The Minish Cap is a top-down Zelda adventure that Capcom made for Nintendo, released on the Game Boy Advance in 2004. The sorcerer Vaati turns Princess Zelda to stone, and Link sets out to stop him with Ezlo, a talking cap that can shrink him to the size of the Minish, a tiny people living unseen all over Hyrule. At that size, a patch of grass is a forest and a puddle is a lake. If you own the game, Nagori lets you play it on iPhone and iPad.
What you need
- An iPhone or iPad with iOS 17.6 or later.
- Nagori from the App Store. Your first game is free.
- The game file of your copy of The Minish Cap in
.gbaformat, or a.zipor.rarcontaining it.
No BIOS file is needed.
How to play The Minish Cap on iPhone
- Install Nagori from the App Store.
- Copy your Minish Cap
.gbafile to the Files app, in iCloud Drive or On My iPhone. - Open Nagori, tap + and select the file. Nagori recognizes it as a Game Boy Advance game by itself.
- Find The Minish Cap on the GBA shelf with its box art and press Play.
Controls
The Minish Cap uses every button on the Game Boy Advance. A and B use the items you assign to them, the sword included. R is the action button, for rolling, lifting and talking, and L fuses Kinstones with the people you meet. Select asks Ezlo for a hint, and Start opens the item menu.
The Standard touch layout has all of them, with L and R along the top of the screen. You press R constantly, so if it feels out of reach, open Edit Layout in the pause menu and drag it closer to your thumb or pinch it bigger.
Fast Forward runs the game at twice the speed, which helps when you cross Hyrule Field again to fuse Kinstones or hunt for Pieces of Heart. Bind it to a controller button, or add the ×2 button to the touch screen in My Layout.
With a controller, the left stick works as the D-pad too, and pressing it opens the pause menu.
Saves: a safety net for every dungeon
Saves you make in the game itself go to the cartridge’s save, and Nagori keeps them automatically. On top of that:
- Quit any time. Leave the app in the middle of a dungeon and Continue puts you back exactly where you were, not at the entrance.
- Save states before bosses. Pause and choose Save before Gleerok in the Cave of Flames or Mazaal in the Fortress of Winds. If you run out of hearts, Load and try again from the door. Nagori keeps your last four saves per game.
- Switch devices. Save to iCloud stores your progress in your private iCloud, and Load from iCloud brings it to your iPad.
Best settings
The Minish Cap is drawn in fine, detailed pixel art, so the picture settings are worth a minute:
- Picture Smoothing softens the edges of the sprites. Turn it off to see every pixel as drawn.
- Full Screen stretches the picture to fill your display. Leave it off to keep the GBA’s 3:2 shape and the art’s proportions.
- Screen Effects → CRT Screen adds scanlines, and Screen Curve bends the picture like an old TV. Both go from Off to Strong.
On iPad you can play in portrait too, with the picture on top and the controls below.
