Every remake comes with a wishlist.

More content in Hyrule Field. A redesigned Water Temple. Voice acting. Nonlinear dungeon order. Better combat. Bigger towns. The internet has had twenty-eight years to compile its grievances with Ocarina of Time, and right now, with a remake confirmed and almost nothing shown, all of them are being aired at once.

Some of those things are legitimate. There are parts of this game that are clearly products of 1998 hardware, and nobody is going to miss the loading screens.

Ocarina of Time is the highest-rated video game ever made. Not one of the highest-rated — the highest-rated, full stop, and it has held that position for nearly thirty years. Almost every flaw people point to in this game has survived thirty years of replays. And things that survive thirty years of replays, while the game around them keeps getting called a masterpiece. Those are features rather than flaws.

Some of what people want changed is load-bearing. Pull it out because it seems like an obvious improvement, and something else collapses. The balance shifts. And what you’re left with is a game that looks like Ocarina of Time and doesn’t feel like it.

That’s what this video is about. The things Nintendo absolutely must not touch. A remake that doesn’t understand what they’re protecting will break them while thinking it’s improving them.

Nintendo gets one shot at this on Switch 2. If the invisible things go wrong — the balance, the structure, the deliberate choices that look like compromises but aren’t — there is no recovery. Today, we’re going to talk about what those things are.

Before we do — welcome back. If you’re new here, I’m Triforce Times. This channel is dedicated to deep dives into The Legend of Zelda: the design, the lore, the stories behind the stories, and everything Nintendo doesn’t fully explain. Subscribe if that’s your thing. Channel members get access to a growing library of exclusive Zelda videos, early access to content before it goes public, and an invite to our community Discord. Link is below.

Right. Let’s get into it.

THE COMPLETE PACKAGE

Ocarina of Time is not the best Zelda game because it does nothing better than any other game in the series. It isn’t the hardest. It doesn’t have the most emotionally devastating story — Majora’s Mask sits on that throne. It doesn’t have the most complex dungeons. It doesn’t have the deepest combat system. Wind Waker has a better villain. Twilight Princess has better set pieces. Skyward Sword, for all its faults, probably has more ambitious dungeons.

What Ocarina of Time has — what nothing else in the series has managed to replicate in quite the same way — is everything, at once, in the right proportion. It’s the complete package.

From the moment you step out of Link’s treehouse, you’re solving puzzles in the Deku Tree. You’re learning to fight enemies. You’re meeting characters who matter — Saria, Mido, the Great Deku Tree himself — and you’re doing it all within the first forty minutes of a game that will go on to ask you to think spatially across multiple temples, navigate time travel, and take down one of the most iconic villains in Nintendo history.

None of it feels rushed. None of it feels padded. It arrives in exactly the right order.

The child section of this game is one of the most perfectly calibrated introductions in the history of the medium. Every dungeon teaches you something. The Deku Tree gives you the basics — here’s a key, here’s a door, here’s an enemy, here’s a boss. Dodongo’s Cavern adds bombs. Changes the vocabulary. Jabu-Jabu’s Belly introduces a different kind of puzzle logic, with Ruto as a mechanic as much as a character.

By the time you’ve finished those three temples as a child, you speak the language of this game. You know how to read a room. You know how to think about items as tools. You’ve learned, without being told, the philosophy of how Zelda works.

And then the world ends.

That’s what the seven-year skip is. The world ends. You pulled the sword — you thought you were saving Hyrule — and Ganondorf walked through the door you opened and spent seven years burning everything down. Castle Town is a ruin. Lon Lon Ranch has a different face at the gate.

You’ve spent hours learning to love this world as a child. You’re invested in it. So when you step out of the Temple of Time as an adult and find out what happened to it, it lands like a punch — because the game has spent the entire first act teaching you exactly how much to care.

Then the adult section asks more of you. The Forest Temple is harder than anything in the child section. The Water Temple is harder than the Forest Temple. The Shadow Temple is disturbing. The Spirit Temple sends you backwards in time and asks you to use both versions of yourself to solve a single dungeon — the thesis of the whole design, resolved in one location.

Every element of this game — puzzle, combat, story, exploration, music, tone — is balanced against every other. No single pillar dominates. None is underdeveloped. It is, in the most literal sense, a complete package.

That’s why it’s the highest-rated game ever made. Everything works together, at the same time, and nothing breaks the spell.

Which means the remake’s job is not to improve individual elements. Better graphics, harder dungeons, and more content in Hyrule Field. The job is not to break the balance between them.

