possible on many other platforms,” they said.
With enough optimisation, there’s no reason why The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess wouldn’t be fully playable on Nintendo 3DS. During the handheld’s lifespan, Nintendo released a number of intensive ports, including Luigi’s Mansion and Xenoblade Chronicles, the latter of which was exclusive to the New Nintendo 3DS system.
As for the 3DS port of Twilight Prince, it’s likely going to take a while to arrive. “I’m gonna keep working on this and also post updates on this version, but please be patient as this takes a lot of time and I want to work on my other projects as well.” With that said, the developer also encouraged other fans to work on their own ports if they’d like a faster release.
