Earlier this year, Nintendo officially unveiled a big new remake of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of time for Switch 2. Naturally, everyone’s mind is brimming with ideas about what (and what not) to expect from it.
As a lifelong Ocarina lover who generally considers it one of the three or four best video games ever made, trust that I have some thoughts about this remake. I’m not opposed to its existence at all, but there are a handful of conditions I’d like it to meet in order to make sense as a big holiday release for Switch 2.
Given that there is a Nintendo Direct next week where we will surely see gameplay for the first time, here are some things I do and don’t want to see from the game.
An Ocarina of Time remake should be different enough to justify its existence
Credit: Square Enix/Steam
To start, I should note that you can play the original Ocarina of Time on a Switch or Switch 2 right now via the Nintendo Switch Online subscription service. I am of the belief that remakes exist to supplement the original work, not replace them, so it’s paramount that Nintendo keep the original playable on modern platforms, and I have no reason to believe the company would remove it from the NSO service.
With that in mind, if this remake is going to a $60+ major holiday release that exists alongside the original, it needs to set itself apart. There are plenty of ways to do that. For starters, it might not hurt to modernize the controls a bit. I love the way the original Ocarina feels, with Link’s weighty, substantial movement grounding him in the game’s world in a beautiful way. Ocarina‘s heavy use of context-sensitive actions gave Link a huge number of ways to intuitively interact with said world, which set the game apart from other 3D action-adventure titles at the time.
Credit: Nintendo
That said, there are a lot of people who don’t have three decades of nostalgia for this game baked into their memories. Some folks are younger and may have started their Zelda journeys with newer games like Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom. For a portion of the modern gaming audience, Ocarina‘s original control scheme feels clunky and unwieldy.
Even I, a person who loves the original release as much as I can possibly love anything, will admit that lining up jumps or trying to precisely throw bombs can be a chore. It also just doesn’t make much sense on anything other than a Nintendo 64 controller, for which Ocarina was hyper-specifically designed.
Whoever is making this rumored remake needs to make it make sense on a Switch 2 controller. It might also help to add new content to Link’s seminal 3D adventure, which might please fans of the original. New or reworked side quests, an additional optional dungeon, or even a smaller second adventure with a different playable character (looking at you, Sheik) would each individually do a lot to make players new and old flock to this remake. As long as it all fits naturally into the original game’s structure, of course.
But they shouldn’t just turn it into Breath of the Wild
Credit: Nintendo
One thing I’ve seen some fans online suggest that I vehemently disagree with is the notion of turning Ocarina of Time into a full-blown open-world adventure in the same vein as the two big Switch games, Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom. This is an idea that might sound enticing until you think about it for a few seconds. Let me explain why.
More than anything, that’s just not what Ocarina of Time ever was. Hyrule Field felt massive, expansive, and mysterious in 1998, but Ocarina at its core is a pretty linear game where there’s typically only ever one authored solution to any problem. It’s not about creativity in puzzle-solving like Breath and Tears, it’s about using a boomerang to open a door in the exact way the designers want you to.
This may sound stifling to fans of the newer games, and in the arc of the Zelda franchise, that formula was indeed stifling enough to inspire the need for a series overhaul, but it’s an apples-and-oranges thing.
New Zelda is a physics sandbox, while old Zelda focused more on the creativity of the designers than the player. In practice, one could very easily argue that the old style produced better pacing, and it allowed each game to have a large arsenal of fun items to use, rather than a small handful of powers like in the newer entries. If you’ve never used the Hookshot, you don’t know what you’re missing.
Crucially, you can also finish Ocarina of Time in like 20 hours. Not everything needs to be a 100-hour epic.
The remake needs to have a fresh look
Honestly, for this remake, the most important decision for its developers to make concerns how it will look. I am not an artist, so I don’t have much in the way of specific ideas for how it should look. But I don’t think a straightforward adaptation of the original game’s graphics is the way to go.
If you just do “Ocarina of Time but modern,” you run the risk of inviting ungenerous comparisons between the original and the remake. It would also be boring, just as it would be to simply convert Ocarina into the more Studio Ghibli-inspired Breath of the Wild art style. Zelda has reinvented itself visually more times than almost any series, and it’s time for that to happen again.
But it also needs to respect the original’s distinct vibes
In playing some of the original release recently for research purposes, one thing that stuck out to me is just how weird it often is. I think about NPCs like Grog, the gaunt misanthrope who mostly exists to tell you how much he hates his parents, or the creepy music box guy. At one point, you can play music on your ocarina for the enjoyment of a bunch of cartoon frogs. It’s a goofy game with a lot of heart, and I hope that doesn’t get lost in translation.
There are lots of other things that I think can be updated without being lost, such as the original game’s brilliant soundtrack. That could use a full orchestral re-arrangement. I’m also open to other ideas, but for now, these are the things that have been swimming around my mind the most about this potential remake.