You can upgrade every component and still lose the thing. You can have better visuals, better combat, more content — and still produce something that feels lesser. The quiet sections got filled in. The gentle child dungeons got scaled up to match modern expectations of difficulty, and now they no longer feel like a beginning.

The most dangerous changes Nintendo can make to Ocarina of Time are not the obvious ones. They’re the ones that feel like obvious improvements — where you upgrade one pillar without noticing what it was doing for all the others. That’s the frame for everything that follows.

THE FOREST TEMPLE MUST COME FIRST

The Forest Temple is the first adult dungeon. That’s the single most important structural decision in the entire game.

You pull the Master Sword. The world skips forward seven years. You step out of the Temple of Time as Adult Link for the first time, and Sheikh is there, and there’s music, and the game is telling you something enormous has happened. And then you go outside.

And Hyrule Field is there. Still there. But different. The sky has that bruised quality. Things feel wrong in ways you can’t entirely name yet. And the game, at this point, could send you anywhere. It could point you toward a new location, a new quest, a new character you’ve never met. Set you loose in the adult world and see what you find.

But it doesn’t. It sends you home.

You go back to Kokiri Forest. And the Lost Woods. And the village where you grew up, with the kids who could never leave, in the houses you used to run between. And it’s all still there.

The music is off. The atmosphere has shifted. The Kokiri kids don’t know what happened — they don’t know anything happened — but you do. You’ve aged seven years, and they haven’t. And Saria’s spot, the place she used to sit, the place she gave you the ocarina and said goodbye — it’s empty.

She was regarded as a sage. While you slept.

And the temple she always sat in the shadow of — the one that was always looming there, the one you could see but could never enter — that’s what you’re walking into now.

The first thing the game asks you to do as Adult Link is not to explore a new part of the world. It’s to return to the part of the world you already knew. You go home. And home has changed. And then you go into the dungeon that represents everything you couldn’t reach as a child — and you face it alone, without Saria, because she’s already where the temple is sending you to eventually find her.

There’s one more piece to this. When you leave the Temple of Time as Adult Link, Sheikh blocks the Pedestal of Time. You cannot go back. You cannot pull the Master Sword back out and return to childhood. You’re staying that way until you’ve earned the right to be both.

The game forces you to live in the adult world before it gives you the option to leave it. And the Forest Temple is why that works — because returning to childhood before you’ve faced what adulthood costs would let you off the hook emotionally.

Now. Why does all of this matter for the remake?

Because the number one structural wishlist item — across Reddit, across YouTube, across every article published in the last two weeks — is some version of non-linear gameplay (even more so than the original). Give the player the freedom to approach the second half the way Breath of the Wild lets you approach its world.

I understand the instinct. Freedom feels like progress.

But the Forest Temple cannot be optional. And it cannot be third or fourth because you chose to go elsewhere first. The entire emotional grammar of the adult section depends on it being the first place you go. The return to Kokiri Forest, the empty spot where Saria used to sit, the sense of loss that precedes the dungeon — all of that only works if you haven’t already been to Lake Hylia and the Shadow Temple and picked up three other medallions first.

If you’ve already been everywhere else, going home stops being a homecoming. It’s just another location on a map.

Dungeons can be rebuilt. Individual rooms can change. New puzzles can replace old ones.

But the Forest Temple comes first. That cannot change.

LEAVE NAVI ALONE

The internet’s relationship with Navi is one of the longest-running bits in gaming. “Hey, listen!” has been a meme for twenty-five years. There are people who know that reference who have never played Ocarina of Time. It has transcended the game and become a cultural shorthand for annoying sidekick companions in general — the example everyone reaches for when they want to complain about NPCs who interrupt too much.

And so the assumption going into this remake is obvious. Of course, they’ll dial Navi back. Of course, she’ll interrupt less. Of course, she’ll be a quieter, more palatable version of the character who drove a generation of players to distraction.

I want to make the case that this would be a mistake. There’s a meaningful difference between a character who is irritating and a character who isn’t working.

Navi exists because the development team was genuinely uncertain that players could navigate 3D space without guidance. It’s a practical decision from a team building a genre that barely existed in 1998. She’s calibrated for a first encounter with a three-dimensional Zelda game. Everything about her is aimed at someone who has never done this before.

Which is precisely why she feels excessive to people who have done it fifteen times.

Navi is the voice that Link doesn’t have. Link is a silent protagonist. And in the child section, especially — a section about a ten-year-old boy who is told he’s special, loses his guardian, leaves his home, and begins a journey — the main character’s silence is powerful. And Navi fills it.

