Switch 2's Zelda remake runs on Android days after launch, but you’ll need a lot of RAM

The emulation scene has been moving very fast lately, but some recent breakthroughs border on ridiculous. Nintendo released The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time Remake a few days ago for the Switch 2, and developers have already gotten it booting and running on Android, building on the rapid rise of Nintendo Switch 2 emulators and ports on Android. While we have previously seen projects bring classic Zelda titles like Majora’s Mask and the original Ocarina of Time to Android via native recompilation, having a brand-new, current-gen console remake running on mobile devices within days of release is rather unprecedented.

As shown across community threads on Reddit, early builds of the game are running on high-end Android phones through BananaNative, a native translation-layer tool. Reddit user BottleCautious3346 demonstrated the game running on a POCO F7 Ultra powered by the Snapdragon 8 Elite, achieving playable framerates hovering around 25fps to 30fps after enabling frame generation and swapping to custom GPU drivers, as you can see in the footage below:

The achievement is largely credited to the Switch 2 sharing an ARM-based architecture with modern smartphones, drastically cutting down the emulation overhead that traditionally bottlenecks mobile hardware.

However, anyone expecting a seamless console-grade experience right out of the gate should temper their expectations. Early testers report that running the remake pushes even flagship phones straight to their thermal and memory limits. The game demands massive RAM headroom (that too, in this day and age of RAMageddon), frequently spiking above 12GB during heavy scene transitions and crashing devices with less than 16GB of RAM. Visual bugs are also rampant, from missing foliage to blown-out lighting shaders and prolonged shader-compilation stutters on initial boot.

Despite the hiccups, running a new flagship console remake on an Android phone this early is an impressive showcase. Try it on your device and share your experience in the comments below!