This review examines The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time (2026).

Background: A Game People Measured Their Lives By

The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time arrived in 1998, and for a certain generation of players it became more than a game — it became a marker of a specific period of life. One player recalls first finishing it during a Christmas break from university, playing all day with the curtains drawn before calling his girlfriend each evening to describe not his day in East Sussex but his day in Hyrule. That habit — playing, then telling someone else about what you found — is the lens through which the new remake is best understood.

Nearly thirty years later, Nintendo has released a remake of Ocarina of Time for Nintendo Switch 2. The core adventure is unchanged: Link still travels between different eras of Hyrule to defeat Ganon, still begins in Kokiri Forest, and still rides Epona over the fence at Lon Lon Ranch in what remains one of the most heart-racing moments in the medium. The game world is still divided into chunks that fade in and out as you move between them, and the unskippable intro — Link and Epona dashing over a misty hill with the moon behind them — is intact.

Development: What the Remake Changes, and What It Deliberately Keeps

The most visible update is graphical. The entire game has been rebuilt with modern visuals, and the fixed camera system of the N64 original has been replaced with a modern two-stick control scheme: movement on one thumbstick, camera on the other. Hyrule Castle Town, once navigated by pivoting around a central camera, now sends cobbled paths racing off in every direction with the camera rushing behind you. The trade-off is real — early 3D games carried a sense that the whole thing was a clever practical trick forever about to collapse in on itself, and that feeling is gone — but the upside is that a child born long after 1998 can pick up the remake and feel at home quickly.

Some locations benefit enormously. The route to Zora's Domain is now a lovely scramble over cliffs and arcing crags. Jabu Jabu's Belly, with its 1990s Nickelodeon colours and glossy textures, reads as a cross between a pre-millennium rave and a modern soft play centre. The Water Temple is now a drowned Art Nouveau palace worthy of Captain Nemo, and the Forest Temple — the favourite Zelda dungeon of this particular player — is a parquet-floored murder mansion overtaken by trees, all dark wood panelling and odd bits of church jutting from the foliage.

Not every change lands. A longtime fan of the original who watched the remake being played felt the visuals had lost some character. The Dark Link fight has shed a little of its glitchy liminality, though the staging — an old tree in the middle of a vast smoky room — remains wonderfully strange. Late in the game, in Gerudo territory, the environments occasionally resemble any number of third-person Unreal games in development, pleasant to look at but no longer specifically Zelda.

The Secret Ingredient: UI Tweaks That Transform Pacing

The changes that matter most are not graphical. Link now has a dedicated jump button, removing the original's contextual jumps and making the thunderous jump attack more satisfying to pull off. Borrowed from the 3DS remake, a trigger mini-menu allows item swapping on the fly, and boots and headgear can be changed with directional face buttons.

This sounds minor. It is quietly transformative. The Water Temple — meme-level shorthand for difficulty and patience, an environment that can be flooded to three different levels — no longer requires slipping into the menu every few steps to add or remove iron boots. The result is that a dungeon long dreaded becomes a dungeon revealed through experimentation: change the water level, see what options open up, reason about the relationship between reachable and unreachable spaces, all without interrupting flow. A simple UI and item-management tweak gives a legendary dungeon its perfect pace and sense of revelation.

Alongside noticeable changes — the Hookshot is easier to equip, the wallet holds more rupees from the start — sit hundreds of smaller adjustments: gentler direction prompting in places like the Water Temple, apparently trimmed backtracking in the Forest Temple, possibly rearranged item placements. All of them share two properties: they improve the game without removing or altering anything meaningful about the original, and they are genuinely hard to spot confidently.

Latest Progress: Time as the Game's True Subject

Memory is unreliable, and measuring the remake against it proves instructive. Hyrule Field feels smaller now but remains thrilling to race across. Epona seems to arrive sooner, or perhaps the idea of a horse in a Zelda game simply loomed larger. A favourite boss involving oil paintings seems to have shifted later in the memory than it actually sits.

What emerges from that comparison is the remake's emotional core. Ocarina of Time is a game preoccupied with time: a central mechanic throws Hyrule seven years into the future, transforming Link from child to adult, and then lets you go back again. Adult Link revisits variations of the dungeons young Link completed, now harder and more consequential — a structural point this player had never fully registered before.

Returning to such a game after nearly thirty years gives memory an IMAX treatment. The first Fairy Fountain summons the recollection of a wife walking down the aisle to that music, with roughly half the registry office recognising the tune and laughing. The Water Temple has become cultural shorthand for a challenge that is not screwing around — a measuring stick for how many awful things one had faced in life before first conjuring the spirit of Link about to enter it. The first arrival in Hyrule Field still carries both the promise of everything games were about to become in 1998 and that fleeting childhood moment when boundaries suddenly change.

The remake does not merely send players back into their own memories; it puts them back in conversation with everyone they have known who loved the game — the friend who played it at university, the partner who loved it long before they met.

What It Means for Readers

Spoiler note: the passages above reference late-game locations and the child-to-adult time mechanic; those who want to encounter them fresh should proceed with that in mind.

Was Ocarina always this good? Were the dungeons always this complex and playful, this coherent? Were the bosses always driven by ideas, drama and humour rather than difficulty? Was the world always this rich with minor characters who linger — the accordion player in the windmill, the gravedigger with his own tour he would very much like you to try? At this distance it is impossible to say. What can be said is that the remake arrives timeless and intricate yet vibrant and clear enough to feel as though it was created last Wednesday.

For newcomers, that means one of the medium's defining adventures is available in its most approachable form — someone, somewhere, is about to play it for the first time and need to call a friend to talk about it. For returning players, the experience is stranger and better: the game has not changed as much as they have, and somehow they will find they are still coming to it fresh. As one father's advice about reading Don Quixote three times in a life suggests, the book — and the game — changes each time because the reader does.