I enjoy all the great homebrew we’ve been getting on the PS Vita, but there’s one thing I miss from days of the PSP scene: native game ports. It is true we’ve had ports of Doom (via RetroArch), Quake, Hexen II and the likes, there hasn’t been much else. The purpose of my GekiHEN Wishlist articles was exactly to show developers all the great games out there they can port. The Griffon Legend 3DS is more along the lines of what I wish we could get from the Vita scene.

The Griffon Legend is a game originally created for Windows and written in FreeBASIC using SDL and FMOD. It was ported to the GCW-Zero with code written in C, using SDL and SDL_mixer and that is the code that developer nop9 used to create his version for the 3DS. The game itself is a screen-to-screen action RPG with an original story made in homage to the classics of the SNES/Genesis era.

What is Griffon Legend 3DS?

The Griffon Legend 3DS is an action RPG, made in homage of the games of that genre from the SNES/Genesis era featuring a screen-to-screen map and an original story. Originally created by developer Syn9, it was ported to the 3DS by nop90 based on the GCW-Zero version.

Changelog for v1.0alpha

• First alpha release
• Game should be fully playable but is mostly untested
• Sfx are enabled but not the background musics (too slow to load and can cause some crashes)
• Only 3DSX format since final release

To-do list:

• Fix the music (not working yet)
• Make ogg file loading faster

Instructions

Installation:

In the zip there is a folder with the 3dsx and the smdh files inside, to be used with a homebrew launcher. All the resources are included in the executable using romfs.

The game creates a GriffonLegend inside the 3ds folder if doesn’t exist. Here will be saved your savefiles and game configs.

Controls:

PAD – moving
A – attack / select
B – open/close item menu
X – main menu / back

During gameplay you can see up to 3 bars below your character. The top is health, the next is attack strength (let it charge to hit harder) and then spell strangth (same as attack). When you learn new spells you will see their icons in the bottom right corner with a meter below them to show them charging. When the meter turns orange they are ready for use.

Credits

The original game is by Syn9 (written in FreeBASIC), it was ported to c for GCW-Zero handheld by Dmitry Smagin.
This game uses a fake 3DS SDL layer made me (NOP90) and some open source libs: ctrulib, citro3d, sf2d, sfil, libnsbmp, stb_vorbis

Download Griffon Legend 3DS

To download The Griffon Legend, just head over to the nop90‘s repository release page and download the file there. The game is only available in 3dsx format so to play it, you’ll need to use The Homebrew Launcher. If you wish to leave the developer feedback just head to the release thread. You can also download the game directly by clicking here.

Enjoy!