The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time Review

A faithful rebuild of a 1998 classic that finally looks, sounds, and plays the way you always pictured it.

Few series can claim that nearly every new entry nudged gaming in a new direction, but Zelda is one of them. Its first step into 3D, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, reached the Nintendo 64 in late 1998 after a long wait. The project first showed up as Zelda 64 at Space World '95, where a few screenshots and rough footage kept people guessing for three years.

Nintendo had just proven with Super Mario 64 that it could build a fully 3D world, so the next question was whether the Zelda formula would survive the jump. A Link to the Past had already set that formula: you explore Hyrule, clear puzzle-filled dungeons, pick up new tools, and eventually take down Ganon.

Moving it into three dimensions meant rethinking almost everything, because Link carries a pile of unrelated items and each one had to make sense in 3D. Nintendo's answers were simple and sturdy. A camera follows you through the world, Z-targeting locks you onto enemies with one button, and Link jumps gaps and climbs ledges on his own.

Dungeons ran on clear visual rules, so you could tell what the Hookshot was meant to grab. The N64 original ran at 20 frames per second, which feels sluggish now, but it held steady, and it became the fourth best-selling game on the system.

In 2011, Nintendo released a remake on the 3DS, developed by Grezzo. It kept the original structure, rebuilt every asset with more polygons and sharper textures, added stereoscopic 3D, moved the inventory to the touchscreen, allowed gyro aiming, and included Master Quest. This tougher take first came as a pre-order bonus for The Wind Waker on GameCube. Master Quest traces back to the game's days as a 64DD project.

Rumors of a new version began in 2026, and on June 9, Nintendo revealed The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time for Switch 2.

Eiji Aonuma and many members of the original team worked on it alongside younger staff learning from them. Finishing The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time takes about 20 to 30 hours, depending on how much you poke around.

The story of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time is the one you already know, told more clearly. Ganondorf wants the Triforce from the Sacred Realm to take over the world, and you play Link, the boy who has to become the Hero of Time and save the kingdom.

You start in Kokiri Forest as a sleepy kid who never asked to be a hero, collect the Spiritual Stones, learn songs on the Ocarina, and travel between your younger and older selves as you watch Hyrule change. The time travel is still the best trick in the game, since you see the same places in different states.

What's different is the delivery. On the N64, many big moments were plain dialogue boxes. Here they are proper cutscenes, and there are more than you'd expect. Link stays silent, but his body language speaks. When Saria gives you the Ocarina and you leave the forest, the original showed an odd high angle and Link jogging off after two steps.

In the remake, he takes two slow steps, his eyes dart around, he lowers his head, and only then turns away from Saria and the only home he's had.

You can feel how little he wants to go, and that care shows up again and again. Characters don't necessarily say more, but what they do say carries more weight, with small additions to character and story details. NPCs also notice what you've done.

Return to them later, and they comment on your adventure; they may also stand somewhere else depending on whether it's day or night. The villains and side characters stop feeling like the fire version or the water version of the same prize and start feeling like people.

Voice acting covers the major scenes, with recordings in several languages, Japanese included. Some performances feel stiff and inconsistent: a character speaks in a cutscene, then falls back on the classic Zelda grunts when you talk to them normally.

Movement in The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time now resembles Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom. You get full right-stick camera control, a jump button, and a sprint with no stamina meter. Tapping the left trigger still snaps the camera behind Link. Jumping opens no new routes.

You still leap at the same spots to scale platforms and solve puzzles, but doing it yourself instead of running off a ledge is quicker.

It also defuses some hazards, since blade traps stop mattering once you can hop over them. Jumping while sprinting takes some finger work, and on a Pro Controller, putting sprint on a back button helps. Climbing lets you move in a full 360 degrees, which the earlier versions never allowed.

Items work differently in The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time too. Holding R pulls up a single line of gear you scroll left or right, whether you want a Deku Stick, a Bombchu, or the Megaton Hammer. The list is short, around 15 at most, so what you need is rarely more than a step or two away.

