In December 2023, a few months after Tears of the Kingdom was released, Eiji Aonuma sat down with IGN and was asked about a group of fans who had never made peace with the new direction: the people who grew up with Ocarina of Time and Wind Waker, who missed the Water Temple and missed a Zelda that knew exactly where it was taking them. Aonuma’s answer was polite enough, but it had an edge. He said people tend to want what they don’t currently have, a bit of a “grass is greener” mentality, and then he turned the question back on them.

“Why do you want to go back to a type of game where you’re more limited or more restricted in the types of things or ways you can play?” Eiji Aonuma, IGN, December 2023

Three years later, Nintendo is about to release the most famous of those restricted games all over again – Ocarina of Time on Switch 2. It’s a ground-up rebuild, with a new art style, newly recorded music, voice acting, reworked dungeon rooms, and a Hyrule Field whose geography has shifted since you last walked across it. One seemingly small change may be bigger than you think.

When Ocarina of Time was first in development, Link could jump. Yoshiaki Koizumi said in Iwata Asks that while the team was making Super Mario 64, they were already thinking about the next Zelda, and that they wanted to “decrease the action element” and “increase the puzzle elements”. Then, as Shigeru Miyamoto told the same interview series, he came back from a day off with an idea called autojump, and a team that had just built the defining 3D Mario game gave up the jump button. On November 5th, the jump button comes back.

So what is this remake for? It could be a victory lap for the series’ 40th anniversary, a safe bet on one of the best-loved Zeldas ever made. Or it could be the moment Nintendo admits the grass-is-greener crowd was right. Look closely at what the previews say has changed, and at what Nintendo has left alone, and a picture starts to form: not of Ocarina’s past, but of Zelda’s future.

Today, we’re going to do three things. First, we’ll go through what the previews tell us has changed in the remake. Then we’ll look at what Nintendo’s own designers have said about the series since 2023, which tells a very different story from what the remake seems to be saying. Finally, we’ll put it all together and make some predictions about the next mainline Zelda.

Before we go on, welcome back. This is Triforce Times. Here, we dive deep into The Legend of Zelda: its design, its lore, and everything Nintendo leaves unexplained. If that’s your kind of thing, consider subscribing. Members get exclusive Zelda videos, early access to new content, and an invite to our community Discord. Let’s get into it.

WHAT ACTUALLY CHANGED

On October 14th, the preview embargo lifted and a wave of hands-on impressions landed at once. Eurogamer, Game Informer, GameSpot, and IGN all played the same three slices of the game: young Link’s opening in Kokiri Forest; the start of Inside the Great Deku Tree, Hyrule Field, and Hyrule Castle Town; and adult Link in the Forest Temple.

Those slices reveal a lot. Before release, Aonuma described the remake as a “faithful interpretation” of the Nintendo 64 original, and the most interesting word in that phrase isn’t “faithful”; it’s “interpretation”. Across the previews, the changes fall into four groups, and each one tells us something different about how Nintendo is thinking about Zelda right now.

LINK MOVES LIKE A MODERN ZELDA HERO

The first group is the most obvious. This Link controls like the Link from Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom. He has a dedicated jump button and can break into a sprint straight out of a roll; the camera is free on the right stick, so there’s no more tapping Z to recentre behind you; the slingshot and bow aim from the right trigger with gyro control; and your items live on a quick-select bar lifted almost directly from the Switch games, with recently used items sorted to the front. GameSpot called the jump button “good. Great, even”, and said it went a long way towards making the game feel modern. Not every previewer was as comfortable with it, and one admitted their first jump went straight into the water in front of Mido.

The clearest example of what this means is a room most of us walked through in about forty seconds back in 1998: the little crawlspace in Kokiri Forest where the Kokiri Sword is hidden. On the Nintendo 64, that room was a maze with a rolling boulder, and its real job was to teach you to recentre the camera with Z so you could see around corners. It was a tutorial for playing a 3D game at all, at a time when almost nobody had. The remake has rebuilt it. The chest now sits on a raised platform in the middle, with the boulder rolling around it, and you reach it by climbing a ladder and jumping across a gap. It’s the first place in the game where you’re required to jump.