She reacts to things Link can’t. She’s there when you step out into Hyrule Field for the first time. She’s there in the quiet after a boss fight, while you’re still catching your breath.

And then she leaves.

After the credits. After Ganondorf is sealed. After Zelda sends Link back. Navi flies to the window.

And goes.

No goodbye. No explanation. Just gone.

Now imagine you’ve spent the game with a quieter Navi. A more restrained Navi. A Navi who’s been updated for modern sensibilities — helpful when you want her, silent when you don’t, never quite as much of a presence as the original.

And then she leaves.

Does it land the same way?

It doesn’t. You can’t mourn the absence of something that wasn’t fully there to begin with.

The meme has survived twenty-eight years because Navi made an impression strong enough to outlast the specific irritation she caused. That’s evidence of a character who worked well enough to become unforgettable. And you don’t fix unforgettable.

LEAVE HYRULE FIELD ALONE

The single most common wishlist item for this remake — more than voice acting, more than dungeon redesigns, more than anything else — is some version of: fill Hyrule Field with stuff.

Make it bigger. Give it more enemies. Add side quests. Scatter collectibles. Make it feel alive.

And by every modern standard, the instinct makes sense. Hyrule Field is almost comically sparse. A large green expanse with a ranch in the middle, some rocks along the edges, and stalactites at night. You cross it to get from one area to another. Mostly, you’re watching the sky.

But the emptiness is not a flaw.

Think about what Hyrule Field is doing. It’s the connective tissue between every major location in the game. Kokiri Forest in the south. Death Mountain. Zora’s Domain. Gerudo Desert through the canyon. And between all of them is Hyrule Field.

Every major destination requires you to cross it. And because the field has almost nothing in it, the crossing becomes breathing space between experiences. A moment that exists between what you’ve just done and what you’re about to do.

That’s nothing. That’s the game of managing your emotional rhythm as a player.

When you cross Hyrule Field toward Zora’s Domain for the first time, and the sound of water starts to build, and you turn the corner, and it opens up — that arrival lands because of what came before it. The quiet. The open road.

Fill Hyrule Field with content — side quests, collectables, wandering enemies, mini-dungeons —, and you’ve converted the passage into a destination. You’ve made the connective tissue a location.

Breath of the Wild is a masterpiece. But it’s making a completely different argument about what a world is for. In Breath of the Wild, the overworld is the game. The journey across it is the point. You are supposed to find things in the open field because finding things is what you are there to do.

Ocarina of Time’s geography is different. The world exists to carry you between places that matter. The field is the road. And a road with too much on it stops being a road.

There are additions that work. More enemy variety after dark — fine. If the world runs seamlessly with no loading screens — which it should — the existing field will already feel bigger just from the technical upgrade. Hyrule Field should feel like a horizon you cross. Not a city you pass through.

The moment you first step out of Kokiri Forest and see it — the wide open expanse, the sunlight, Castle Town visible in the distance — is one of the most famous moments in the Zelda series. It works because it’s vast, clean, and slightly intimidating. So much space and so little in it that you feel the scale of the world.

That is what the remake needs to recapture. Not more content. That feeling.

LEAVE THE DUNGEONS ALONE

The layouts can change. Individual rooms can be redesigned. New puzzles can replace old ones. The dungeons can be bigger, more visually realised, more fully three-dimensional than the N64 hardware ever allowed. I want all of that. That’s what a remake is for.

What I’m talking about is the philosophy underneath the design. The rules governing how every dungeon in Ocarina of Time works, regardless of which dungeon it is.

The rule is this: you enter a dungeon, you find an item inside it, and that item is the key to everything.

The Bow in the Forest Temple. The Hammer in the Fire Temple. The Iron Boots in the Water Temple. Each item is specific to its dungeon, fits thematically, and unlocks it in ways that make the dungeon feel designed around the item.

This is the classic Zelda dungeon philosophy at its purest. And it’s what Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom moved almost entirely away from. The Divine Beasts and Temples have mechanisms and things to activate, but they don’t have an item. There’s no single tool that changes your relationship with the space once you find it.

That moment — finding the dungeon item, feeling the shift — is one of the most satisfying things this series has ever done. It’s been mostly absent for nearly a decade. The remake is the chance to bring it back.

Two cases where the temptation to interfere will be highest.

The Water Temple.

Its reputation has grown so large that people who’ve never played Ocarina of Time know to fear it. The canonical annoying Zelda dungeon. And so, the remake wishlist almost universally calls for an overhaul.

