The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time Review – Remaster Quest

The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time’s legacy is already secured, the game having arrived as part of Nintendo’s 3D revolution on the N64, helping to define just what 3D gaming would become over the decades that followed. The Ocarina of Time remake for Switch 2 can’t hope to have anywhere near as much impact, but it ably shows both how far gaming has come in the past 28 years, and just how timeless the original really is.

What’s inescapable is the visual transformation, going from the simplistic, blocky appearance of the N64’s early 3D effects, to a world that really embraces a classic fantasy aesthetic with knurled woodlands, rolling grass-covered plains, the bright and colourful Hyrule Castle Town, and so much more. Barely dipping a toe back into the original game or its 3DS remaster, and you see just how basic both the environmental details and the layouts were. Kokiri Forest is so much more vibrantly imagined, the layout of Kakariko Village feels much more natural with more space between its buildings, which are no longer rigidly on a square grid, you’ve got hedge mazes to help excuse why guards can’t see you when approaching Hyrule Castle, and on and on. As much as this is a remake, it’s not to a fault.

There are, however, some compromises in getting to this level of fidelity, with Nintendo leaning on FSR 1.0 and SMAA for upscaling and anti-aliasing. It’s not clear why they’re not making use of DLSS, but it does mean that the game has a noticeable upscaling shimmer and flickering of distant details. The art direction and the amount of detail on offer does manage to shine through this, but it does also provide a rough side to what Nintendo has tried to do here.

In some ways, it’s a transformation that feels like a big budget Hollywood adaptation of your favourite novel. Ocarina of Time’s N64 visuals were plain enough for you to fill in the gaps with details from your own imagination, but now it’s like Nintendo has held an open casting call to find the most cherub-like school child in Britain, and then put him in a woven reed tunic and the shortest shorts in all of Kokiri Forest.

They’ve also put voices to a lot of the characters within the key cutscenes, and there’s something distinctly un-fantasy about everyone being American, if you ask me. I mean, they’ve cast a pair of English actors to lead the live action film, and Zelda had an English accent in Breath of the Wild. There’s plenty of expression through these cutscenes, Nintendo taking moments and amplifying their tone – the way that Talon races off to find Malon, for example, or Big Brother’s dancing to a cheerful tune – but Young Link does have a tendency to stand stock still and expressionless like a creepy child at the foot of his parent’s bed at 3AM.

As much as I can say that certain artistic choices don’t quite match what I might have imagined in my youth, it’s still a fantastic looking game that is a showcase for the Switch 2 and what it can do. Kaepora Gaebora (or the owl species bubo adventura explicator) and his feathered tendril eyebrows do objectively look weird, though.

Just as impactful is how Nintendo has adapted and tweaked the gameplay. No, we weren’t lumbered with Tomb Raider and Resident Evil “tank” controls, but there is still a distinct awkwardness to playing the original Ocarina of Time when coming from a modern gameplay perspective. You didn’t have free camera control, the game would often switch to fixed camera angles, you really had to lock on to enemies, or could only aim by switching to a stationary first person view.

Ocarina of Time Remake largely conforms to the modern norms of third-person action adventuring. You have full camera control on the right stick, you have a manual jump – so you can do a leaping sword strike without locking on – you can forward roll into a sprint, there’s quicker inventory access and management without dipping into the pause menu, and a small handful of key items accessible on the D-pad.

And then there’s oddball additions, like letting you hum, sing or whistle the game’s iconic melodies instead of tapping away on gamepad buttons. I wasn’t initially sold on this – the tunes are all just out of my natural register for singing – but as soon as I switched to “Instrument” mode and could quickly whistle some vague approximation of the songs, it clicked. I mean, I was already whistling along, because these melodies are etched into my gaming soul, but getting to use this in puzzles was a nice shortcut.

Perhaps the most significant feat, given its reputation, is that even the Water Temple now feels natural and intuitive to play. Coming from the early days of 3D gaming and relative inexperience of gamers with navigating such a complex space, to now doing so with twin sticks and free look makes a world of difference. But we can’t pin all of this just down to the controls, because Nintendo has gone back and edited this temple, building on the work already done with Ocarina of Time 3D.

Rooms have been reshaped, sight lines improved to draw the eye, you have colour-coded lines to lead you to where you can set the water levels, and (of course) the quick toggle for your iron boots to control your buoyancy. It’s really saying something that it’s now about as fluid and enjoyable as the other temples within the game.

And fundamentally, that’s what really matters. This game might have come with a dramatically modern visual style and contemporary controls, Nintendo might have revamped and reconsidered some aspects of the world design, but the structure and the flow all feel in keeping with the original. No longer needing to break new ground for games and methods for adventuring in three dimensions really allows the original excellence to shine through.