Rejoice!! The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom is finally available to play on the Nintendo Switch. A game more than five years in the making, and after facing a delay, Zelda fans can now finally rest happily knowing that ToTK is now just a purchase away. Reviews are already out for the game, and the overall consensus ranges from best to great. Suffice it to say, Nintendo has another masterpiece on their hands. As great as the game may be, its gameplay experience is limited by the aging hardware of the Nintendo Switch. Once again reminding us that we definitely and quickly need a successor to the Switch. It’s because of this that some gamers have decided to play the game on their PCs via an emulator. Specifically the Yuzu emulator.
There aren’t really a lot of Switch emulators available for PC. Less so for Android. Yuzu and Ryujinx are the only duo of emulators that can emulate and play most Nintendo Switch games on PC. And both of these emulators have their own pros and cons. A topic better left for another time. Now, if you want to play the game on the Yuzu emulator, you need a PC first. If you have that important piece, then let’s start with the guide.
How To Play the Legend of Zelda Tears of the Kingdom (ToTK) on PC via Yuzu Emulator?
First, download and install the Yuzu Emulator on your PC. Now, access the prod and title keys from your Switch or get them online. Once you have them, save them into a new folder called “keys” on your PC. Next, open the Yuzu Emulator, go to the File option, select the Open Yuzu folder option, and delete the “keys” folder found there. Copy and paste the new “keys” folder here. Close Yuzu after this and relaunch it. Now, we are assuming that you have already dumped the ToTK files on your PC and then added them to the emulator.
Once you are done with that, select the Emulation option and go to Graphics. Select OpenGL in the API settings. If you opt for Vulkan, you will need a mod to do so since there appears to be a glitch when using Vulkan to run the game. Well, head to the Advanced tab, and make sure to check the VSync and Fast GPU Time options. Select the Accuracy level at Normal for the best experience.
Don’t forget to download the Day 1 patch for Tears of the Kingdom as that patch, in particular, optimizes the game a lot and fixes almost all the glaring issues with the game when it comes to performance. Also, make sure to select the Docked mode of the Yuzu Emulator. Now, you can launch your game. Remember that you should have your own copy of The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom if you want to play the game on your PC using the Yuzu Emulator. Getting an unpurchased copy is illegal and is something we don’t condone.
Additionally, the game can and will crash at some point while playing on an emulator due to various reasons. Furthermore, it’s better to run Tears of the Kingdom at 30FPS rather than 60FPS as people have found it particularly hard to run the game on higher frames. We hope now you know the process of playing ToTK on PC via the Yuzu Emulator. For more guides like this, check out DigiStatement.