So Nintendo removed a lesson nobody needs anymore, how to look around in 3D, and replaced it with the lesson this version needs: how to jump. The room is still teaching you something, just something different, and that small change sums up the whole remake.

A WORLD THAT EXPLAINS ITSELF

The second group of changes is more subtle. The remake keeps fixing things in the world that never made physical sense. Inside the Great Deku Tree, a platform that used to float in mid-air is now a crumbling bridge built into the room’s structure, and the vines leading to the dungeon map have been cut down since there was already a ladder nearby. In the Forest Temple, the room where you fight a Stalfos used to have a hole in the floor; the skeletons hovered over it while Link had to stay at the edges. Now the hole is a shallow pool of acid. The Stalfos can walk through it because they have no flesh to lose, and Link can’t, so the fight plays out as it always did, but now there’s a reason.

The list goes on. The Forest Temple’s block puzzle room now has an elevator, and the rotating pillars that used to block your arrow shot through the torch are gone. Out in the world, Lon Lon Ranch now sits level with the rest of Hyrule Field instead of up on its plateau; Kakariko Village has been rearranged; and wheat grows around the ranch, with a dilapidated building near the castle moat. A stream has replaced the six trees that once lined the path out of Kokiri Forest, a small loss; those trees always felt like the forest saying goodbye.

None of these changes are random. Each one takes something that existed because a 1998 game needed it and gives it a reason to exist inside the world. If that sounds familiar, it should, because it’s the founding principle of Breath of the Wild, where fire spreads because grass burns, metal conducts because metal conducts, and the world works by its own rules rather than the designer’s convenience.

A HYRULE WITH MORE PEOPLE IN IT

The third group is about density and storytelling, and this is where the remake goes furthest beyond the original. Hyrule Castle Town used to be a fixed-camera backdrop where you stood near a fountain; now it’s a fully explorable space, with wanted posters in the back alleys, a stable opposite the jar room, and residents who’ve moved house or now wander the streets. Previewers described it as the polar opposite of Hyrule Field, with activity everywhere you look.

The dialogue has been expanded too. The Kokiri shopkeeper now apologises for his empty shelves, because Mido is blocking the path his staff use to restock, and a Castle Town citizen gawps at the handmade stitching on Link’s tunic as if he’s met a foreigner from a distant land. Saria has more to say, and her farewell is now a fully voiced cutscene. Every character in the demo was voiced except Link, although the English dub divided previewers, and you can change the voice language if it isn’t for you. The Forest Temple gains new cutscenes that flesh out the dungeon’s antagonists, and out in Hyrule Field, an abandoned camp is tucked into a cliff, with a note left by a fairy that Navi translates for you.

Then there’s a new menu called the Threads of Time: a tapestry that tells the story of the Hero of Time as you live it, showing what has already happened and what is still to come, and doubling as a hint system if you get lost.

WHAT NINTENDO REFUSED TO CHANGE

The fourth group is the one most coverage will skip: the things Nintendo looked at and decided to leave alone. Hyrule Field is still small. Sprinting from Kokiri Forest to Castle Town takes less than ninety seconds, and previewers described it as mostly empty land, smaller than you remember, and the one area where the design feels consciously old-fashioned. The loading screens between areas remain, and Aonuma confirmed the team chose to keep them. Combat is still built on Z-targeting, to the point that one previewer wished he could swap targets without letting go of the trigger.

The dungeons are recognisably the dungeons, each with its identity intact and the Forest Temple’s layout largely unchanged. Most importantly, you still earn the arsenal. Adult Link enters the Forest Temple with the hookshot and leaves it with the Fairy Bow, and you find your tools one dungeon at a time, each one opening the world a little further, as it did in 1998. Nintendo had every opportunity to change those things. It could have built a seamless open Hyrule Field and handed you your toolkit at the start; a studio that just shipped Tears of the Kingdom knows how. It chose not to.

