Link walks into the Temple of Time with all three Spiritual Stones and the Ocarina of Time, plays the Song of Time, and the Door of Time grinds open. We’ve all seen what comes next a thousand times. He walks up to the pedestal, grips the Master Sword with both hands, and pulls. In the Switch 2 remake, though, it doesn’t stop there. A beam of light shoots out of the blade and tears open a door to the Sacred Realm, and Link freezes, locked in place with the sword raised. Then you hear the laugh. Ganondorf walks in behind him, takes his time, and walks straight past the boy who was supposed to stop him. And he thanks him for opening the door.

In the original, that moment cuts to black, then a voice in the dark. Here, Nintendo makes you watch it happen; you stand there, helpless, while the villain strolls past. And they did that in a remake that almost every review this week has called safe.

On Metacritic, all 85 critic reviews counted so far are positive, and nearly all of them are answering the same question: how faithful is it? NPR called it “superb, streamlined and safe.” Game Informer said the colouring is “firmly inside the lines.” I think that’s the wrong question, because Nintendo told us, just days before launch, exactly who this remake was made for. It wasn’t us. It was made for the people who will build the next Zelda.

Here’s the plan for today. I’ll show you the real reason this remake exists, straight from the people who made it. Then the feature Nintendo built and then deleted, the scenes they made braver, and my honest verdict after ten hours, including the one thing I think they got wrong.

THE REAL REASON

Let’s start with the obvious problem: Ocarina of Time has already been remade. In 2011, Nintendo released Ocarina of Time 3D on the 3DS, co-developed with Grezzo. It reworked parts of the Water Temple, the dungeon Aonuma has said he regretted, so that the Iron Boots were far less of a chore to take on and off. It added Sheikah Stones, which showed you short visions of how to get past a section if you were stuck. It also included Master Quest, a remixed, harder version of every dungeon, mirrored. It was well received, and for fifteen years it was the definitive way to play the game. If Nintendo only wanted to modernise Ocarina of Time, it had already done that job.

The Switch 2 version goes far beyond that. Every model, every room, every cutscene and every piece of music has been rebuilt. The orchestral score is new, the animations are new, and the cutscenes are staged differently, with voices where there were only text boxes. That’s an enormous amount of work to spend on a game that already had a good modern version, and it’s the kind of work you only commit to if the point isn’t the finished product. The point is the rebuilding.

When Nintendo announced a second remake for Switch 2, plenty of people asked a fair question. Why remake the same game twice, when there are Zelda games that have never been remade at all? Nintendo’s own interviewer asked a version of that question in the Ask the Developer interview published just before launch, pointing out that the 3DS version largely preserved the original presentation. Eiji Aonuma’s answer came in two parts. The first is the one you’d expect: “This year marks the 40th anniversary of the very first Legend of Zelda game.” Anniversaries sell games. The second reason was very interesting.

Aonuma said that “many of the team members who work alongside me on Legend of Zelda games today have only experienced developing the more recent titles.” For most of the last decade, the Zelda team has been making Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom: open air, stamina wheels, physics engines, shrines, warps, and the freedom to go almost anywhere from the start. That’s the Zelda a whole generation of Nintendo developers learned on. By Aonuma’s own description, some of them only vaguely know Ocarina of Time, and others played it as children. Then he asks the question: “Do they truly understand just how significant The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time was to the series as a whole?”

That’s remarkable for a producer to say publicly about his own team, and when you look at who has made Nintendo’s classic-style Zelda games recently, it starts to make sense. Majora’s Mask 3D was co-developed with Grezzo, like Ocarina of Time 3D before it—Grezzo co-developed Link’s Awakening on Switch. Grezzo co-developed Echoes of Wisdom. Tantalus handled Twilight Princess HD and Skyward Sword HD. For fifteen years, the traditional, dungeon-led Zelda games have largely been remade, remastered or built with partner studios, while the main team went into the open air. The last dungeon-led 3D Zelda that Nintendo’s own team built from scratch was Skyward Sword, in 2011. If you joined the Zelda team in the last decade, you may well have spent your whole career on Hyrule without walls.

