Game of Tobi's latest showcase of their port of The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess for the Nintendo 3DS shows significant progress over earlier builds. The 27-minute gameplay footage highlights major improvements and now includes working stereoscopic 3D on the New Nintendo 3DS.
Nintendo originally launched Twilight Princess in 2006 for the Wii and GameCube, before remastering it as Twilight Princess HD for the Wii U in March 2016. The 3DS never received an official version, despite years of fan speculation and even a short-lived Twilight Princess 3D rumor in 2015 that was ultimately revealed to be fake.
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Following an initial reveal in July this year, Game of Tobi is effectively building the 3DS version Nintendo never made. The project is possible thanks to the community decompilation of Twilight Princess. ZeldaRET spent years reconstructing the game's source code, which has since enabled native ports like Dusklight, along with other projects such as Twilight Princess: Courage Reborn.
The first 3DS demo in July saw the game technically running on the 3DS, but it was riddled with performance issues, graphical glitches, and crashes. A second update arrived in early September, with large portions of the game fully explorable and accessible.
On September 28th, the developer shared roughly 27 minutes of gameplay footage across several areas of the game. Tobi says the game "now works very well" on New Nintendo 3DS, and the handheld's signature stereoscopic 3D functionality is also up and running. The progress made in only a few weeks is impressive, although the current build still has some obvious rough edges.
Performance still isn't completely smooth. The footage contains noticeable frame-rate drops and occasional hitches, while some environments exhibit what appears to be texture or asset pop-in as Link moves through them.
It's worth mentioning that this showcase focuses on the New 3DS models. The developer is openly asking whether he should ship a New 3DS version first and tackle old 3DS compatibility afterward.
The hardware gap between the two is significant. The original 3DS uses two ARM11 CPU cores running at 268MHz and has 128MB of system memory, while the New 3DS expands that to four ARM11 cores capable of running at up to 804MHz alongside 256MB of memory. This additional headroom makes the New 3DS a considerably easier target for such a project.
This year has been jam-packed with decompilations and unofficial ports to all sorts of platforms. We recently saw GTA III, Vice City, and Liberty City Stories heading to the New Nintendo 3DS, an unofficial GTA V port for Android, and Super Smash Bros. Melee being decompiled for a native PC port, to name a few.
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Tobi says he had previously considered making his next video the release of the finished, tested game, but decided the project wasn't quite ready. Whether the first public release targets only the New 3DS or waits for support across the entire 3DS family remains to be seen.