I won’t spend long on the art style today, because we covered that in a separate video. I’ll say only this: previewers who were sceptical of the doll-like character designs in the trailers came away won over in motion, and the handwoven detail on the clothing and the real-time lighting in the Forest Temple came up again and again.

So Nintendo has modernised Link. He moves, jumps, aims, and manages his inventory like a Breath of the Wild hero, and the world around him feels more logical, with more people and more words. But the skeleton is untouched: the small hub, the authored dungeons, the earned items and the linear story are all still there. This isn’t a classic game with a modern coat of paint, and it isn’t a modern game in a classic costume. It’s a mesh between Zelda’s two formulas, albeit a slight one. And that raises a question, because for the last three years the man who produces this series has been telling us that one of those formulas belongs in the past.

CAN NINTENDO MARRY THE TWO PHILOSOPHIES?

Let’s be fair to Aonuma, because his position is clear, consistent and backed by more than 56 million copies of evidence: that’s Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom on Switch alone, by Nintendo’s own figures. In May 2023, the week Tears of the Kingdom was released, Game Informer asked him whether Breath of the Wild had become the series’ template, as Ocarina had been in 1998. He agreed that Ocarina created a format for the games that followed, then added that it was “a little bit restricting for us” and that the format couldn’t give players certain freedoms.

“I think it’s correct to say that it has created a new kind of format for the series to proceed from.” Eiji Aonuma, Game Informer, May 2023

In the same interview, he said puzzles with only one answer are “kind of the past way of developing games”, that he was happy the team had arrived at a style where a single problem can have many correct answers, and that cheating is fun because people enjoy finding shortcuts. That same week, the Dutch outlet RTL Nieuws asked whether the team would ever make a classic, old-school Zelda again; Aonuma said they always try to make something that offers more than what came before, and that they prefer to focus on the future. Then, in December, he called set-order games the games of the past and followed it with what I think is the most revealing thing he has said about modern Zelda. In an open game, he argued, “There still is a set path; it just happens to be the path that they chose”.

That’s Aonuma’s position: freedom over restriction, many answers over one, and the player’s path over the designer’s. It’s hard to argue with the results. However, Nintendo has already walked part of the way back once.

In that same IGN interview, he was pushed on dungeons: people loved Ocarina’s crafted, deliberate design, and Breath of the Wild’s dungeons felt simpler by comparison. Aonuma didn’t dispute it. He explained that one of Breath of the Wild’s guiding principles was to rethink the series’ conventions, dungeons included, and that breaking apart the team’s assumptions led to a simpler approach. Players then asked for something more designed, and that request shaped the dungeons in Tears of the Kingdom. Then he summed up how the team works.

“Whenever we’re making a game, we look back at our past and then consider where we are now with the freedom that we give to the player in these games.” Eiji Aonuma, IGN, December 2023

That isn’t a description of a team that has closed the door on classic Zelda; it describes a correction cycle. Break the conventions, listen to what didn’t work, and bring back what matters in a form that fits the new freedom. The Ocarina remake is Nintendo looking back at its past with the whole Switch 2 audience watching.

We also know Nintendo can build a hybrid, because it already has. Echoes of Wisdom, released in September 2024, was a top-down Zelda in the classic mould, with themed dungeons, small keys, bosses, and a world that opened up as you progressed. At its centre, though, was the Tri Rod, which lets Zelda copy objects and monsters and use them however she likes. Need to cross a gap? A stack of beds will do it, or a water block, or a flying monster to carry you. It was the multiple-answer philosophy Aonuma talked about, poured into a classic Zelda structure.

