Review: The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time (Switch 2)
An inferior but nonetheless enjoyable take on one of the greatest games ever made.
Spoilers Ahead
The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time came out in 1998 on Nintendo 64. It was a watershed moment in the history of video games, a game so pioneering and innovative that it changed the industry forever. Major advances in cinematic storytelling, a context sensitive action button, adaptive music, and its Z-targeting system were all marked leaps forward for video games. Ocarina of Time's legacy has impacted countless players and inspired numerous video game developers to take up the career in the first place. To remake Ocarina of Time is to remake, quite truthfully, one of the greatest games ever made.
When Nintendo revealed that it would be taking a second stab at remaking Ocarina of Time (Grezzo was first up to bat with The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time 3D back in 2011), I was worried about what changes would be made, how extensive they would be, and what might be cut in an effort to sanitize the original. It was honestly nerve-racking at times when playing the remake because I dreaded seeing something I cherished ruined. That might sound hyperbolic, but I wasn't exaggerating up above when I said how impactful Ocarina of Time was to the industry—and me. I couldn't possibly write a review about this remake without talking about how much the original meant to me.
I was 12 when I first played Ocarina of Time; it was the marquee Christmas gift that year. Ocarina of Time had been hyped for years and my prepubescent mind was bought into it the second all those glorious screenshots started hitting the pages of Nintendo Power. Playing it, though, was another story entirely. It was a formative experience, one that sent my young mind in a thousand different directions simultaneously. I marveled at its art, its music, its characters (especially Link), its story, its world... virtually every aspect of Ocarina of Time embedded itself into my gamer DNA. It might not be necessary to point all this out, but I feel like there are many who will read this review and have similarly strong memories of either the N64 original or even Ocarina of Time 3D on 3DS. There's simply no way for me to review this new Ocarina of Time without being influenced by my appreciation of the classic one.
With that in mind, let's get to it. Ocarina of Time, like its forbearer, centers around Link, a young Kokiri boy without a fairy. One day, the Great Deku Tree, the protector of Kokiri Forest and the children within it, is taken ill by an assault from Ganondorf, the King of the Gerudo. He sends the fairy Navi to help guide Link, who embarks on a grand adventure across Hyrule to aid Princess Zelda in defeating the evil Gandondorf before he can get his hands on the Triforce, an all-powerful divine artifact that provides providence to their world. Link's adventure transcends time as he fights as both a child and as an adult to complete his quest. The narrative remains simple but compelling, akin to the classic fairytales and parables that humanity has been telling for eons. Thankfully, the story here remains largely intact, beyond a couple of small, but noteworthy, changes that I'll get to in a bit.
As was the case with Star Fox earlier this year on Switch 2, Ocarina of Time is a mostly faithful remake of the original game upon which it's based. The biggest departure, and most obvious, are the visuals. Ocarina of Time might be one of the prettiest games I've ever played. Where Breath of the Wild originated as a Wii U game and Tears of the Kingdom was solely primed for release on Nintendo Switch, Ocarina of Time is allowed to stretch its wings as a proper Switch 2 title. The textures, the lighting, the level of detail, is all staggering. Like the Resident Evil remakes and the Final Fantasy VII Remake Trilogy, Nintendo has managed to take the memories that players have of Hyrule and extrapolated upon them a hundredfold. Some spots, like the grounds outside of the Temple of Time, are actually fully explorable now as opposed to being static, pre-rendered backdrops.
The result is a Hyrule that feels more immersive and alive than ever. I found myself ravenous for every new location that I visited, eager to see how it had been transformed by the designers, eager to see what was the same and what was different. Interestingly, while the game was aggressive in revamping the graphics of the original, this remake sticks to the basic map of that first game pretty closely. With one notable exception, there isn't anywhere new to go in this remake. Everything fans remember is there, perhaps slightly repositioned at most, and nothing more. That might be a letdown to some, but frankly, unless it was cut content from the original Ocarina that was left unfinished, I didn't want anything new, so this was perfect to me.
The same visual overhaul extends to the characters. While the game world in Ocarina of Time is astonishingly realistic, the cast still maintains the cartoonish designs of the N64 version. Characters have exaggerated features, disproportionate bodies, and bushels of personality; I was grateful that Nintendo didn't attempt to make everyone look realistic and instead stuck with the designs from almost 30 years ago. Even the clothes are largely the same for much of the cast... with one disappointing exception: Link. I was not a big fan of Link and Young Link's new looks. The leather on the tunics, the embroidered accents all over their costumes, and the tassels were not my cup of tea. These flourishes felt try-hard and over designed, unlike the iconic, clean look of the originals. Sometimes, less is more, and this was one of those times.
