The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time's Navi voice actress reprised her role after 28 years, but it happened entirely by chance because of Nintendo's blind auditions

Background: A familiar guide enters a new era

The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time returns on Switch 2 with a substantial change from the Nintendo 64 release that came almost three decades earlier. The new version adds proper voice acting, replacing the original's grunts, murmurs, and hyahs with fully voiced cutscenes. That shift raised a design question: if the remake would look dramatically improved, how would it preserve the sounds players already associate with the original?

Director HokWai Ng said in the most recent Ask The Developer blog that the team felt fully voiced cutscenes were needed to match the improved graphics. At the same time, Nintendo did not want to disturb established perceptions of how certain characters sound. Navi's Listen line was singled out as a reference point because even people who have never played The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time may have heard it before. Ng said the team absolutely did not want to change anything that iconic.

Development process: Blind auditions aimed at nostalgia rather than novelty

To protect the original's nostalgic voice texture, Nintendo held blind auditions for the Switch 2 remake. The goal was not to create new interpretations of the characters but to find actors who could recreate the feel of the original game.

Series director Eiji Aonuma recalled that the team wanted to choose actors based solely on which voices most closely resembled those of the original. That approach produced an unexpected result. According to Aonuma, as fate would have it, one of the selected actors had actually voiced the same character in the Nintendo 64 version. None of the team saw that coming.

Latest progress: A leaked credits video confirms Navi's return

Nintendo did not outright name the character involved in the double casting discovery. Long-running speculation among players pointed toward Kaori Mizuhashi, who is associated with Link's trusty fairy companion Navi, at least in the Japanese-language version.

A leaked online video of the game's credits now confirms that Mizuhashi is back almost three decades later. The result gives the Switch 2 remake a rare kind of continuity: the same voice actor returns to deliver the role tied to Navi's infamous Heys and Listens, 28 years apart.

Current stage: A remake built to feel both new and recognizable

The Switch 2 version of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time is now being framed as a remake that pairs dramatic visual and voice upgrades with deliberate preservation of the original's soundscape. Chris Donlan called the new version an astonishing remake in a five-star Eurogamer Ocarina of Time review.

At this stage, the most notable thread is not just that the remake sounds different from the Nintendo 64 classic, but that it sounds familiar in the right places. The same actor behind Navi's original Japanese voice has returned for the new version, turning a blind audition meant to avoid disturbing memory into a 28-year callback.