Twilight Princess Finally Lands On Switch

The arrival of The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess on the Nintendo GameCube and Wii really was a bit of a moment for longtime fans of the franchise, as they finally got to see what the series would be like with the darker tone that they had been calling on the developer to use for years.

It’s a brilliant and beautiful game, and one that fans still look back on as a real high point, even if getting hold of a copy to play on the original hardware can be a bit of a pain these days. If you do have a copy, it’s often a lot easier to play the game via emulation, and that’s largely because Nintendo bizarrely hasn’t made the game playable on the Switch officially.

That’s never stopped clever fans before though, and it is finally possible to play the game on your current handheld, though you will need a little technical know-how to get it going.

Over on YouTube, the channel HandHeldo shared some footage of Twilight Princess running on the original Nintendo Switch, and it has to be said that the game looks and runs brilliantly.

So how does it all work? Well, essentially this has been made possible by the fact that the original GameCube version of the game has now been entirely decompiled. That means the base code has been converted into a human-readable format, allowing a native version to be brought across to the PC.

From there, you’ll need to set up some custom firmware on your Switch which, although it sounds a bit scary, actually isn’t too bad to get going from a technical perspective. Then, you’ll need to set up the Dusk launcher (the proect created by those who decompiled the game) on an SD card, and boot your Switch with the custom firmware.

It’s actually simple from that point on, but there are detailed guides online that hold your hand through each step of the process, and it should be achievable for most who have the right hardware.

Link and Zelda look into the sun in Twilight princess

If you can’t quite bring yourself to do all that, it’s obviously possible to play the game via emulation on PC with a lot less trouble. Either way, Twilight Princess is back in a pretty big way in the minds of many, with a big chunk of the community also hoping that the game will serve as the inspiration for the next entry in the series, whenever that may come.