This remake is different. It wasn’t handed to a partner; according to Nintendo’s interview, the Zelda team made it themselves. And that tells you something about how seriously Aonuma takes the lesson, because Ocarina of Time was his first Zelda game, and he worked on its dungeons. He’s watched this series move from that dungeon-led structure to the open-air games, and he signed off on both. He knows what’s been gained, and he’s clearly wondering what’s been lost.

It’s worth reiterating how different those two kinds of Zelda are. In Breath of the Wild, the structure is yours. Once you leave the Great Plateau, you can head straight for the final boss if you want to. You can do the Divine Beasts in any order, your tools are mostly things you find or build, and the story is something you piece together from memories scattered across the map. Ocarina of Time is the opposite. The dungeons come in an order; each one gives you an item, and that item opens the next part of the world. The story arrives in scenes, when the game decides you’re ready for it. Aonuma described the original’s fun as coming from “a carefully paced adventure and story.” Somebody decided when each thing would happen.

That structure didn’t come from nowhere. Ocarina of Time took the shape of A Link to the Past, the dungeons, the item that unlocks the next area, the overworld that slowly opens up, and worked out how to do it in three dimensions. And in 1998, nobody had solved that. How do you sword fight in 3D, when the enemy can be anywhere around you? Ocarina’s answer was Z-targeting: lock on, and the camera and Link both focus on one enemy. How do you fit an entire adventure onto one controller? A context-sensitive action button that changes depending on what Link is standing next to. Those answers became the template for a generation of 3D action games. The developers on this remake inherited them fully formed, as every game does. Rebuilding them yourself, piece by piece, is how you find out why each one was needed.

Aonuma was also clear that this isn’t only a lesson for the team. He said they wanted “players who had grown accustomed to Legend of Zelda games like Breath of the Wild” to experience that kind of adventure. So there are two sets of students here: the developers who’ve only made open-air Zelda, and the players who’ve only played it. Millions of people started this series in 2017, and for a lot of them, this is the first Zelda that tells them where to go next.

Think about what that’s like if your first Zelda was Breath of the Wild. You step out of Kokiri Forest, and instead of a world that says “go anywhere,” you get an owl on a branch telling you exactly where Hyrule Castle is. Kaepora Gaebora shows up again and again, giving directions and gently steering you down the path. Paths are closed until you have the right item. Death Mountain is guarded until you have the right permission for someone raised on open air, which could feel restrictive, even old-fashioned. But it’s also how a story gets told properly. You can’t have the Great Deku Tree die in front of you, or Ganondorf walk past you at the Door of Time, if the player might have wandered off to the other side of the map. Ocarina’s limits give its big moments weight, and that’s a lesson for players and developers alike.

Director HokWai Ng leads the remake, with Aonuma and Fujibayashi as producers; Fujibayashi directed Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom. So you have the man whose Zelda career began with Ocarina, the man who made the open-world games and a new director, all rebuilding a 1998 game from scratch. Aonuma hopes, in his own words, that it “may trigger new insights that they can carry forward into future development.”

So here’s how I want you to look at this remake: not as a product, but as homework. Think of a band learning a classic album note for note before they go back into the studio to write their own. Every change in this remake, and every change they refused to make, is the team showing their working. So what did they learn?

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WHAT THE STUDENTS CHANGED, AND WHAT THE TEACHER REFUSED

Aonuma noticed something about how people play Ocarina of Time. To get across Hyrule Field faster, players roll, over and over, all the way to Kakariko. So he asked the team to add warp points, the kind you’d recognise from Breath of the Wild, where you open the map and jump straight to where you want to be. The team built them. Then, after playtesting, they took every one back out, because the warps cost players the moments of discovery that come from stopping along the way. The producer who oversaw the open-air games asked for the most open-air feature there is, and the team decided it made Ocarina worse.

It helps to remember that Ocarina already has fast travel. Later in the game, you learn warp songs that take you to the temples. But that’s fast travel the game gives you when it decides you’ve earned it, to places it chooses, once you’ve already walked there the long way. Free warp points would have turned Hyrule Field into a menu. You’d open the map, pick a name, and never see the space in between again. And in Ocarina, the space in between is where a lot of the game happens.