The Ocarina, masks, Iron Boots, and Navi sit on the D-pad, which matters most in the Water Temple, where you used to dig through the pause menu to equip the boots. Now it's one tap down. The Lens of Truth returns as a pair of goggles instead of a magnifying glass, which makes more sense. Reloading a save drops you where you last saved, rather than at your house as young Link or the Temple of Time as adult Link.

You can play the Ocarina in a few ways. The basic way is to press specific face and shoulder buttons, and holding ZL opens a list of songs you've learned. You can also hum a tune into the Switch 2's microphone, and it mostly picks it up; there's also a practice option. It's a cute gimmick, and you'll likely go back to buttons. Tapping a Zelda amiibo gives small extras like arrows, hearts, or bombs- nothing essential.

Navi is toned down a lot.

In the original, she interrupted constantly with her famous two words. Now she mostly sticks to small speech bubbles while you keep playing, and you may hear "Hey! Listen!" only once. A quest log called Threads of Time tracks what you've done and what's next, and together with cleaner menus and extra dialogue pointing you onward, it's much harder to get lost.

The side quests are still easy to miss, and the hunt for a certain sword is as obscure as before. The Echo Gem, a reward from the House of Skulltula quest that replaces the Stone of Agony, glows and vibrates near a Gold Skulltula, making it much easier to collect. Blue glowing fairy messages around the world give riddles that point to a song; playing it fully heals you.

Chests that look ordinary may hold a Business Seed. Plant it, and a Deku Scrub pops up to sell health and magic potions, a shop you can call anywhere, such as mid-dungeon or before a boss. Optional mask quests also give you a reason to deal with the Happy Mask Salesman.

After a certain story moment, sleeping in a bed takes you to the Hall of Fallen Heroes, where statues of enemies you've beaten stand on display. You can replay boss fights there, or fight several in a row. The rewards don't matter, but beating your own time is fun enough.

Combat in The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time feels familiar.

You lock on and slash with Y, and tilting the left stick changes the swing direction. X, the default jump, or A lets you hop, do a backward somersault, or make a leaping attack, and holding then releasing Y gives the spin attack. The setup is the same as you remember, but each hit lands with a red flash and a loud crash, and sword strikes make a satisfying thwack.

The game never throws crowds at you. Most fights are one-on-one, with two enemies when it wants more pressure, and at most you'll face about three Deku Scrubs shooting at once. Every fight works as a small puzzle: shield and then strike, or dodge aside and hit the weak spot on the back.

Some enemies changed. A Skulltula no longer waits for you to hit its belly. You have to hit it or wait for its attack, which triggers a spin and a short opening. Gold Skulltulas need only one hit to give up their tokens, and bigger Stalchildren roam Hyrule Field.

Bosses are mostly as before and easier than ever, because Link is more nimble, the camera helps, and everything is easy to see. They're not hard, but they feel large and dramatic. Aiming is far better too. Gyro lets you nudge shots by tilting the controller, the slingshot is fun now, and shooting from Epona's back is bearable.

Dungeons remain the heart of the game.

You get an item, work out what it opens, and push on. The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time trims the annoying parts. The Water Temple needs fewer keys, and large fluorescent lights guide you to the spots where you change the water level, which was always the real difficulty. Some puzzles were reworked. In Kokiri Forest, the chest holding your first sword used to sit in front of you past a boulder.

Now there's a ladder, a gap to jump, and the chest on a central pillar, which confirms you've learned to jump. The biggest change is the puzzle in Hyrule Castle: you still dodge guards, but the setup makes more sense for how you enter and where you end up. The Hookshot now attaches only to marked points, so Kakariko rooftops you could once grab are off limits, with vines placed where you can't hook on.

Plenty works in The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. The combat is clear and doesn't try to be more than it is; the puzzles still give you the moment of working something out, and the pacing keeps you moving without wasted time. The Twinrova sequence goes further than you'd expect, and one item borrowed from Tears of the Kingdom, the sign guy, is a fun surprise.