I eventually came to terms with Link's new style, but I can't totally say the same about the controls. To be clear, the game plays fine, but it's a weaker setup than the N64 original, or even the 3DS iteration. In the original Ocarina of Time, players had six dedicated face buttons to use, with three of them customizable: the left, down, and right C-buttons. In this new Ocarina of Time, players only have a single customizable button, ZR, which can be changed on the fly via a scroll wheel not unlike Breath of the Wild, Tears of the Kingdom, and even Echoes of Wisdom. In practice it works well enough, but it is, without question, inferior to what was done before.
The problem with reducing the player's customizable buttons down to one is that there are too many instances during combat and even exploration where it's necessary to be able to rapidly move between different items and weapons. For instance, in the Water Temple, Link has to fire his arrow and then quickly pull out the Longshot to zoom across the way through a timed gate. That entire process now has a pause in the middle because the player has to fire an arrow, hold R to bring up the scroll wheel, select the Longshot, and then pull it out, aim, and fire. I suspect newer players, especially ones whose first experience with Zelda was Breath or Tears, won't notice, but longtime players will instantly recognize how clunky this feels by comparison.
In fairness, the N64's wealth of face buttons aren't present on a Switch 2 Pro Controller, but Nintendo already demonstrated how to properly compensate for fewer inputs with Ocarina 3D. That game had the limited buttons of the 3DS to contend with but was able to provide players with two customizable slots to use. Now, some might try to counter with, "yeah, but 3DS had the touch screen!" It did, and the only real difference it made was that the touch screen was home to a dedicated button for Link's ocarina. I contend that the average player on N64 likely always had the ocarina assigned to one of the three C buttons, which means they effectively only had two active buttons for weapons/items. However, just the addition of one extra customizable button makes for a far more elegant solution than the new Ocarina's scroll wheel.
Which also ties into another big change: the addition of a jump button, another hallmark of the Breath/Tears games that was heretofore unique among 3D Zelda titles. It's inclusion in Ocarina is... odd. Odd because the entire Ocarina of Time experience, and indeed the entire 3D Zelda experience up to the release of Breath of the Wild, was designed around auto-jumping. Meaning, you don't need to jump in Ocarina because the game would do it for you, and quite well. Given that the design of the temples and overworld here isn't significantly different than the original game, there aren't even any real changes to platform arrangements that would make jumping necessary or increase the level of challenge. It honestly just feels like players can jump because Nintendo assumed players weened on Breath/Tears would be expecting it. Jumping doesn't ruin anything (indeed, most games of this kind allow jumping), but it does take away one of the face buttons that could have been used for item mapping.
Other niggling frustrations I have with the controls include a lack of first-person view, whether for exploration or shooting; it's especially frustrating considering how many things I'd like to have been able to take a closer look at. It's also mildly irritating that items like the Deku Stick and the Biggoron Sword can't be pulled out without automatically swinging. Sometimes I like to simply pull out an item to have it at the ready, but Ocarina on Switch 2 insists that you start swinging the second you hit the button. Neither of these are deal-breakers, but do point to an occasional lack of thoughtfulness from the design team that belies the loving care that was put into the visuals.
Similarly confounding are the cinematics in the new Ocarina. They're gorgeously animated, presented using the in-game engine same as all previous iterations of Ocarina of Time. However, Nintendo decided to fully voice the cinema scenes—sometimes. And by sometimes, I mean that the game will go from fully-voiced, to unvoiced, to fully-voiced in rapid succession. It made no sense. I can understand when returning to player control and exploring the game world that the dialogue would stop being voiced; that's fairly standard in video games. But to make the shift from voiced to voiceless when there is no transition back to player control felt bizarre. Worse, the staccato nature of the voiced sections sometimes made the cut scenes feel almost unfinished.
Compounding the matter is that I don't know that I really liked any of the choices for character voices. Link remains silent, as he should, but all of the major characters, including Zelda, Ganondforf, Impa, and Kaepora Gaebora, are voiced (by Erica Mendez, Matt Mercer, Laura Post, and Frank Todaro, respectively). They perform well, but the delivery is too much like a typical anime dub for my liking. It's too melodramatic, with some scenes utterly gutted of emotional impact compared to the silent delivery of the original as a result. The Great Deku Tree's (Richard Epcar) narration at the beginning lacked the emotional heft of the original and sounded like something I'd glaze over on Crunchy Roll. That's a stark downgrade from the classic version which had me mesmerized without ever uttering a word. Navi (Lisa Reimold), meanwhile, is cursed with a cutesy, girly voice that is grating in large doses. Her line at the end of the game during Link and Ganon's final showdown had zero weight because of the tone used by the voice actress.