So what would a full-scale marriage look like? The likely version is an open world containing authored, themed dungeons: spaces with real identity but multiple ways through each room, signature tools that don’t break alongside the disposable weapons, and a clearer spine of story running through the middle. Tears of the Kingdom’s temples moved some of the way, and the Wind Temple, with its climb into the storm and its fight in the air, is probably the closest modern Zelda has come to the old dungeon feeling. The question is whether the next game goes all the way.

MASTERY OVER TIME

One part of this marriage matters more than dungeons, and the remake is about to remind a whole generation of players it existed: the feeling of getting stronger in a way that changes how you see the world. In Breath of the Wild, you get every rune you’ll use for the whole adventure on the Great Plateau, in the first few hours. Tears of the Kingdom gives you Ultrahand, Fuse, Ascend, and Recall on the Great Sky Island, and the only ability left to find is Autobuild, an optional shortcut for things you can already build. From then on, you grow by numbers: more hearts, more stamina, better armour. You can get very good at those tools, but you never find a new one that makes you look back at a place you passed hours earlier and think, I can get up there now.

The Ocarina remake keeps that feeling as it was. Nintendo’s designers clearly understand getting stronger over time; they apply it on a smaller scale now. In that same December interview, Fujibayashi described building the route up to the Wind Temple boss so that players would meet small obstacles, learn from them and grow along the way, arriving at the boss having already learned everything they needed. That’s mastery over time, lasting the length of one dungeon rather than the length of the game. Echoes of Wisdom sits in between: you get the Tri Rod early, but your library of echoes keeps growing until the end, so your options widen across the whole adventure.

So which way will the next game go? Will it hand you everything on the plateau and trust you to find your own way, or make you earn the tools that change how you see the map? I don’t know, but I know which one the Ocarina remake is about to teach millions of new players to want. One previewer who had never properly played Ocarina came out of the Forest Temple describing its “aha” moments and its let’s-see-if-this-works experimentation as the kind of thing he’s always loved in Zelda. Another said the original hasn’t aged well, but that the remake made it fun to play again.

If the Breath of the Wild generation picks this game up in November and falls for earned items, authored dungeons and a story that knows where it’s going, Nintendo will have that data, and as Aonuma told us, the team looks back and then considers where it is now. Nintendo won’t choose between its two formulas. The single-solution puzzle is gone, and unlikely to return, but authored spaces, an earned arsenal, and a firmer story are on the table, provided freedom lives inside them. And if that’s the shape of what’s coming, the obvious next question is when we get to see it, where it’s set and what it looks like.

READING THE TEA LEAVES

Before we start predicting, there’s something worth knowing about Eiji Aonuma: when he drops a hint, it tends to come true. In that same December 2023 interview, he was asked about the long-running wish for Zelda herself to take a bigger role, and maybe even be playable. Aonuma pointed out the irony that the series is named after Zelda while Link is always the hero, then said there “may be some sort of possibility for something like that in the future”. Nine months later, Echoes of Wisdom was released with Zelda as the protagonist. It’s one example, but it means that when Aonuma talks about the series’ future, it’s worth listening carefully, and over the last couple of years he’s left us a couple more hints.

HINT ONE: AGE OF IMPRISONMENT

Nintendo’s Zelda team didn’t make the first new Zelda game on Switch 2. Hyrule Warriors: Age of Imprisonment was released on November 6th, 2025. Koei Tecmo’s AAA Games Studio developed it, and it told the story of the Imprisoning War from Tears of the Kingdom, with Zelda and Rauru fighting off Ganondorf’s armies. When Aonuma spoke to the Japanese site 4Gamer that December, he laughed and admitted his own team had wanted to be the first Zelda on the new console. Then he said something much more interesting.

