For someone who’s been a fan of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time for almost 30 years, like me, Tuesday’s reveal of Nintendo’s new Switch 2 remake had a couple of heart-stopping moments.
The first of these was our first glimpse of the game, with young Link standing in Kokiri Forest. Like a lot of viewers, I had mixed feelings. The detail of the scene was shocking, overwhelming, down to Link’s distractingly textured hat, and elements of the presentation seemed to tip over into the uncanny valley — notably Link himself. Had Nintendo, after holding out for 20 years, finally succumbed to the high-definition mania that tempts so many studios to fill all that resolution with needless noise?
As the footage unspooled, I was reassured that Nintendo was staying firmly faithful to the gameplay of the original masterpiece, with a few sensible modernizations like a jump button and free camera movement. But I didn’t have a firm grasp of the art style, and I wasn’t 100% sure that Nintendo did either.
Then Zelda producer Eiji Aonuma guided Link out onto Hyrule Field, and my heart stopped a second time.
A little historical context: In 1998, walking onto Hyrule Field in the original Ocarina of Time was a seminal moment. After the tight confines of Kokiri Forest, the Deku Tree, and the Lost Woods, it was a breathtakingly open space by the standards of the time. The landmarks dotted around its wide vista gave a sense (however false) of a single, interconnected world that few early 3D games had managed to evoke. Together with the stirring musical theme, it created a powerful sense of adventure.
But, by the standards of modern open-world games — The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild not least among them — Hyrule Field is absolutely tiny. Before the reveal, I was worried about how Nintendo would adapt it. Taking an open-world approach to the remake would surely destroy Ocarina‘s immaculate structure and fairytale charm. But if Nintendo remained faithful to the original space, how could the magic of Hyrule Field be preserved for modern players, who have vastly expanded expectations of video game environments?
I needn’t have worried; Nintendo has nailed it.
The Ocarina of Time remake surrounds Hyrule Field’s rolling grasslands with an astonishingly beautiful diorama showing the rest of the kingdom. Death Mountain looms at an impressive, smoky scale. Hyrule Castle’s spires are wreathed in mist on a forested hilltop beyond the town gates. Kakariko Village’s windmill spins lazily in the background. The ochre rock spires of Gerudo Valley hint at radically different landscapes beyond.
The effect sits somewhere between a believable, realistic 3D space and a feeling like you’re inhabiting an airbrushed storybook cover or a matte painting backdrop from an old Technicolor movie. You can tell that it’s not a true open world — that it’s an illusion created with layers of geometry, painted art assets, and lighting effects. The vista is too dense, too impossibly romantically lit, to feel real. But this is intentional.
This is when I finally understood what Nintendo’s artists are going for with Ocarina of Time on Switch 2. In remaking an old game with modern visuals, they’ve chosen an approach that feels old as well as new. As Aonuma put it in the demo: “We didn’t just aim for realistic graphics. We were particularly focused on reimagining them in a way that feels nostalgic.” The game’s look is deliberately unreal: busy, painterly, dreamlike, heightened. It’s not supposed to be entirely convincing, or to feel like a product of the here and now.
This approach suits the age of the game design, which can only be updated so far. It also suits the spirit of the game; Ocarina of Time isn’t a simulated world like Breath of the Wild, it’s a fairy tale, a playable fable. And the approach ensures that, by different means, Nintendo can still make you feel a rush of wonder as you step out onto Hyrule Field for the first time and anticipate the adventure ahead.