Unlike you, probably, I am not playing Nintendo's Switch 2 remake of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time right now. I even turned down a kind offer from my editor to review it. This despite the fact that it might be my favorite Zelda game (mostly by virtue of being the first one I played) and indubitably one of the greatest games ever — as close to a Citizen Kane as the medium has.
I've read the ecstatic reviews, several of them by friends of mine, like Keza MacDonald and Christian Donlan, and of course Polygon's own Giovanni Colantonio, who I know to be people of good sense and great taste who share my reverence for this game and this series. I also trust Nintendo, especially now it's clear the game was developed by the in-house Zelda team and not farmed out to an external studio. I trust producers Eiji Aonuma and Hidemaro Fujibayashi, veterans of Zelda's golden age and architects of its great Breath of the Wild renaissance, who Gio talked to this week.
I trust their decision to pass Ocarina on to younger developers at Nintendo to train and inspire them, but also to inject the aging game with youth and life. I also know that Ocarina needs the work. I played a little of the Nintendo 64 original recently, and while I remained entranced by its strangely haunted vibe, I found that, like so many early 3D games, it is fighting a battle with clunky, barely-ready technology that it has been slowly losing over the last 28 years.
I'm honestly not sure that it's still fun to play now. And this matters to me, because my 10-year-old son loves Zelda — which, to him, means Tears of the Kingdom. He thinks Tears is the best game ever, and I wouldn't necessarily disagree.
He's read the Ocarina of Time manga and fiddled about with other games in the series, including the Link's Awakening remake and The Wind Waker, but never settled into any of them. Honestly, I warned him off trying to play the original Ocarina. So the Ocarina remake arrives at a perfect time for him.
He is beyond excited about it. He will get it, and his own Switch 2 to play it on, for Christmas. Put yourself in his shoes. (Maybe you once were, and got the original Ocarina, or the 3DS version, as a childhood Christmas gift yourself.) Can you imagine anything better?
Extract — continue reading at the source.