Here’s the thing. The Water Temple isn’t hard. It can be uniquely punishing for one mistake. Lose track of a small key. Forget you’ve already used a particular lock. Miss one chest behind a water level you thought you’d already changed.

The dungeon isn’t difficult. It’s unforgiving of inattention. There is a difference.

The 3DS version fixed this correctly — colour-coded boots and clearer visual indicators for water-level changes. It addressed the genuine usability issue without touching what the dungeon was actually doing, which is asking you to think spatially across three vertical levels simultaneously. It’s the only dungeon in the game structured that way. At its best, it’s the most mechanically interesting dungeon in the game.

Redesign it from scratch, and you risk losing the only thing worth keeping.

The Biggoron Sword quest.

The most powerful weapon in the game is hidden behind a trading chain that the game does not tell you exists. You pick up a Pocket Egg and trade it across half of Hyrule — ending, after timed sections and awkward geography, with eye drops for a giant Goron and a reward that makes the final stretch of the game significantly more manageable.

No quest marker. No hint from a character who says, “Have you tried talking to the running man?” You find it by talking to everyone and exploring everywhere.

In a 2026 game, the natural instinct is to surface this. Quest log. Tracker. Make it findable.

But the difficulty of finding it is inseparable from the reward of having it. The Biggoron Sword is a real secret. Something the game didn’t give you. Making it visible makes it accessible and, in the same stroke, strips out what made it worth finding.

The remake can reduce friction in completing the chain without advertising the chain’s existence. The timed sections can be generous. But the obscurity — the sense that this is something you have to look for — needs to stay.

Ocarina of Time’s dungeons, its weapon systems, and its hidden depth are built on one philosophy: this game rewards engagement. It treats the player as someone who will look, think, explore, and be given something real for doing so.

COMMUNITY SECTION

Before I get to what I think can change in this remake, I want to take a moment, because I asked the Triforce Times Discord community the same question I’ve been asking in this video. What must not change.

And the answers were good enough that I want to go through them, because they picked up on things I haven’t covered yet — and some of them put it better than I did.

EldritchKhaotic opened with something that feels obvious once you say it, but I haven’t seen written down anywhere near enough:

The darkness has to stay. The Shadow Temple. The Bottom of the Well. Dead Hand. The ReDeads. They talked about the first time they encountered a ReDead as a kid — playing on their mum’s save file, finding the Royal Family’s Tomb open, hearing the scream, losing control of Link. That specific feeling of helplessness. The freeze. And I think every person who played this game as a child has a version of that story.

The remake will introduce Ocarina of Time to an entirely new generation. And the temptation — in a 2026 game built to sit alongside a movie, marketed to the widest possible audience — will be to sand the edges. To make the scarier sections more manageable, more legible, and less traumatic.

Don’t. The fear is the point. The Bottom of the Well and the Shadow Temple work because they arrive after everything else. After the open sky of Hyrule Field, the warmth of Kokiri Forest, and the music of Lake Hylia. The contrast is what makes them devastating. A remake that softens them softens the whole.

ElfQuest made a good point, because it runs counter to something I said earlier in this video. They want the characters to keep their personalities and designs. But also wants more — more depth, more things to say, more quests. They used Navi as the example.

The argument isn’t that Navi should be frozen exactly as she was in 1998. It’s that her presence, her weight in the story, her constant-ness — that has to stay. If the remake gives her more to say in ways that deepen her rather than reduce her, that’s a different thing entirely.

The same goes for the wider cast. If the remake uses its extra scope to give Malon more of a story, to let Saria exist as something beyond the memory of a goodbye, to make the Kokiri feel like a village rather than a collection of NPCs — that’s the design working harder, not changing. The personalities and the relationships are load-bearing. The amount of content around them isn’t.

Lear Wolfe made the point I most want Nintendo’s writers to hear. Leave the unanswered questions unanswered.

The Sand Goddess statue in the Spirit Temple. The drawing on Link’s treehouse wall foreshadows his adventure. The Shadow Temple is the physical remains of Hyrule’s darkest secrets. The environmental storytelling that works precisely because it doesn’t explain itself.

This is something modern games are bad at. The reflex to clarify everything, to give every mystery a resolution, to make sure no player leaves confused — it kills the texture of a world. Ocarina of Time has always felt bigger than what it shows you, and that feeling lives in the gaps. The remake should resist the urge to fill them.

Lunnaei made the point about handholding.

They have been watching someone play the original for the first time. And noticed something — Navi’s hints don’t always tell you how to beat a boss. Players who encounter it for the first time still get lost. Still have to try things. Still fail.

