This is an IGN opinion piece from writer Logan Plant. The Legend of Zelda is his favorite video game series, and he plays Ocarina of Time to completion at least once a year.
How many Zelda reveals do I have left in my life? I think about this more than I probably should. There are few better feelings than the precise instant I’m exposed to a new interpretation of an old friend: the shock of Link trading in his green tunic for a blue one as he fires a high-tech arrow into the eye of a spider-like robot. The roar of the crowd as a dark, grittier version of Hyrule is revealed and Shigeru Miyamoto rushes onto the stage. And now, the gasp I let out as a gorgeous tapestry telling the familiar tale of a boy without a fairy seamlessly transitions to our first look at an unfamiliar hero. I don’t know him yet, just as I used to not know of Guardians or the Twilight, but I will soon enough.
My initial response to the brief teaser for Switch 2’s remake of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time aligned with much of the internet’s: “That’s it??” But while wrapping up our live Nintendo Direct reaction show and flying home from a busy week in Los Angeles, I couldn’t get that tiny glimpse into Link’s treehouse out of my head. We have just one piece of an enormous puzzle, and my mind started racing to fill in the rest of the picture. By showing restraint, Nintendo surprisingly managed to create countless questions surrounding a 28-year-old game I’ve played endlessly. We only get to light our imaginations on fire like this a couple of times each decade, and I’m so glad we don’t have all the answers to these questions just yet.
“That’s what Link looks like?”
All I needed to see was a new art direction. One of the main reasons Zelda is my favorite fictional world is because of its constant willingness to reinvent itself. I love the painterly aesthetic of Breath of the Wild, but after two 100+ hour games and multiple spinoffs following its guidelines, I’ve been desperately hoping for the next chapter in Zelda’s visual identity.
Ocarina of Time is answering the call. Link is leaning more realistic than ever before – although I’d still argue his look is firmly fantastical – his woven outfit has seen a complete overhaul, and he’s snoozing without his iconic cap. The jarring departure has predictably caused a lot of backlash, but to me, Zelda will always be a bedtime fairytale told in different ways over the years, and I’m already fully on board to see this bold take through. He still feels very new, but that’s how it should be at this point. Basically every version of Link has looked just a little bit wrong at first blush, and I have no doubt that this iteration will one day fit perfectly into the rich history of heroes that have come before as just another amiibo on my shelf. But right now, he sticks out a little bit, and I’m enjoying the fleeting moments of novelty.
Link’s new design also injects a lot of mystery into the surrounding world. What will a Goron look like in this new realization of Hyrule? Will Ocarina’s horror elements like ReDeads and Wallmasters be too frightening for young kids to handle? Will Nintendo tone down the exaggerated nature of the Great Fairies, or lean into it? Attempting to extrapolate Link’s appearance onto the people, enemies, and villains of Hyrule is a fun thought exercise, and one we can only carry out in this brief window of time.
“Is it a full reimagining?”
There’s lots of chatter over website descriptions using words like “timeless gameplay” and the debate of reborn vs. remaster vs. remake vs. reimagining, but I don’t think digging into the semantics is as valuable as just evaluating the trailer itself. Nintendo didn’t treat this reveal like any Zelda remaster it’s shown off in the past.
Typically when Nintendo reissues a 3D Zelda, it sticks to a similar art style as the original and is very transparent up front about what we should expect: the same game design with updated graphics, controls, and a few improvements to clean up some outdated bits. They’ve followed this playbook for all five 3D Zelda remasters to this point, from Ocarina of Time 3D all the way to Skyward Sword HD. But Ocarina of Time on Switch 2 is breaking the trend. This reveal falls firmly in line with how Nintendo likes to reveal a new 3D Zelda – see the comparisons to Breath of the Wild and Twilight Princess’ initial reveals I discussed at the top – and I have a hard time believing Nintendo would give us such a hard tease for simply a faithful remake with a revamped art style.
