It’s always a worry, returning to a formative piece of art from your childhood. Will your jaded adult sensibilities render you unable to locate the magic that captivated your child self? Will revisiting it reveal that it was never actually that good, and that your tastes are built on a foundation of lies?
With video games, there is the added complication of technological advancement: decades-old games can look so basic and feel so treacly to play that it’s hard to explain why they were mind-blowing at the time. Light-touch remasters aim to bring such games up to modern graphical standards without fundamentally changing them; an ambitious remake attempts to transform the work into something that can stand alongside any modern masterpiece. Ocarina of Time is the latter.
And I could not be more delighted to report that it is a dream come true. Let’s start with what hasn’t changed. This is a clever, challenging game about a lonely boy who travels back and forth through time to save the world, and its flow and structure remain the same.
We visit all the same places in the same order, emerging from misty Kokiri Forest into the expanse of Hyrule Field, onwards to the active volcano Death Mountain with its good-natured rock people, to Lake Hylia and its sunken treasures, through Kakariko Village and Castle Town and their small but memorable cast of strange inhabitants. Intimidating dungeons and temples still hide in plain sight in these places, and the solutions to their ingenious puzzles remain the same, whether you are lighting a stick on fire and rolling over cobwebs to burn them up inside an ancient tree, or searching with a magic lens to find invisible gaps in the crumbling walls of a crypt. If you played this game as a child you may find, as I did, that the solutions to these smart spatial and logical conundrums rise unbidden from the very depths of your memory, and you will feel suddenly compelled to shoot an arrow in the direction of the rising sun for reasons you can’t quite recall.
What has changed is how all of this is framed. Ocarina of Time’s story was once told through necessary understatement: you could not fit reams of dialogue and hours of cinematics onto a Nintendo 64 cartridge in 1998. Text chatter with Hyrule’s denizens has been spruced up and expanded here, so that the world feels more alive: it’s funnier and more colourful.
But more importantly, pivotal moments in this story play out in fully voiced cutscenes (don’t worry, Link himself remains silent) that recall 2023’s Tears of the Kingdom. I anticipate that these scenes will prove divisive – this is a good time to remind Ocarina of Time purists that the original is still there, if you want it – but I found that they brought out the latent epic drama in a previously sparse tale. They really boost the pathos.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
