Emulation fans couldn’t wait to see how Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom ran on Yuzu, and the results are surprising. In the past, most gaming consoles haven’t seen reliable emulation during their lifetime due to one issue or another. In this case, though, Yuzu was emulating Tears of the Kingdom on launch. In fact, depending on your PC configuration, Yuzu runs it better than native hardware.
Can you play Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom on Yuzu?
Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom runs well on Yuzu. If you have a high-end PC, you can play it at a higher resolution than native hardware and get a more stable framerate. The only issue we’ve seen is that it does frequently hitch and stutter when building shaders. However, that’s an issue with all Yuzu games, and it lessens as your shader cache builds. Eventually, it’ll go away entirely.
One caveat to playing Tears of the Kingdom on Yuzu right now is that you need the early access build to get the best results. You must subscribe to the team’s Patreon to download these, but the monthly fee is reasonable.
The real challenge here comes with setting up Yuzu and dumping your copy of the game. Emulators are legal (at least in the US), but Yuzu requires some extra setup that complicates things. You need a hacked Switch to dump both system files and the game, which takes everything into a legally nebulous direction.
Unfortunately, there’s no precedent for any of this. So, remember that while Yuzu itself is a perfectly legal program, the process required to get the files to play Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom is questionable.
However, depending on your country, things are more clear-cut. In Japan, for example, console modding is (technically) illegal, so you can’t dump the system files necessary for Yuzu without violating the law since it requires custom firmware.
