I haven’t even reached Adult Link yet, and Nintendo has already exceeded my expectations for the Ocarina of Time remake by an enormous amount. I knew I wanted a modern version of this game. I’ve wanted one for years. What I didn’t expect was how much simply being back in its world would impress me.
The opening in Kokiri Forest, around the Great Deku Tree, was enough to make me stop and take it all in. I know this place. I know how small it actually is. Yet the forest looks so rich and convincing that it feels like a little corner of somewhere much bigger. That feeling has stayed with me as I’ve explored more of Hyrule.
I’m still too early in the game to write a proper review, and I’m enjoying taking my time as Young Link. But I already have something I want to give Nintendo a huge amount of credit for: it has preserved a world I loved while making it feel enormous again.
The Zelda game that got me hooked
Ocarina of Time was the first Zelda game I properly got to spend time with. I’d played the original on the NES, but this was where the series really caught hold of me. I was an enormous fan, and a lot of that came from the sheer novelty of being able to explore this world in 3D.
People can explain all the things that made the original Zelda brilliant, and I understand why it matters. My own connection to the series really began here. Ocarina of Time gave me a place I could move through and look around, and at the time that felt incredible.
I remember it looking practically photorealistic. Obviously, looking at the N64 game now, that’s a ridiculous description of what’s actually on the screen. But it’s an honest description of how it felt to me then. I wasn’t studying the textures or counting polygons. I was completely taken in by it.
That’s a difficult thing for a remake to compete with. A developer can recreate the locations, improve the models and give everything better lighting, but my memory of that game includes the excitement of experiencing something so new. Simply making the picture sharper was never going to reproduce all of that.
I did return for Ocarina of Time 3D on the 3DS. It had updated graphics and controls, but it didn’t give me the kind of transformation I was hoping for. To me, it still felt too close to the old presentation to get me properly excited about playing through the adventure again. I don’t think I ever really got stuck into it.
I’d been waiting for this for years
Over the years, I kept seeing fan projects showing what a more ambitious version could look like. I remember following footage of an Unreal Engine recreation and desperately wanting to get my hands on something like it. Seeing familiar places rebuilt with modern detail made the idea of returning to Ocarina of Time much more exciting.
I wasn’t following those projects because I’d stopped loving the original. Quite the opposite. I wanted to see how far someone could take the world I already loved. Those videos made it very easy to imagine a version of Hyrule that finally had the detail my imagination had supplied all those years ago.
So when Nintendo finally delivered its own modern remake, I was excited, but I was also fairly split on what to expect. Remaking a game this beloved must be a difficult job. People want to recognise the places and moments they remember. Change too much and you risk losing the very thing that made them want to return.
At the same time, the original’s limitations were always going to become more obvious with modern graphics. Hyrule seemed huge to me when I first played it. Go back now and it’s a surprisingly compact collection of locations. I wondered whether rebuilding it would make those boundaries even harder to ignore.
I’ve also often felt that Nintendo can be conservative about revisiting its older games. Given how long I’d wanted this particular remake, I wasn’t going in assuming it would deliver everything I’d imagined. I hoped for something impressive, but I was prepared to find that it hadn’t gone quite far enough for me.
Instead, I’ve been overwhelmed by how good a job it has done.
A small part of a much bigger world
Kokiri Forest is where that first became obvious. The familiar space is still there, but Nintendo has gone to town on how it looks and feels. There’s enough richness in the forest to make its compact size feel completely natural. It feels like the part of the woods where this adventure happens, with a whole world continuing beyond it.
That’s the distinction I keep coming back to as I play. I’m happy exploring a small area when the surroundings convince me that the area belongs to somewhere larger. The remake has been remarkably good at doing that.
The rolling hills and mountains in the distance make a huge difference. Looking between Death Mountain and Kakariko Village, I get a sense of places that are miles apart, even though travelling between the playable areas is much quicker than that distance would suggest. The transition almost feels as though the journey between them has been skipped over for me.
I don’t need to walk every mile for that to work. I can see enough of the surrounding landscape to understand the scale. The village has its place in that landscape, the mountain has its place, and the world feels bigger than the route I’m actually travelling.
What impresses me is how naturally that fits the original game. Nintendo has kept the familiar arrangement of locations and made the scenery around them do an enormous amount of work. I can recognise the Hyrule I remember while believing there’s much more of it beyond the places I can reach.
Nintendo’s developer interview helps explain why this works. The team deliberately retained separate maps and adjusted the scale and detail of distant scenery and landmarks. It also rebuilt characters individually, studying their behaviour in the original. There was clearly a great deal of thought involved in making the world feel familiar at a much higher level of detail.
That care is what I’m enjoying most. I wanted a substantial visual transformation, and I got one, but I can still feel the shape of the game I fell in love with underneath it. Nintendo has changed enough to make returning exciting without disturbing my connection to those places.
There’s plenty I haven’t seen yet. I’m still experiencing all of this as Young Link, and I’ll leave a full assessment until I’ve spent more time with the rest of the adventure. Right now, though, I’m delighted. After years of wanting this remake and wondering how much Nintendo would actually do with it, it’s a lovely surprise to find myself this impressed.
When I first played Ocarina of Time, Hyrule felt far bigger than it really was. All these years later, Nintendo has managed to give me that feeling again.