And that’s correct behaviour. That’s the game working. A first-time player being lost in Ocarina of Time isn’t evidence that the game needs to be clearer. It’s evidence that the game is asking them to think — and that when they figure it out, it’ll mean something. The Majora’s Mask 3DS remake changed boss mechanics to make them more approachable. It was well-intentioned. It also removed a layer of what made solving those fights feel like a genuine discovery.

Don’t make it easy for the sake of easy. A new generation deserves the same game.

And JRock gave the one pushback in the thread. He thinks Hyrule Field needs something. More enemies, more things to interact with. His argument is that you can change Hyrule Field without fundamentally changing Ocarina of Time — that it’s a blank slate that won’t hurt anything else if it gets more content.

I made the case earlier that the emptiness is doing work. But JRock is right that Hyrule Field in the original is sparse even by 1998 standards. The question is whether the additions understand why the emptiness was there in the first place. Content that fills the field without converting it from a passage into a destination — I can live with that. Content that turns it into an open world hub — that’s where I’d push back.

All of these points came from the Triforce Times Discord. If you want to be part of conversations like this one — and potentially have your name in a video — channel membership is how you get there. Check out the join button below and find the right tier for you.

WHAT CAN CHANGE

This video is not an argument against change.

Ocarina of Time was built at the absolute limit of what 1998 hardware could do. There are things in this game that aren’t design choices — they’re workarounds. Compromises. Things the team would have done differently if the N64 had twice the memory and twice the time. Remaking it is an opportunity to finish what they started.

So let me talk about where changes could be.

Castle Town.

Cobblestone streets, timber buildings, a city that felt like a living place. The original game gets you maybe forty per cent of the way to that vision. The Switch 2 version can get you the rest.

A proper three-dimensional Castle Town — with depth, with population, with streets that go somewhere — would be the single biggest upgrade the remake could make to the overworld. And it carries no structural risk. Castle Town’s role in the story doesn’t depend on its population. It’s where you meet Zelda. It’s where you watch Ganondorf ride away. It’s the place you return to as an adult and find in ruins.

More people in the square make the ruins more devastating. That’s not a change to the design. That’s the design, finally finished.

The Light Temple.

There’s a well-documented gap in Ocarina of Time. A Temple of Light that was planned, cut, and never included in the final game. The evidence is all over it — the Light Medallion you receive from Rauru in the Sacred Realm with no accompanying dungeon, while every other sage rewards you at the end of theirs.

Adding the Light Temple would fill a gap. The placement that makes the most sense structurally and narratively is at the end of the adult section — a final challenge before Ganon’s Castle, where the last unresolved thread of the game’s mythology is properly resolved.

Voice acting.

This is probably happening. The teaser already included narration. Nintendo is building something that needs to sit alongside a live-action film, and a game with full voice acting is a more natural companion to a movie than one with grunts and text boxes.

If it happens, the risk is tonal. Ocarina of Time’s dialogue is spare, formal, slightly mythological — the language of a legend being told rather than a conversation. Voice acting that understands that register will work. Casting matters. Direction matters. But this is a solvable problem.

Camera, controls, loading screens.

These are hardware limitations. Fix them freely, completely. The 3DS showed how much of the original game’s friction was purely technical. The full remake, on hardware that didn’t exist twenty years ago, has no excuse to preserve any of it.

The rule across all of this is simple.

Changes that work with the game’s internal logic — that fill gaps, finish what the original started, remove friction without changing what the friction was protecting — are wins. Changes that require breaking the internal logic to fit — that substitute modern design instincts for the specific, deliberate decisions that made this game what it is — are where the danger lives.

Renovation, not demolition.

There’s a version of this remake that gets everything visible right.

The visuals are stunning. The music is orchestrated and enormous, exactly what you remembered, rendered in a way 1998 could only have dreamed of. The Master Sword pull lands like a movie moment. Ganondorf is terrifying in HD. People who played this game as children will watch it and feel something enormous.

And that version is still possible to get wrong.

The balance between every element of the formula, the emotional grammar of the Forest Temple’s position, the weight that accumulates in Navi’s presence only to be spent when she goes, the scale communicated by Hyrule Field’s deliberate emptiness, the philosophy underneath every dungeon — none of those things shows up in a trailer. The negative space. The things that are doing work precisely because you don’t notice them.

Get the visible things right, and you get a remake people celebrate at launch.

Get the invisible things right, and you get a remake people are still talking about in twenty years. One that sits in someone’s memory the way the original sits in ours — not as a game they played once and appreciated, but as a place they’ve been. A world that felt real.

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Catch you in the next one.