The best thing about The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time’s fantastic new Switch 2 remake is that Nintendo didn’t try to reinvent the wheel. Everything that made the original Nintendo 64 classic special is preserved in a focused game that fights the urge to modernize a timeless experience that still stands on its own today. You won’t find that Hyrule Field has turned into an enormous open world filled with busy work, thank God.
You will, unfortunately, find that Breath of the Wild’s worst feature did manage to creep its way in. Yes, it’s exactly what you fear: that pesky horizontal item menu that keeps creeping its way into every Zelda game! Oh, did you think I was going to say weapon degradation?
Not unless you count the shoddily-crafted Giant’s Knife. While you can file this one under pet peeve, hear me out for a moment. In Zelda games, items can be a hassle to juggle.
Dungeons often require Link to use multiple tools from his arsenal to solve puzzles and defeat enemies. There simply aren’t enough buttons on a standard video game controller to map every item to a button, so Zelda games have historically forced you to hop in and out of menus to change up your shortcuts. This was one of the few pain points of the original Ocarina of Time especially.
You spend so much time in menus juggling your ocarina, arrows, lens of truth, masks, and more fundamental items as you work through the adventure. The remake offered an opportunity to address that problem, and the solution largely works. For starters, you have some key items like your ocarina, masks, and boots mapped to your D-pad for quick access.
The rest of your items, though, all compete for one open button spot. That’s not ideal, considering just how many useful items there are in Ocarina of Time, but Nintendo is wise to implement a pop-up menu for easy swapping. There’s a catch, though: the remake takes notes from Breath of the Wild to get the job done.
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