Demakes always get us excited here at Retro Dodo; if we love anything more than new games appearing in our favourite franchises, it’s seeing what they would look like on the first consoles that we ever used. I mean, the clue is in our name really; if it’s Retro, then it’s getting the big points from us.
Tears of the Kingdom hasn’t been around for a long time. It dropped in 2023 and instantly became one of the most loved Zelda titles of all time. The new building and fusing mechanics, the chance to revisit the same Hyrule from the previous game with a difference, the vastness of the Depths; it’s an exhilarating game that I’m still ploughing through today. The most impressive thing about it, however, is the storyline, and the cutscenes that help to drive the incredible narrative forward are second to none.
And a word of warning, you’re about to read and see some serious spoilers if you carry on past this point, so if you haven’t bought the game yet.
I suppose as a writer, this storyline was something that I was always going to pick out as being of interest, but Nintendo has done a fantastic job of creating an immersive tale that gamers just can’t help but get hooked into. Zelda travelling back in time and helping Link from the past, the war with Ganondorf, Rauru’s backstory – it’s all incredible and makes finding Dragon’s Tears scattered around the Kingdom of Hyrule one of the most important and exciting parts of the game.
And it turns out that it’s this storyboarding and not the modern-day graphics that make the cutscenes so special, as this Tears of the Kingdom Game Boy demake from YouTuber ‘it’ proves. No, it’s not the clown with the balloon or the main character of the book ‘A Child Called It’, simply a YouTube channel called ‘it’, and you know what, we dig it a lot.
How incredible is that video? I’m instantly transported back to sitting on the stairs in my first house with my Yellow Game Boy DMG, not wanting to come downstairs to eat my evening meal until the clink of the fork on the table signalled that I had zero seconds of gameplay time left. It looks and sounds brilliant – I think I was pretty close to getting goosebumps the first time I watched this through!
Thanks to NintendoLife, we’ve discovered that It has made some more demake videos on their channel too, with Link battling the bosses from TotK as well as the final showdown with Calamity Ganon in BotW. If you love Zelda and Retro Gaming (if it’s not you, get the heck outta’ here!), then take a look and immerse yourself in 8-bit brilliance