I felt that in the first few hours. The first time you step out of Kokiri Forest and onto Hyrule Field is still one of the great moments in the series, and I almost got emotional. In the N64 original, that first trip across the field always felt like a sprint, a race to Castle Town before night fell. In the remake, time doesn’t seem to pass quite so quickly, and I kept stopping. I’d be halfway across the field when the sun started to set, and I’d stand there and watch it, with Lon Lon Ranch in the distance and Death Mountain looming behind. In Ocarina of Time, the journey across the field isn’t dead time between places; it’s part of the game. Warps would have been the modern answer, and Nintendo chose the old one.

You can see the same instinct in the places that already existed. Castle Town is busy and bustling now, with people in the market moving around on their own little schedules, and I spent far longer there than I needed to, talking to everyone I could find. The Temple of Time is beautifully designed, the music is wonderful, and you now walk from Castle Town straight into the temple with no break at all, so it feels like part of the town rather than a separate place. Oddly, the loading screen between Hyrule Field and Castle Town is still there, and I’m not sure why they kept it when they removed the others. But the direction is clear. They didn’t make Hyrule bigger; they made it denser. That’s a very different instinct from the open-air games, where the answer to making a world feel alive was usually more space.

The dungeons tell the same story, and this is where you can really see the teacher’s hand. Inside, the Deku Tree is mostly the same. There are a few extra chests and passageways, but the layout, the puzzles and the order you do them in are the dungeon you remember. Dodongo’s Cavern is the same. Jabu-Jabu’s Belly is the same, and although I always remembered it as an annoying dungeon, it wasn’t too bad this time. When you’re studying how something works, you don’t redesign it; you rebuild it exactly and add around the edges.

And look at what those first three dungeons are doing. The Deku Tree gives you the slingshot, and then the whole dungeon, boss included, is built around firing it upwards at things you’d otherwise ignore. Dodongo’s Cavern gives you bombs and teaches you that walls aren’t always walls. Jabu-Jabu gives you the boomerang and asks you to use it on switches and enemies you can’t reach. Each dungeon teaches one tool, and by the end, you know it completely. That’s A Link to the Past’s design, carried into 3D, and it’s the opposite of a shrine in Breath of the Wild, where the game hands you every tool on the Great Plateau and then sets you a hundred and twenty small puzzles. Breath of the Wild replaced traditional dungeons with Divine Beasts and those shrines, and Tears of the Kingdom brought themed dungeons back. If you’re the team deciding what the next game’s dungeons look like, rebuilding Ocarina’s room by room is about the best education you could ask for.

Not every small detail made it through. Players have already noticed that the secret rupees you could reach by walking up the drawbridge chains to the top of the Castle Town gates appear to be gone.

The side content has survived intact too, and that matters more than it sounds. I’ve spent hours collecting: catching bugs and dropping them into soft soil to find Gold Skulltulas, rounding up the Cucco Lady’s Cuccos in Kakariko, playing songs with the Skull Kids in the Lost Woods for rewards and a Piece of Heart, and picking up the Hylian Shield, which is comically big on a child and somehow even bigger than I remembered. None of that is required, and the game never pushes you towards it. It trusts that you’ll be curious.

Then there’s the instrument in the title. In Ocarina of Time, music isn’t background; it’s something you do. Songs open doors, summon your horse, change the weather and move you through time, and the game teaches them to you one by one, from people who matter. Malon sings Epona’s Song at Lon Lon Ranch, and baby Epona only comes to you once you’ve learned it. Saria teaches you her song in the Sacred Forest Meadow, after you’ve found your way through the Lost Woods, and the Skull Kids there will play along with you for a reward. Every song is tied to a place and a person, so by the time you’re playing them from memory, they mean something.

The remake understands that. Playing the ocarina feels great, and it’s tactile in a way it never was, whether you use the buttons or, like me, hum into the microphone. That could easily have been a gimmick, and it’s become my preferred way to play. But the songs themselves, the order you learn them and the people who teach them, are untouched. The team changed how it feels to play the instrument, and left what the instrument means alone.

