The Legend Of Zelda: Twilight Princess Is Finally Getting The Remaster It Deserves

Published Oct 2, 2026, 1:00 AM EDT

Ben Brosofsky has been writing for Screen Rant since 2022 and editing since 2024. He graduated from Vanderbilt University with a Bachelor's in Cinema & Media Arts. Writing serves as a much-needed distraction from tackling a backlog of Steam games that will never be surmounted.

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It's now been over a decade since The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess returned on the Wii U, matching the time elapsed between the game's original release and the HD remaster. For most of the decade since, fans have been clamoring for the game to be ported forward to the Switch and now the Switch 2, but these pleas have seemingly been falling on deaf ears.

Nintendo may not release a new remaster, but that doesn't mean the game is forever trapped in its original form. It's no surprise that loyal Zelda fans have continued to tinker with Twilight Princess, and one creator's work delivers an impressive overhaul.

Twilight Princess Just Got An HD Upgrade From A Fan

X user TiredAndOnFire shared an update on an HD Twilight Princess texture project, an ambitious overhaul that focuses on delivering higher-resolution interpretations of the game's original textures. While the project isn't complete yet, it's now available in a partially complete form. Those interested in using it can use it in conjunction with another texture pack to play the game without any missing textures, with TiredAndOnFire shouting out Henriko and Twilight Princess HD as options.

While it's always nice to see fans attempting to update games they love, I often tend to tune out news regarding fan remasters and texture overhauls due to common problems they run into. This Twilight Princess remaster seems to avoid a lot of the issues that typically concern me. Rather than relying on smudgy AI upscales, TiredAndOnFire's version uses a more manually curated approach to produce visibly better results than most.

In a follow-up post, TiredAndOnFire compares an original texture to the reinterpretation in the Henriko texture pack and their own version. While text in a fictional script gets muddled into a vague pattern in the Henriko texture, TiredAndOnFire's texture presents a much clearer picture of text, along with retaining a mossy effect that Henriko struggles to represent. The overall Dusklight HD project also meant to be more accurate than the approach taken in Nintendo's own remaster, with changes to aspects like color timing and bloom going beyond textures to restore more of the original look.

It's Easier To Play Twilight Princess Than Ever

TiredAndOnFire's texture pack is intended for use with Dusklight, a Twilight Princess decompilation that makes the game run natively on PC. While Dusklight still requires a copy of the game, similar to emulating it, its status as a native port opens up various options for accessible improvements. This includes a suite of quality-of-life options, along with making it easy to use texture mods like this one.

If you want to wait until TiredAndOnFire's texture pack is complete to install it, the textures used in the Wii U port are probably the best option currently available, although Henriko may still be worth considering. No matter what you do to Twilight Princess, its more realistic art style hasn't aged as gracefully as Wind Waker's cartoon approach, and high-resolution textures can't grant any additional polygons to the attempts at detailed environments. Nonetheless, it's a Zelda game, so it still features some gorgeous and interesting art design that remains compelling today in any form.

This isn't TiredAndOnFire's first ambitious project, and they're currently also advertising a remaster of the God of War Origins Collection on their X account. With multiple projects in the works, it could be easy for one to fall by the wayside, but the modder is offering continual updates in a Discord server for fans interested in following along with the progress.

I'd still like to see Twilight Princess HD come to the Switch 2 someday. If not, Nintendo could at least follow the approach taken with The Wind Waker and add the original GameCube version to the Nintendo Switch Online + Expansion Pack subscription. For now, though, we have no official news from Nintendo, and the fan remaster might be the best way to experience the game for the time being.