Breath of the Wild wasn’t just ‘the latest Zelda game in the series’ when it dropped back in 2017; it completely revolutionised the series as we know it, taking everything we had become used to from the series as a whole and throwing it into the unknown. It was the biggest gaming shake-up I’d ever experienced and finally allowed me to do all of the things I wish I had been able to do in previous Zelda games, and I thank Eiji Aonuma on a weekly basis for it!
Imagine purchasing a flashcard from AliExpress for the DS and discovering a demake of what is undoubtedly the Switch’s most famous game preloaded into it. That’s exactly what one lucky owner has found, with a demade version of Hyrule and a very DS-style Link first discovered by us in a picture posted by GBAtemp. What’s even more exciting is that there are Japanese demos of this demake running all the way back to 2019 that completely flew under the radar of Western gamers!
The video above uploaded by JustJasen even shows the game running on DS and not just an emulator, just to prove that it is 100% real. All Link can do is run around; there’s no combat or any quests to be completed, but the entire map of Hyrule from Breath of the Wild is there for players to traverse, even if you sometimes run through parts of mountains instead of over them. Let’s just hope that the modder never got around to adding Lynels into the equation
This is an incredibly ambitious project and one that I can safely assume is no longer being worked on. If this Breath of the Wild demake hasn’t gone any further than demos showed in 2019 after a 5-year hiatus, then it’s probably as far as its ever going to go, especially with Nintendo prowling after modders like Shere Khan in Mowgli’s village. Still, it’s an exciting project and one that would have been cool to get our hands on. I have no idea who made this mod, but there are rumours that it’s still out there on the internet somewhere for those willing to search. Or you could just keep buying Flashcards from AliExpress and play pot-luck… I wonder what the odds are?