“The inspiration we received from this collaboration with Koei Tecmo may be reflected in the (next) Zelda we create. Please picture this while playing Age of Imprisonment, and look forward to our Zelda.” Eiji Aonuma, 4Gamer, December 2025

That’s an unusual thing to say about a musou spin-off. So what did Age of Imprisonment do? According to the head of Koei Tecmo’s studio, the goal was to combine the strategic back-and-forth of using Zonai devices against powerful enemies with cutting down waves of weaker foes. Fujibayashi, the director of Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom, said Koei Tecmo kept coming back with ideas his team would never have come up with themselves.

I want to be careful here: “may be reflected” is not a guarantee, and nobody is suggesting the next Zelda will be a musou. But consider what it could mean: battles on a larger scale than mainline Zelda has tried, combat that makes you feel powerful against a crowd and not just precise against one Bokoblin at a time, and maybe even a setting in Hyrule’s ancient past, given where Age of Imprisonment took us. What would a mainline Zelda look like if Link stood at the edge of an actual war, rather than a field with three Moblins in it?

HINT TWO: THE HYRULE QUESTION

The second hint goes back to September 2023, when Nintendo confirmed there would be no DLC for Tears of the Kingdom. Speaking to Famitsu, Aonuma explained that the team felt it had done everything it could to create fun in that world. On the surface, that sounds like a goodbye to the Hyrule of Breath of the Wild, but he left a door open.

“If a new reason arises, we might return to the same world again. Whether it’s a sequel or a new work, I think it’s going to be a completely new game.” Eiji Aonuma, Famitsu, September 2023

If you’ve spent two full games on the same map, under the same sky, you might feel ready for somewhere new, and you wouldn’t be the only one. But Aonuma’s words leave both doors open: the team felt it had done everything it could in that world, and yet a new reason could bring them back. Which do you think wins? And would a third game in Breath of the Wild’s Hyrule feel like the future, after Nintendo has put so much effort into rebuilding the Hyrule of 1998?

THE LOOK

That brings us to art direction, and to a pattern that has held for over twenty years: almost every new 3D Zelda has arrived with a new visual identity. Wind Waker went cel-shaded, Twilight Princess went dark and realistic, Skyward Sword went soft and impressionistic, and Breath of the Wild went painterly and open, a look Tears of the Kingdom kept because it was a direct sequel. Outside direct sequels, Nintendo has rarely reused a mainline 3D style.

The Ocarina remake’s style is something else again. Previewers called it doll-like, carved, puppet-like and handwoven, and Game Informer described it as maximalist, with detail in every character, enemy and environment. Add real-time lighting in the Forest Temple, with Navi’s glow shifting shadows down a dark corridor, and you get the most detailed Hyrule we’ve seen. So is this what Switch 2 Zelda looks like? Is the remake, in part, Nintendo working out its next visual language on a game whose design it already knows inside out? That’s speculation, but Nintendo has tested new ideas on safe ground before betting a new game on them.

THE STORY

One of the questions I was most excited to explore in this video was a story question: could the next Zelda tell a brand-new Hero of Time story? In Twilight Princess, the Hero’s Shade teaches Link his hidden skills and speaks of the regrets that have kept him from resting. Hyrule Historia, supplementary material rather than the games themselves, identifies the Shade as the Hero of Time, a hero no one remembered as such, and Aonuma has said he wrote the Shade’s dialogue himself. Between Majora’s Mask and Twilight Princess, that hero’s life is almost entirely untold.

But Aonuma’s words push back against that idea. In the same IGN interview, the interviewer described Zelda’s story as an oral tradition, a set of legends retold, and Aonuma agreed. He said he doesn’t like to put too much stock in the series’ chronology because it can box the team in and limit where they can take the story. A story built to fill a specific gap in the timeline is exactly the kind of box he means.

Now look at how the remake presents itself. The quest log is written in the past tense, like a fairy tale: “There once was a young boy named Link…” The reveal trailer opens with a narrator saying “long ago”, and the Threads of Time tapestry tells the legend back to you as you play. The remake isn’t presented as a timeline entry; it’s presented as a legend being retold. With the live-action film arriving on April 30th, 2027, Nintendo seems to be consolidating its Ocarina mythology across games and cinema. So my read is that the next Zelda will likely be a new legend rather than a chapter that fills a hole in the timeline.

