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Over the past couple of weeks, a wave of unofficial retro PC ports have emerged. While most of these decompilations and recompilations are focused on old-school games, we're starting to see more Switch titles get the PC port treatment, including Hyrule Warriors: Definitive Edition and Pokémon Let's Go Pikachu and Eevee.
One of the first to drop was The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening's LASRecomp, a 2019 Switch remake of the 1993 OG Game Boy classic. Naturally, I decided to try out the static recompilation to see if it's any good and if it offers advantages over playing the iconic top-down Zelda title with a more traditional Switch emulator or even on the Switch/Switch 2.
Overall, my experience with LASRecomp is best described as just okay. I've only played the game for a few hours, but there's some pop-in and lag when you enter a new area and shaders are loading. Thankfully, the more you play, the less it seems to happen (some sort of shader pre-warming feature would likely help). The frame hitches I remember from the Switch release are still here to some extent, though, and the game frequently drops from a smooth 60fps to somewhere between 30-45fps.
I'm playing on the ROG Xbox Ally X20, which runs on AMD's Ryzen Z2 Extreme chip, so in theory, more powerful hardware should deliver a better framerate. Still, the handheld should, in theory, have enough juice for a port like this. I tried turning off anti-aliasing, and that didn't solve the issue. Next, I switched the internal resolution to Dynamic and the Upscaler to AMD FSR 1 with Anti-aliasing Off. This made the game run notably smoother, but it also added a weird checkerboard shadow grid to the visuals that's really noticeable sometimes. It definitely made playing the port a way better experience, though.
Zelda: Link's Awakening ran at 60fps on the original Switch, but frequently dropped to 30fps when entering or leaving buildings and in busy outdoor areas (it was awful in Mabe Village). The jarring frame-rate change was so bad that I gave up on the game back when I reviewed it, though I picked it up again on the Switch 2, since the more powerful handheld solves nearly all the game's performance issues.
With this Windows 11 port, the Switch's frame rate issues are mitigated a bit, but they definitely aren't gone. Still, it's better than the 26fps I got when emulating Link's Awakening through a now-dead emulator Yuzu while using a 60fps mod (more modern emulators like Eden get slightly better performance). Of course, if you're playing on a powerful gaming PC, your experience with LASRecomp or a traditional Switch emulator will likely differ from what I encountered on with the ROG Xbox Ally X20.
The main advantages over emulation are a smoother frame rate and mods
There are also interesting randomizer features
With all this in mind, in the context of LASRecomp, the advantages over emulation are fewer graphical issues and, on less powerful hardware, a smoother frame rate. It offers other useful quality-of-life features, too. You can unlock the aspect ratio to make it wider or taller, it supports keyboard and mouse alongside controllers, it has anti-aliasing and resolution scaling, and you can remove blur entirely.
You can even add Xbox or PlayStation gamepad icons to the in-game UI and remap all button inputs. Other features include a randomizer that shuffles items, enemies, music, and dungeons, plus the ability to change Link's tunic color. Since LASRecomp includes mod support, it'll be interesting to see what pops up over the next few weeks as the community gets their hands on the project. I'm personally hoping for a 120fps mod.
The experience isn't perfect, though. First, since Switch games use fonts built into the Switch operating system for some in-game text, LASRecomp uses replacement fonts. They look fine, but can seem a bit off at times. Also, when I first booted the game, text didn't appear at all, and I had to wait about five minutes for it to start showing up in character speech bubbles. Of course, if you're dumping the game from your own cartridge and Switch, you can also easily get the handheld's fonts.
On that note, like nearly every recently released static recompilation, LASRecomp requires you to provide your dumped image from a Zelda: Link's Awakening Switch cartridge or download you already own (this is the route I took). Of course, you can also find this file elsewhere, but that's very illegal and not something I condone. Additionally, unlike other recompilations I've covered, this project requires you to provide an extracted game image with an exefs and romfs folder, which you unpack from a .NSP file using various tools available online or with Ryujinx, an emulator Nintendo killed back in 2024.
I still prefer the Switch 2-enhanced version of Link's Awakening
LASRecomp doesn't really offer any notable improvements yet
Like a lot of recent ports, the project's creator says it was "made almost exclusively with AI." The groundwork peiikai and Claude Code laid with LASRecomp has already been used for other recent Switch ports, including the Pokémon: Let's Go games. The current beta version of LASRecomp is available for Windows, macOS, Linux, and Linux aarch64.
Speaking of revisiting The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening remake, I have to mention how incredibly sick the game's opening animated cinematic is. It brings the original Game Boy game's cover art to life in the best way possible. Of course, the whole claymation-inspired art style still looks gorgeous in 2026, too.
But would I play Link's Awakening on my ROG Xbox Ally X20 over the Switch 2 right now? Probably not, unless performance improves or some impressive mods appear. Link's Awakening already plays pretty well on the Switch 2, and while this PC port is an impressive technical achievement, it still runs better on Nintendo's latest handheld.