Sadly, the modern day creeps into Ocarina of Time in other ways besides the nauseating anime line delivery. There are several instances of story sanitization that I rolled my eyes at. Classic bits like the poe collector in Castle Town who tells Link "I could run a different kind of business if I looked like you... heh he heh..." and Nabooru telling Link "If only I knew you would become such a handsome man... I should have kept the promise I made back then." As far as sexual innuendo goes, it's practically Mr. Roger's Neighborhood, but somehow, the censorious nature of the modern, progressive storyteller demands that any and all such dialogue be bowdlerized. In the grand scheme of things these are minor tweaks, but unwelcome ones because of what they represent and the mindset that prompts their removal. Where I marveled at and looked forward to seeing each new locale in Ocarina, I dreaded discovering changes in the story and dialogue like these.
Speaking of dialogue, besides the delivery not being the best, the actual lines themselves sometimes left me wanting. Where the original Ocarina of Time was timeless in its dialogue and storytelling, the new Ocarina occasionally gives off whiffs of millennial/GenZ tropes. The Great Deku Tree no longer speaks in Old English, which both undercuts how old the character is supposed to be as well as diminishes some of his grandeur. Words and phrases that sound like they came from social media posts have no business being in a game like this. Characters blurting out generic one-liners such as "rude" are wildly out of place, but perhaps the biggest offense was the game's incessant need to telegraph virtually every secret via NPC dialogue. The game obsessively tells the player where hidden things like the Sun Song are, what each Great Fairy will give you before you head to them, and so on. Not only is it pointless (who wouldn't explore the giant graveyard in a video game?), but it also makes dialogue strained and unrealistic.
There are also changes to minor aspects of the story that actually made things confusing when they weren't before. A prime example of this is the encounter with the Composer Brothers in the Kakariko Village Graveyard. The original game made it clear that the siblings were working for the king to develop what would become the Sun Song. They were subsequently killed by Ganon for refusing to share the fruits of their research with him. In this game... they worked themselves to death. Seriously. And hid the song before Ganon could get to it... except how would they have known that Ganon would be coming for it in the first place? Did they just die? The graves look weathered and old, so I don't think that's likely. It's a confusing alteration that only seems intended to make the king look bad and ultimately makes no sense.
It's not an isolated problem, either. Ingo's arc at Lon Lon Ranch is also worse from the changes that were made. He was always depicted as a groveling underling to Ganon, desperate to court the villain's favor, but now there's been a new, added detail that Ingo is taking out endless loans to send Ganon money. Uh... why? In the original, he was trying to impress Ganon by presenting him with Epona, but Epona's unruly nature was preventing him from being able to do so. Now, there's this unneeded, bizarre story beat that doesn't fit. Worse still is that by the end, once Link has whisked Epona to freedom and the ranch returned to Malon and Talon, Ingo is uncharacteristically repentant about his actions. Why is it necessary to try and redeem Ingo? There are no satisfying answers to these questions, and thus these changes are pointless and damaging.
A final story element that needs addressing is Sheik. While I thought the design looked good, it was confounding to hear Navi referring to Sheik as "he" when, clearly, she and Link were talking to a woman the whole time. There's nothing masculine about Sheik's body or voice in this game, so why is Navi saying "he?" Again, no good answers, and another needless added point of confusion. There are a couple of other odd moments with pronouns that creep into the adventure, like calling Iron Knuckles "they" but other enemies "it." Iron Knuckles are distinctly masculine and humanoid, so the use of "they" really makes no sense—unless it's a case of Western localization with an activist bent. Yes, Nabooru ends up in some Iron Knuckle armor, but her reveal is meant to be a surprise because—shocker!—she's a petite woman in the shell of what looks like a giant, hulking man.
One of the mission statements of the new Ocarina seemed to be speeding things up and streamlining where possible. Most dungeons are the same as they were before, but there are instances where treasure chests have been relocated, locks removed, rooms repositioned or replaced, and so on. The most obvious dungeon to receive a facelift, the infamous Water Temple, has indeed been reworked. I personally never had an issue navigating that particular temple, but it's been a point of contention since 1998, so I wasn't bothered. Indeed, all of the nips and tucks to the dungeons only seemed to improve flow and clarify obscure objectives. I was more ambivalent towards Link's new sprint ability and being able to jump up ladders and fences/vines. Part of me feels like it's bending the knee to impatient players, but it's not like either new addition is required to be used, nor do they rush the experience. Overall, it felt like a lot of smart choices that didn't compromise any of the gameplay.
