Ocarina of Time's remake finally shows gameplay, and it's a mess

I can't believe Nintendo finally hired this man.

For the uninitiated, "Nintendo, hire this man!" was a serious rallying cry that eventually became an ironic meme. Every time someone who'd just discovered Unreal Engine uploaded a "This is what Ocarina of Time would look like in 2014!!1" video to cash in on nostalgia — and every time the result was a smeary, brown-and-bloom-filled mess — the signal fires would be lit and Nintendo's hiring department would be called on.

When Legend of Zelda series producer Eiji Aonuma finally unveiled live gameplay of the long-rumored official Ocarina of Time remake, there was just one thought I couldn't get out of my head: one of those calls must finally have gotten through. (This is a game that's already had a remake, by the way, but that doesn't seem to have stopped Nintendo as of late.)

I want to clarify that I'm far too young to have played Ocarina in its heyday. This isn't nostalgia talking. The dread I felt as I watched Link gaily traipse around his freshly photorealistic forest in an overdesigned, multi-layered outfit worthy of the MCU, the edges of his gorgeous blonde haircut jagged and flickering from the upscaling, was fully organic. There's brown, there's bloom, there's blurry volumetric fog. There's moe-eyed anime characters walking around in photoreal environments and making both halves of that equation look so much worse by comparison.

This is what Ocarina of Time would look like in 2026.

The target audience seems to be people twice my age who played the original game as kids, so fair enough, it's not for me. At least, those are the only people I can imagine spending $70 on a six-hour N64 game with a fresh coat of paint. The only innovations this new Ocarina seems to have taken from all-time greats like Breath of the Wild are questionable voice acting and a manual jump button, both of which its contemporaries already had in 1998.

I think I'll stick to the 3DS version, if it's all the same.

More about Zelda:

Zelda history has plenty of hidden jokes and dedicated modders: the line "I am Error" was never a mistranslation, it was a matched programmer's joke; one project has already managed to add co-op multiplayer to Tears of the Kingdom; and another has made Breath of the Wild fully playable in VR.