Nintendo's The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time remake launched on Switch 2 on Nov 5, but less than three days later, developers have already managed to run it on a jailbroken PlayStation 5 and an iPhone. The two technical efforts were disclosed separately by developers Vampinity and Joe Jiang, and both remain at an early stage, far from offering a usable gaming experience.

PS5: Emulator port runs at low frame rates and crashes easily

On the PS5 side, Vampinity published test results in the EglantinePS5 project repository on GitHub. EglantinePS5 is a Switch emulator ported to the PS5 platform, built on the Eden emulator. Tests show that on PS5 system firmware version 12.40, the game can already load saves, and players can control Link out of his house and into Kokiri Forest at roughly 15 to 20 FPS.

However, the game crashes from insufficient memory after a few minutes, the forest scene suffers from severe white fog effects, and some scene models fail to display properly. Vampinity said plainly that the current build is "still a long way from being playable," and revealed that the relevant patches were written by Claude, with much of the shader porting work drawing on branch code from the Lichii emulator. Lichii had previously gotten the remake running on PC via a Switch 2 emulator on the game's launch day.

The PS5 build requires the Relapse jailbreak, which supports PS5 system firmware versions 7.00 through 13.60.

iPhone: Peak memory held to 3.4GB

On the iPhone side, developer Joe Jiang showed the Ocarina of Time remake running on an iPhone 17 Pro Max, with the Kokiri Forest scene displaying correctly. Jiang said the toughest problem in porting was the memory limit: the game needs about 9 GB of memory to run, while iOS caps memory use for a single app at 8192 MB (8 GB). He claims his approach keeps peak memory during scene loading to just 3.4 GB while preserving image quality.

According to Jiang, the technical approach was not developed specifically for the Ocarina of Time remake. He said it could potentially let Nintendo Switch and Switch 2 games run on iOS, iPadOS, Apple TV, Android and HarmonyOS devices. Jiang has not yet released the approach publicly. Earlier, shortly after the first public Switch 2 jailbreak, Mario Kart World also booted successfully on an iPhone.

Reception: Record user score, but hit by review bombing

Drawing attention alongside the technical ports is the game's reception. Review site Metacritic opened player reviews on Nov 5, and the Ocarina of Time remake currently holds a user score of 9.7, the highest in the site's history. For reference, second place is Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 (9.4), while Silent Hill 2 (2001), The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt — Blood and Wine, Resident Evil: Requiem and Splatoon Raiders tie for third at 9.3.

The game's Metacritic critic score is 96, below the N64 original's 99. Users broadly praise its strengths, with some calling it one of the best-looking games on a handheld platform; a more modern control scheme and dungeon exploration that is no longer frustrating are also frequently cited improvements. But screen flickering in Hyrule's open areas and the absence of the Master Quest leave some regrets.

The game has also drawn some malicious zero-score reviews, with some users making baseless claims, such as that the game uses generative AI or looks too much like the original. At least 30 such reviews have been removed by the platform.

What to watch

For now, neither the iPhone nor the PS5 port offers a genuinely usable gaming experience. Joe Jiang has not published his memory optimization approach, and Vampinity's PS5 emulator still needs to resolve crashes and visual problems. Nintendo has not responded to the ports. The tech community is watching whether these approaches can mature further, and whether Nintendo will take countermeasures.