I think it would be a failure in expectation management for Nintendo to drop a 90-second look that gets us asking dozens of questions, only to reveal two months later that it’s the same Ocarina of Time we’ve always known. Of course, I’d still personally be excited to play a modern version of one of my all-time favorite games in 4K with proper right stick camera control – something Ocarina of Time has never had in any of its iterations – but right now, I’m more excited thinking about what this could be: a full reimagining that brings the essence of the original into the modern day. I’m imagining a seamless world with no loading screens between areas; larger, more populated towns with unique Zoras and Gorons that don’t all look exactly the same as each other; a richer Hyrule Field that evokes the same feelings of scope and depth that the original did in 1998. The original will always exist, and there will always be ways to play it, so in my mind anything should be on the table to change in this new telling. But a lot of that will come down to who is actually handling development.
“Who is making it?”
Nintendo has been frustratingly secretive the last few years over which team is developing upcoming games, and we have no indication of who is working on Ocarina of Time. If Nintendo is partnering with an external studio, as it’s doing with the upcoming Star Fox remake, then I highly doubt this is going to be much more than a 1:1 recreation from a gameplay perspective. Ocarina of Time is one of Nintendo’s most sacred creations, and I don’t think they’d fully trust a development partner to redefine it for the next generation.
My hope is that Nintendo is handling this one internally, and I have a theory about why Nintendo is choosing to revisit Ocarina at this exact time. Zelda series producer Eiji Aonuma is 63 years old, and legendary Nintendo composer Koji Kondo is 65. Nintendo has a retirement age of sorts at 65 years old, at which point you pass your core development roles to the next in line. We’re seeing this with Takashi Tezuka’s recent retirement announcement, and although Shigeru Miyamoto is in his 70s, he hasn’t been hands-on in game development for several years.
Aonuma and Kondo both have deep ties to the original Ocarina of Time. For Aonuma, it was the first Zelda game he worked on, and he designed the dungeons that stand to this day as some of the best in the series. For Kondo, Ocarina of Time’s unforgettable soundtrack was his final solo composition. Since then, he’s always had at least one collaborator on each one of his credits. Is it possible that these two Nintendo legends are returning to Ocarina of Time as a victory lap of sorts before moving on from core development? Are they revisiting their most iconic work, and recreating it for the modern day? I sincerely hope so, and I can’t think of a more meaningful project to send off a pair of Nintendo greats.
There’s also a strong possibility that Monolith Soft is working on the remake. Monolith actually has three teams: the first works on the Xenoblade series like the upcoming Xenoblade Genesis, and the third is a smaller support team that helps with asset creation on Nintendo games like Mario Kart World and the Splatoon series. It’s the second team that’s the most interesting in this discussion. They’ve been assisting in the development of the Zelda series since Skyward Sword in 2011, and they’ve only grown in size as new games have become larger and more complex with Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom. In recent interviews, Nintendo has gone on record saying it’d like to see Monolith start making more elements of the Zelda series from scratch, on their own.
Maybe, as Nintendo ramps up production on the followup to Tears of the Kingdom, Monolith is tackling this remake before they need to go all hands on deck for the next open world entry. And perhaps, recognizing that the dungeons have been one of the weakest elements of Zelda’s open air era, they’re using this opportunity to revisit some of the franchise’s all-time great puzzle boxes and consider how their design could be implemented in a more open format.
This is all conjecture, of course, but that’s kind of the whole point! I love that everything is a possibility right now, and I’m genuinely eager to see which of these guesses age well and which age terribly.
Ocarina of Time has been on my mind almost constantly since the remake’s reveal, and I suspect it will stay that way for much of the rest of 2026. I’ve been texting family and friends about it nearly nonstop, discussing theories and hopes, and sharing in the joy that one of the best games ever made is coming back in a new way. Nintendo is speedrunning a Zelda hype cycle over the next six months, and I’m so happy this is the way Ocarina of Time was revealed to us. I’m savoring sitting in the angst and excitement of the unknown as my brain churns nonstop to generate another angle while I watch the reveal trailer again and again. There’s no need to rush through the rare sensation of a Zelda reveal. We only get to do this so many times.
Logan Plant is the host of Nintendo Voice Chat and IGN’s Database Manager & Playlist Editor. The Legend of Zelda is his favorite video game franchise of all time, and he is patiently awaiting the day Nintendo announces a brand new F-Zero. You can find new episodes of NVC every Friday on the IGN Games YouTube channel, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app.
