[3DS] The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap ROM

The Minish Cap was developed by Capcom and Flagship, but Nintendo made the final decisions. The game was officially released in January 2005 on the Nintendo DS, and you can now play it on an emulator or a virtual machine. The ROM version we provide in this article is for a VM on a Nintendo 3DS.

Story and Characters

In The Minish Cap, Link and Zelda are childhood friends who are on their way to a festival celebrating the arrival of magical little guys called Picori. At the festival, there’s a rather interesting sword-fighting tournament with a legendary Picori sword as the grand prize. There’s a guy there who looks a lot like Magus from Chrono Trigger, and he tears through the tournament like a breeze. Instead of taking the prize sword, he decides to shatter it, releasing a horde of monsters.

It turns out the guy who isn’t Magus is a sorcerer looking for a power source, and Zelda tries to stop him. That attempt gets her turned to stone. So, to turn her back, you have to take the shattered Picori sword to the Picori themselves (also known as the Minish) so they can repair it.

The “Shrinking” Mechanic and Excellent Gameplay

Every handheld Zelda game has a gimmick, not just with the story but with the gameplay. It started with Link’s Awakening on the original handheld Game Boy, where you could combine items to solve puzzles, like combining a bomb and an arrow, or later in Link Between Worlds, you could turn yourself into a two-dimensional form and climb walls and find all sorts of interesting things.

The gimmick in Minish Cap is the hat. It shrinks you down to a tiny size at warp points, usually found in large rocks or tree stumps, so you can interact with the Minish and figure out what you need to do to repair the sword. The hat reluctantly guides you along the way. I love how Link actually looks annoyed with this guy.

The shrinking mechanic is used very well from the get-go. You can shrink and roam the overworld map to places you couldn’t otherwise go. And as you can imagine, a lot of the game’s puzzles revolve around switching between normal-sized Link and “fun-sized” Link.

The core of the game is mostly familiar Zelda stuff, you know, swords, shields, heart pieces, gadgets, etc. Although Minish Cap is unique in that it combines the look of Wind Waker with the top-down perspective and controls of Link to the Past.

Dungeons, Puzzles, and Bosses

The Minish Cap is one of the more linear Zelda games compared to the rest of the series. It’s a roughly 12-hour playthrough with eight bosses you have to defeat before facing Vaati.

The dungeon design here is what you’d expect from a Zelda game. Right off the bat in the first dungeon, you get the Gust Jar, which acts like a vacuum cleaner, just in case you wanted Link to be more like Kirby, and you use it to clear paths, find treasure, and whip yourself around these dungeons using these mushrooms, to give one example. Later on, you’ll acquire a cloak that allows you to jump high, an item that lets you dig, the Ocarina of Wind that lets you warp around the overworld map, and the Cane of Pacci, which shoots a bolt of lightning at an enemy or object and flips it over.

The dungeons make great use of all these items while also including the shrinking gimmick, and it’s all very well done. The closest comparison I can make is to Illusion of Gaia. That’s another game that has you switching between two different forms to solve puzzles and access new areas.

The boss battles also do their job well, for the most part. Some of them are used a few times in the game, but the battles themselves are a lot of fun. There’s one where you play a little tennis, and then he freezes the ground, and you have to move around him and burn him with your lamp. There are also some good old-fashioned sword and shield battles that are reminiscent of Zelda II.

Download The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap ROM for Nintendo 3DS

Overall, The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap provides players with a good time. It’s just not as polished as some of the other Zelda titles, but it’s still Zelda, and it’s always great. We still have some good puzzles, varied dungeons, and fun boss battles. Additionally, there are some unique items to this game that are a blast to use.

This is one of those games that is very worth checking out, and if you’re ready, it’s time to download its ROM file for free here and play it on your Nintendo 3DS.

• All files have been compressed by us in 7zip format, so you will need to decompress them. We recommend using 7zip or Winrar.
• The ROM file after decompression is in *3ds format. You can use a suitable Nintendo 3DS emulator to play it. We recommend Citra Emulator or Panda3DS for Windows, MacOS, and Mobile. -> Check Guide Here
• All game information in the ROM Info section is taken from the first file we uploaded. Some games have multiple releases for different markets such as Europe, America, Japan, Korea, etc. Most of the content is the same except for the language pack. You need to pay attention to the file name to distinguish them.