Hadlee Simons / Android Authority
TL;DR
- The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess has been unofficially ported to Android and several other platforms.
- This port requires the game’s ISO file but offers a ton of graphical, audio, and gameplay options.
- The game runs on both Snapdragon and MediaTek hardware, but don’t be surprised if there are glitches on some Snapdragon devices.
The Legend of Zelda series has seen its fair share of unofficial ports to other platforms. Just last week, a developer ported The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap to PC. Now, a GameCube and Wii Zelda game has been ported to a variety of platforms, including Android.
A group called Twilit Realm has released an unofficial port of The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess for Android, MacOS, PC, Steam Deck, and iOS. The port, called Dusk, is a decompilation of the original game with help from the Twilight Princess decompilation community. Interestingly, this port also uses the so-called Aurora compatibility layer for running GameCube and Wii titles on other, more modern platforms.
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Installing the game is pretty easy on Android, but you’ll need the game’s ISO file. Simply download and install the Dusk app from the project’s GitHub page and then launch it. From here, tap Select Disc Image and choose the game’s ISO file. The app will then attempt to verify the ISO file. For what it’s worth, my first ISO file didn’t pass verification, but I was still able to proceed. You can then choose between Classic and Dusk presets, with the latter offering graphical and quality-of-life tweaks. You’ll also need a physical controller once you actually enter the game, as this unofficial port doesn’t support touch input.
Hadlee Simons / Android Authority
I tried this game on the vivo X300 Ultra, but it was full of texture glitches that rendered the game unplayable. Thankfully, the team notes on GitHub that it’s working to resolve “a number of issues” affecting devices with Qualcomm Adreno GPUs. Otherwise, the title tentatively ran fine on my Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra (Snapdragon 8 Gen 2) and vivo X300 Pro (MediaTek Dimensity 9500). I’m particularly happy to see that MediaTek-powered devices are supported, as they usually play second fiddle to Snapdragon devices when it comes to these bleeding-edge projects. I’m also happy to report that performance was very smooth at this juncture.
Otherwise, the unofficial Twilight Princess port offers a variety of settings compared to the original version. This includes internal resolution scaling (up to 11,827 x 5,376), shadow resolution (up to 8x), unlocked frame rate, gyro aiming, a mirror mode to match the Wii version, a minimal HUD option, cheats, and loads of other gameplay options.
This isn’t actually the first time that the game was ported to Android, though. Nintendo released a version of the game on the NVIDIA Shield series back in the late 2010s, but this was restricted to China. So we’re glad the title is now available to more users. It also joins unofficial Android ports of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time and The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask.
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