WHEN DO WE SEE IT?

Which leaves the question everyone wants answered: when? Tears of the Kingdom was released in May 2023, and Nintendo says it took around six years to make. In September 2023, Fujibayashi said the team was moving on to the series’ next new experience. Switch 2 launched in June 2025 without a mainline Zelda, and a Koei Tecmo spin-off beat Aonuma’s team to the console. Aonuma has also given two reasons his games take as long as they do: designing for freedom, where players can approach things in any order, adds development cost, and bringing veterans and newer staff to a shared understanding of what Zelda is takes time. Of Tears of the Kingdom, he said: “Thankfully we had that time.”

If full development began around the time Tears of the Kingdom shipped and runs anywhere near that six-year cycle, we’re looking at something like 2029. If it moves faster, closer to the four years Aonuma gave for Breath of the Wild, it could be as early as 2027. Either way, we’re at or past the halfway point. Nintendo has historically revealed its big 3D Zeldas years in advance; it first teased Tears of the Kingdom at E3 2019, almost four years before launch. With the film landing in spring 2027 and Nintendo coordinating Zelda across media, it’s hard not to look at that window and wonder.

THE SCORECARD

These are my five predictions for the next mainline Zelda, each with how confident I am.

Prediction one, which I’m confident about: it’s an open world with authored, themed dungeons, each with multiple solutions. Not the Water Temple’s single path, but not the Divine Beasts either.

Prediction two, which I’d call likely: your toolkit grows across the whole game, rather than being handed over on a tutorial plateau. Echoes of Wisdom has already shown that multiple-answer philosophy and progressive unlocks can coexist.

Prediction three, which I’d also call likely: combat goes bigger in scale. Aonuma told us to picture Age of Imprisonment, and I expect to see its influence in large battles and crowd fights.

Prediction four, a coin flip I’m leaning toward: a new legend, a new land or a substantially new Hyrule.

Prediction five, the boldest and least certain: the reveal lands around the film’s 2027 release.

If I’m wrong, remind me in the comments.

An argument in IGN’s preview has stuck with me, and it starts with an old Iwata Asks story about how Z-targeting was invented. On a hot summer day during the original development, a small group from the team visited Toei Kyoto Studio Park, a theme park attached to a film studio. It was so hot that they ducked into a playhouse to cool off, and inside they watched a samurai fend off a group of ninjas. The attackers never came at once: one fought while the others waited their turn. That observation helped spark the targeting system that 3D action games still use today.

IGN argues that the remake treats all of Ocarina as a stage production. Hyrule is the stage, the dungeons and villages are sets, and the loading screens are the crew changing scenery between acts; the lighting spotlights Link and his foe, and even the music sounds like a small ensemble playing live in the pit. I think that’s right, and if it is, the remake raises a question that goes beyond nostalgia. Nintendo has built itself a new stage, re-carved every member of the cast, rehung the lights, and rehearsed its most famous play in front of a new audience. Is this Nintendo getting ready for its next production?

So let’s go back to where we started. In 2023, Aonuma dismissed the yearning for classic Zelda as a grass-is-greener mentality and asked why anyone would want to go back to a more restricted kind of game. He may well be right that the grass isn’t greener. But three years later, Nintendo has gone back to that grass anyway, measured it, rebuilt it blade by blade, and is about to hand it to millions of players who’ve never stood on it. That isn’t a contradiction. It’s what he told us the team does: look back at the past, then consider where they are now. The remake is the looking back. The next Zelda is where they’ll be.

If the next Zelda could bring back one thing from classic Zelda, just one, what should it be? Earned items that change how you see the world? Proper themed dungeons? A story that knows where it’s going? Or something I haven’t thought of? Let me know in the comments.

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