When beloved art is revisited and revised, a familiar cry is often heard: “You’re ruining my childhood!” But with Nintendo’s Switch 2 remake of Ocarina of Time, there are also livelihoods at risk: specifically, the man running the shooting gallery in Castle Town. In the original 1998 version of the game, he’d rip off players as they funnelled rupees and fudged the then still novel analogue-stick aiming. But in 2026 we have more responsive frame rates and a motion-controlled slingshot that allows precision adjustments.
His targets tumble on the first go, and with them his entire business model. Even in Hyrule, the death of the high street seems inevitable. Bad news for him but great news for Link, a child of the forest who, as in 1998, steps into a vast fantasy kingdom to vanquish a great evil, but now does so with a number of improvements.
The boy can now sprint, preventing the ignominy of endless roly-polies to zip across grassy plains. He has a manual jump, free-rotating camera, a scrolling inventory bar that replaces menu screen faff and, crucially, a fatter wallet for holding all those gems he fleeces from struggling shooting gallery owners. Yes, we are being asked to applaud features that have been the norm for decades elsewhere, but it’s undeniably striking to enter familiar territory with a hero who feels this different under the thumbs.
The dilemma facing any remake, let alone of a game recognised as a genre-defining classic, is how closely you hew to the past. As with this year’s Star Fox revamp, Ocarina of Time finds Nintendo in a celebratory mode. It’s a polished victory lap for a game with little to prove.
For newcomers it means seeing what the fuss is about without having to scrutinise the N64 original on unflattering flatscreen TVs. I doubt Hyrule Field – once a byword for video-game freedom – will ever conjure the awe it did in 1998, but seeing the sun catch in puddles and grass growing from the floor helps mask what is an obviously artificial pen, compared to Breath of the Wild’s sprawling continent. For some returning fans, the more controlled shape is precisely the appeal.
After the “make your own adventure” ethos of Switch’s open-world Zeldas, there is comfort in slipping into traditional dungeons, where every room has a characterful beast to chop up or a mechanism to unpick with a growing kitbag of tools. My great fear was that some of the puzzles are simply too iconic to be forgotten and solved again. Yet here I am, sweatily hunting ghosts around the Forest Temple, and surreptitiously peering at my neighbour’s demo pod to remind myself that, yes, you have to … [redacted for your benefit].
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