The weak points are mostly about challenge. You might die only a handful of times, and a few puzzle rooms are so obvious you won't feel clever, like a room with a red button and a red thing to hit it with. The Business Seed seems unnecessary because the game already hands you hearts and potions where you need them, and it lowers the value of rupees.

The Hookshot's tighter rules cost some freedom. The missing Master Quest is a real letdown, and there's no hard mode.

You can cut the HUD down to minimal information or nothing, which adds a little challenge, but it can't replace what Master Quest offered. You also get one manual save plus several autosaves, so restarting without touching your main file means making another profile at the system level.

The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time has no XP system, so there are no experience points to farm and no level-ups. Growth comes from what you find. Heart Pieces raise your health, new items open new areas, and Gold Skulltula tokens reward you for checking every corner.

The nearest thing to grinding is gathering rupees for costly purchases, which can take a while, though the Business Seed lets you skip some of it. Visually, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time changes the most. Link's and Zelda's designs may take getting used to, and Zelda's porcelain look stands out against everyone else, but by the end the art style works. Everything else is a pleasure to look at.

Dampé looks strange, the Happy Mask Salesman is creepy, and the ReDeads and Stalchildren are scarier than before. Kokiri Forest is full of fog, Death Mountain at night looks like a national park, and sunrise and sunset over Hyrule still have the old effect. The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time appears to run on the technology behind Breath of the Wild, which shows in the grass and lighting.

Physically based materials make stone, metal, leather, and cloth look right. Light fills interiors with real color transfer and shadow, avoiding the floating, glowing look of older techniques. The Forest Temple's wood, slime pools, and stained glass stand out, and the Fire Temple's lava glows under stone while the walkways stay dark.

The mood is darker and stranger, and the creepiness the 3DS version lost is back.

Small details add to it. Foliage reacts when you touch it or run past; leaves drift down streams, and pot shards stay where they fall, moving under your feet. Navi gives off light, Lord Jabu-Jabu's Belly has a fleshy, translucent look, and low fog swirls around Link and reacts to his movement and attacks. Link plays the Ocarina with his actual fingers.

The world feels more connected, too. A few loading screens remain, mostly between major areas, and they rarely last more than a second or two. Entering buildings involves no loading, and Castle Town, once pre-rendered and segmented, is now seamless. 

You can walk from Hyrule Field straight into Lon Lon Ranch, and paths and ledges visually link places, so the road between village and castle looks long without you walking it. The Castle Town drawbridge no longer rises and falls with the sun, probably because the day-night cycle is longer.

Technically, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time runs at 60 frames per second and holds there. Docked, resolution reaches 1440p and drops to around 1080p. In portable mode, it ranges from about 1080p to 720p, with shorter draw distances and lower texture filtering.

It uses SMAA and AMD's FSR 1 and skips DLSS, so you'll see shimmering when you swing the camera, overly smooth mountains and trees in the distance, and a soft look at times, especially docked. HDR works but isn't impressive. None of it ruined play, and the stable frame rate matters more.

The sound in The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time is just as strong.

The soundtrack keeps the notes and styles of the N64 music, now played on real instruments. It doesn't pile on choirs or turn everything into a big epic, and that restraint helps. The instrument range is huge, and the music still shifts dynamically with what you do. Themes swell more in cutscenes.

Sound effects are punchy, from footsteps and doors to sword swipes and enemy noises, and the mix makes good use of surround channels. The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time stays close to the original. You could follow an N64 strategy guide and get through nearly all of it.

No new temples and no new side quests. What changes is how it feels: visuals, sound, controls, camera, quest tracking, and cutscenes. It makes the world feel lived in, fixes the problems the 3DS version left, and brings back the dark mood. 

A few puzzle tweaks, the missing Master Quest, and the single save slot keep it from being the last word, and anyone who knows the original will find it easy. It's also a good place to start if you only know Breath of the Wild, since it's shorter, more linear, and explains itself well. Whether you're returning or playing for the first time, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time is worth your time.