The quick menu is a smaller lesson. On the N64, you assigned items to the C buttons, three slots, and that was it. The remake replaces that with a horizontal quick-select menu, and it works brilliantly. If you played Echoes of Wisdom, you’ll know a similar menu style struggled there, because you had dozens of echoes to scroll through. In Ocarina, the item list is small: slingshot, boomerang, bombs and a handful of bottles. The menu works because the game is limited. That’s something the newer games lost sight of. A small toolset means every item matters, every item has a dungeon built around it, and you always know what you’re carrying. The remake team didn’t add more items; they made a better way to use the few that were there.

The most talked-about change is the jump button. The original had no dedicated jump. Link leapt automatically when you ran off an edge, partly because the N64 controller had no button to spare, and every gap in the game was designed around that. The catch was that your angle had to be right, or Link would sail off the wrong side of a ledge. The remake gives you direct control, and it does trip up your muscle memory in the early dungeons; I had a moment or two of that myself. Once it settles, though, Link feels great. He’s nimble and responsive, rolling into a run feels great, and bouncing on the spider webs inside the Deku Tree is tactile in a way the original never quite was. Slicing the signs is as satisfying as ever. And there’s no stamina bar. Compare that with Breath of the Wild, where every climb, sprint and glide draws from the same wheel. The team took the feel of modern Zelda, the responsiveness and the snap, and left out the economy that sits on top of it.

Then there are the bosses. Gohma is still terrifying, possibly more so, crawling across the ceiling of the Deku Tree with that single eye. The fight is the same lesson as the dungeon: watch the eye, wait for it to turn red, hit it with the slingshot, and then go in with the sword while she’s stunned. The fight that surprised me was Barinade, inside Jabu-Jabu’s Belly. In my memory, that fight was a lot of button mashing, throwing the boomerang at anything that moved and hoping. In the remake, the phases are much more distinct, and you can see what’s happening and why. That may be my memory playing tricks on me, but I don’t think it is. The structure of these fights hasn’t changed; what’s changed is how readable they are, which is exactly what you’d do if you were studying how they worked.

Not every lesson is so clear-cut, but you quickly notice Nintendo doesn’t want anyone to get stuck. There are tutorials for everything: combat, targeting, and even the shield, which the shop now teaches you to use. There’s Threads of Time, a new hint feature presented as a tapestry, and I like the look of it. In fairness, this worry isn’t new. In 1998, Navi was Ocarina’s hint system, a fairy whose whole job was to tell you where to look. The 3DS version added the Sheikah Stones on top of her. Threads of Time is the third layer. Nintendo has been worried about players getting stuck in this game for twenty-eight years.

Some fans feel the remake overcorrects, and that a few rooms which used to have obscure solutions now have obvious ones. I don’t think it’s gone that far; it feels easier and more streamlined, but not too much. Still, it raises a question I can’t quite shake. Part of what made Ocarina of Time feel like an adventure in 1998 was the moment you got stuck, stayed stuck, and then worked it out.

WHERE THEY WERE BRAVER

Go back to the start of the game. Link is the boy without a fairy, the only Kokiri who doesn’t have one, and Mido never lets him forget it. Then Navi arrives, you’re summoned to the Great Deku Tree, you clear the dungeon and beat Gohma, and the Deku Tree tells you he’s dying. In the original, he fades. In the remake, his bark snaps and breaks. It’s far more violent to look at, and much sadder.

Then you walk out into Kokiri Forest, and this is what hit me hardest. The Kokiri don’t know what’s happened, and then they do, and you see their disbelief. These are children who have lived their whole lives under the Deku Tree’s protection, and now it’s gone. Mido is angrier and more animated than he’s ever been. And Fado says to you, “The Great Deku Tree didn’t leave us because of you, Link, did he?” That’s a devastating line: a child blaming another child. And it lands harder because of who Link was before all this. The outsider, the boy without a fairy, finally gets one, and the first thing that follows is everyone wondering whether it’s his fault.

