The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time - Switch 2 Review
"More than we could have ever hoped for"
The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time is, in itself, a legend. It’s a tale that those who played it back during its original 1998 release will tell their children about, and now those kids (with this remake) will tell their children about. It is a game that, since its initial launch, has synonymously taken the number one ranked spot on Metacritic (99/100) and has remained there, uncontested, for 28 years and counting. A game such as that is unequivocally legendary, but it is now time to engage with the classic tale for the umpteenth time once again, but this time, like never before!
The Good
When you bring back and modernise a piece of entertainment for a modern audience, it’ll always be tied to how well the base product was received, in addition to how well it holds up today. The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, however, is a unique case in that it was (and often is) considered to be a near-flawless game with the least amount of blemishes as one could imagine. Therefore, having that as a base for a grand adventure on 2026 hardware is a pretty darn good start. The biggest question that would come to most minds is: can they do it justice?
Aside from the visuals (which we will get to), this remake set out to re-release their quintessential game with a slew of quality-of-life features that aimed to iron out some of the common practices of video games from the late 90s. The Threads of Time menu option is probably the most helpful, acting as a quest log for players to know what they should be doing next or important conversations they’ve had before. And then there are other small things like the UI layout, having more buttons to quickly change items (which fixes the Water Temple issue) and, as strange as it may be for seasoned gamers’ muscle memory, the ability to jump at will! All of these and more make this new version of Ocarina of Time a more seamless game to play from start to finish and I’m here for it.
The cutscenes, my goodness, those cutscenes! We always knew how grand Hyrule was, but being able to see important scenes acted out with more careful cinematography and voice acting is incredible. When The Legend of Zelda series first received voice acting in Breath of the Wild, I was tentative at first, as it made it more difficult to project one’s interpretations of a character. And, while this is a personal gripe, I wasn’t a big fan of the voice work in Breath of the Wild, Tears of the Kingdom and the related Hyrule Warriors titles, as it all felt a bit stilted. While admittedly in Ocarina of Time, some of it did feel a little Saturday morning cartoony, the overall execution was stellar and the new story additions allowed for further elaboration. In the end, the story felt much more fleshed out and complete, and coming across new beats was always a treat.
What a charming game Ocarina of Time is! The world, its characters, their quirks – it’s all so memorable and I just want to live there (the Young Link version, at least). But that’s not new; we’ve known how charming this game has been for decades, but the fact that Nintendo can have this world, make it as beautiful and fleshed out as they have done, and then add little details like being able to hum melodies into the Switch 2’s microphone to play the ocarina is just superb. It’s like they know exactly what we would do as children, and being able to live out those fantasies in such small yet heartfelt ways almost brings a tear to my eye.
And that brings me to my final point in this section: this is all how I imagined Ocarina of Time looking and feeling like as a child. Growing up with the Super Nintendo and Nintendo 64, players often needed to fill in the gaps. We could close our eyes and see the particle effects or little cracks on the walls. We could see the emotion in the characters when they were just standing still and the fauna in Hyrule Field where there was none. It’s all just so beautiful.
TL;DR
- Base Ocarina of Time remains a masterpiece
- Quality of life additions go a long way
- Cutscenes add so much additional context and flavour
- So much charm
- Exactly how I envisioned it as a child
The Bad
I say this with most remakes I tend to review, especially when it concerns games from bygone eras. Regardless of everything Nintendo has done to modernise Ocarina of Time, there are still some lingering annoyances that are some intrinsically baked into the original source material. Hyrule Field is probably the most glaring, with its wide open space that evoked a grand world where you can see key landmarks in the distance, whereas in a post-Breath of the Wild world, that grandeur is diminished and what we are left with is a lot of barren empty space. Certain dungeons and their tight spaces can be a little frustrating too, but it makes sense when you consider what Nintendo had to pack into a 32MB Nintendo 64 cartridge in the late 90s. But these blemishes aside, it still makes me nostalgic for a bygone era.
TL;DR
- Some lingering nitpicks due to the age of the source material
Final Score: 10/10
The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time is, still to this day and for decades to come, a masterpiece. It is legendary in every sense of the word and this remake is more than we could have ever hoped for. The world, its characters, its nuances and its attention to detail – it is superb. I say this with absolutely zero cheek that this is a piece of work that should be studied alongside other famous pieces of art (literature, film, etc.).
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