I thought that combat also took a step forward in the new Ocarina. Link's movement speed as a whole is faster than in the original, making him more nimble in a fight. Enemies, meanwhile, are more aggressive and smarter as a whole. Fights against low-level foes remain pretty breezy, but once the likes of Lizalfos enter the fray, fights start to become more nuanced. The player has to be diligent about blocking and dodging versus rushing in to deliver volleys of blows with reckless abandon. Haste makes waste (of Link) this time around, and I appreciated that enemies like Stalfos and especially Iron Knuckles were genuinely deadlier than ever. The game might make it easier to figure out where all the secrets are, but it doesn't hesitate to kick the player's butt.
I appreciated that Nintendo made the economy in Ocarina more useful this time around. Although I would actively collect every rupee I could in the original game, it never felt like there was much point to all the money. Resources popped up with ease just from cutting grass, I rarely if ever used potions, and if I ever needed to buy anything, Link always seemed to have enough cash at the ready. Now, however, Great Fairies demand a monetary tribute (that goes up in price with each upgrade), and the game isn't quite so generous with hearts and resources in bushes and pots, and so on. I actually needed money and was conscious of my spending, and more, I found myself using things like potions for the first time. My one gripe here was a Business Scrub that can be summoned with a special seed anywhere in the game world, including dungeons. It felt sort of like a cheat, it was so convenient, but purists can choose to not use the seed if they want.
It would be folly to talk about Ocarina of Time and not discuss its music. The score of Ocarina is, like the game itself, one of the greatest ever made. Its compositions are tunes that players hear and keep with them for the rest of their lives. To this day I whistle Epona's Song and the Song of Storms to myself during the day. Graciously, Nintendo did not muck around with the music in the new Ocarina. The songs are virtually identical save for the fact that they're performed by real instruments instead of the synthesized MIDIs of the original. I wouldn't say any of these fresh recordings are an improvement over the N64 versions, but the highest compliment I can give is that they are on equal footing. If you've never played Ocarina in any form, the music will be a highlight, for sure.
One all-new addition in the Ocarina remake is the Hall of Fallen Enemies. It's not a physical location on the map, which was what I had assumed, but instead a place in Link's dreaming mind (familiar territory for the character) that you can visit when he goes to sleep in a bed (another new mechanic that helps restore health and pass time). While in the Hall of Fallen Heroes, there are a couple of things that Link can do. First, he can look at statues of all the enemies he's beaten, including bosses. There's data on each enemy that includes tips for fighting them in the future. On the perimeter of the hall are statues of the bosses and mini-bosses. These can be faced in combat once more and there's even a gauntlet challenge for those interested. As Nintendo is wont to do, there isn't a true reward for this (a collectible, basically, but no new items or weapons), but the satisfaction of besting all of Link's opponents again is the real point, y'know?
If I had to sum up my thoughts on Ocarina of Time on Switch 2, it's that this is the weakest version of one of the greatest games ever made. It looks stunning and plays mostly great, but there are significant problems that hold this iteration back from being the definitive take on Ocarina. This game's adoption of Breath/Tears' selection wheel is too limiting and bogs down combat and exploration. Modern day tweaks to the narrative and dialogue are unwelcome and, in some cases, make the storytelling unclear. An overuse of character dialogue to communicate objectives an secrets that should naturally be discovered versus telegraphed to the player not only dumbs down exploration, but also results in some awkward, unnatural dialogue. Changes to dungeon layouts and puzzles, not to mention some quality of life tweaks, do offer some improvements to the play experience, but overall Nintendo got this game just right in 1998. The Ocarina of today is a fine game but a lesser one than the original.
Thoughts on Zelda Notes
Zelda Notes is an optional feature that is activated via the Nintendo Switch app on mobile. Once toggled on via the options menu in Ocarina of Time, it provides a number of useful features to the user. Some are interesting but unnecessary, such as My Play Data & Achievements, which is a stat tracker for things like enemies killed, walk distance, and so on. Similar are the Gossip Quests side missions, which provide hints to in-game locations that, when found, earn the player points that can be used to purchase music scores to use for a virtual ocarina that can be played via the app. The one feature that it seems pretty lame to have tethered to the app instead of directly accessible in-game is the Completion Tracker. This handy map shows where remaining Heart Pieces, Gold Skulltulas, and treasure chests are throughout Hyrule. Without the app, players are left flying blind, which is a bummer. Zelda Notes are worthwhile but also needlessly convoluted.
Incredible visuals immerse the player in Hyrule like never before
Faithful recreation of the world map, combat, and story line
Music remains timeless and unforgettable
Rupees and potions finally feel useful
Zelda Notes adds a fun layer to the gameplay and is useful
Modern day writing tropes diminish the quality of storytelling
None of the voice cast really works; line delivery often sounds like bad anime
Single customizable item slot is a step backwards
Zelda Notes should be an in-game feature, not part of an external app
8
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