And the remake makes you carry that feeling. When Link finally leaves the forest, Saria is waiting for him on the bridge, the one friend who never treated him as an outsider, and she gives him her ocarina before he goes. It’s one of the most emotional moments in the game, and one of the saddest, because Saria already seems to know something Link doesn’t. Every Kokiri believes they can’t survive outside the forest. Link walks out anyway.

Once you notice that, you see it everywhere. The graveyard in Kakariko now has rain, thunder and lightning. The dungeons are dark, properly dark, with Navi’s glow lighting Link’s face as you move through them. And the ReDeads, the creature that scared a generation of children, now run.

Then there’s Ganondorf at the castle. You creep through the courtyard past the guards, find Zelda, look through the window, and there he is, kneeling before the King. That scene was always good, and in the remake it’s perfect. You can see the performance; he’s bowing, and you know he doesn’t mean a second of it. Zelda has already told you about her dream, and you’re watching a man pledge loyalty to a king he’s about to betray. When he glances towards the window, the scene does in a few seconds what an hour of dialogue couldn’t.

It isn’t only the dark moments that have been turned up, though. Going back to Lon Lon Ranch and seeing Talon and Malon again, with baby Epona trotting around the paddock, is as warm as ever, and warmer knowing what’s coming. Darunia’s dance is even more animated than I’d imagined, and it’s a lot of fun. Jabu-Jabu is dressed up and looks properly regal now, with all the shiny materials and gems, and the cutscene where he swallows you whole is excellent. Kaepora Gaebora carrying you down from Death Mountain gives you great scenery, although I wouldn’t want to be Link, hanging on to those talons. So the pattern isn’t that the remake is darker. It’s bigger in both directions: the sad moments are sadder, the strange moments stranger and the funny moments funnier.

Which brings us back to where we started. Ganondorf outside the castle gates, Zelda fleeing on horseback and throwing the Ocarina into the moat, and Ganondorf proclaiming that he will rule the world. Then the Temple of Time, the beam of light, the door to the Sacred Realm, Link frozen, and Ganondorf walking past him. Now that you know what this remake is for, look at that scene again. Of all the moments in Ocarina of Time, the one the team chose to make bigger, slower and more cinematic is the moment the hero fails: not the moment he wins, but the moment he opens the door for the villain.

Ocarina of Time is a game about a child who does everything right and loses anyway. He collects the stones, he finds the Ocarina, he opens the door exactly as Zelda planned, and that’s precisely what Ganondorf needed. Everything the game has taught you for ten hours, that if you follow the path and clear the dungeons you’ll be rewarded, turns out to have been the trap. The original told you that in a few lines of text. For the first time, the game makes you watch it.

This is also where the remake shows its seams. The cutscenes are incredible. The Great Deku Tree has extra voice lines, and Navi has a voice. Then you leave a cutscene, talk to a character, and you’re back to text boxes. Going from a fully voiced scene to silent text is jarring, and I’d rather have had more voice acting, not less. Zelda has been moving towards voice acting since Breath of the Wild, which gave its cutscenes full voices in 2017, and this remake sits awkwardly between the two approaches. Navi’s voice in particular is very Disney, closer to Pauline in Donkey Kong Bananza than to anything Zelda has done before. Put that next to a Zelda film arriving next April, and it’s hard not to ask a bigger question. Is this remake partly Nintendo learning how to tell Zelda stories on screen?

Aonuma wanted a team raised on Breath of the Wild to understand a carefully paced adventure and story. Through this remake, that team has rebuilt classic dungeons room by room. They’ve learned why the field matters, why the toolset is small and why the bosses work, and they’ve shown they can tell a story with real weight, cinematically, in a way the series hasn’t quite managed before. The director put it: the visuals may change, but the experience does not.

The question now is what they build next. Tears of the Kingdom already brought back themed dungeons inside an open world (to some extent). Imagine the next step: a world with the freedom of Breath of the Wild, but with dungeons built the way Ocarina builds them, one tool, one lesson, one boss that tests it, and a story that knows when to stop you and make you watch. A team that understands both open air and classic dungeons, that knows how to make you stop and look at a sunset, and that isn’t afraid to make you watch the hero fail. I can’t wait to see what they do with it.

WHAT I THINK ABOUT THE REMAKE SO FAR

Let me step out of the analysis for a few minutes and tell you what I think, ten hours in.

The visuals are stunning. It’s bright and vibrant, and the textures jump off the screen; the thick foliage and mist in Kokiri Forest, and the mist across the floor of the Deku Tree, are some of the most atmospheric things I’ve seen in a Zelda game. The detail is everywhere. The shrine that holds the Spiritual Stones stands out from the screen, the pots look like real ceramic, the bombs look great, and the lava bursting from Death Mountain on the climb to the summit is a lovely effect. I often find myself stopping in Hyrule Field just for the sunrise or the sunset. The lighting in the dungeons looks far better than in any other version of Ocarina of Time.

The music deserves its own mention. The new orchestrations are beautiful, and the Temple of Time in particular sounds the way it always did in my head. Walking in from Castle Town with that choir rising around you is still one of the best feelings in the series.

The character models looked odd when they were first revealed, and the child designs in particular put a lot of people off, me included. Zelda’s look didn’t sit right with me at first. But that wears off quickly. Within minutes, you don’t notice, and she’s grown on me. The Gorons and the Zora look great, much better than the Gorons did in Twilight Princess, and Kaepora Gaebora’s eyebrows are epic.

It plays brilliantly too. The quick menu works, the boomerang is easy to control, and there’s a Master HUD option that removes everything from the screen, which makes for very clean screenshots. I’ve also been humming into the microphone to play the ocarina. I expected that to be a gimmick, and it isn’t; it’s quicker than using the buttons, and it feels right in a game where the instrument is the title. Most of all, the hours melt away. I looked up after one session, and three hours had gone by. I spent far too long in the shooting gallery and got caught by the castle guards thirty-three times, so I must be losing my touch.

It’s not perfect. The half-voiced dialogue is the biggest issue for me, and I wish every character interaction were voiced. Navi with a voice is funny, and she does look a bit like a white chocolate Ferrero Rocher. There are a few audio glitches, nothing major. I also had a moment where my Switch froze, and I thought it was broken, which turned out to be my own VRR setting rather than the game.

Then there’s the ocarina itself. Nintendo’s own ocarinas were a big talking point when the remake was revealed, and as far as I can tell, they weren’t available at launch, and Nintendo has been quiet about it. For a game named after an instrument, launching without the instrument people were promised feels like a miss. What happened there? And there’s the question about getting stuck. Threads of Time, the tutorials and the more obvious puzzle solutions: I’m enjoying it, but I’m not sure every one of those changes was needed.

If you’ve read the reviews this week, you’ll have seen the word safe over and over, and after ten hours, I understand why. It doesn’t change the story, the dungeon order or the structure, and if you wanted Nintendo to rethink Ocarina of Time from the ground up, this isn’t that game. But I don’t think safe is the right word for it. Faithful is closer. You can’t learn why something works if you change it before you’ve understood it.

This is the perfect place for new players to start. It’s a great story, linear and contained, not too hard and not too easy. It’s the Zelda you play with your kid, an old friend or your partner. My wife walked in while I was playing and said it looked good. We tried to play it together years ago on the N64, and she didn’t like the graphics; now I’m hoping we can play it together at Christmas, and I can imagine millions of people doing the same this holiday season.

Ten hours in, this is the best version of Ocarina of Time ever made. I hope Nintendo keeps this art style, because the moment I saw the Happy Mask Salesman, looking as creepy as he’s ever looked, I had one thought. They have to remake Majora’s Mask like this.

So that’s the real reason Nintendo remade Ocarina of Time, not just for the anniversary, and not just for us. It’s a lesson for the people who will make the next Zelda, written in the shape of the game that taught all of us what 3D Zelda could be. From what I’ve played so far, they’ve been paying attention. They kept the warp points out, the dungeons whole, and the toolset small, and they found the grief that was hiding in the original and brought it to the surface. Whatever they make next, I think we’ll see this remake in it.

Now I want to hear from you. If you’ve started the remake, which change made you feel something the original didn’t? Let me know in the comments.

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