Nintendo's Zelda Ocarina of Time could have been very different

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The first tease of the The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time remake divided opinion with its revelation of what looked to be a highly realistic art style for one of Nintendo's most loved adventures. However, many fears will have been assuaged by the Zelda Ocarina of Time previews.

While the game is much more than a fresh coat of paint for the 1998 classic, with new controls, richer environments, extra dialogue, voiced cutscenes and fixes for some of the creakier bits of the original, it's also clear that Nintendo has been faithful to the original in many ways. Some of the thinking behind that comes across in a new series of interviews with developers. They reveal the vision for retaining a stylised look to the game's art, and confess that certain changes were considered but ruled out because they interfered with the core structure of the game.

The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time – The Ocarina Is the Key – Nintendo Switch 2 - YouTube

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The art style aimed for a "puppet-show" feel

As we noted in our preview, the new Hyrule of the Ocarina of Time remake remains very faithful to the shapes and colours of the N64 original but rebuilds them with sumptuous lighting and far more detail, from the grain in the wood and foliage to the stitching on Link’s tunic.

Despite the Nintendo Switch 2's far superior graphics capabilities compared to the N64, art director Aya Shida emphasises that the goal wasn't merely to make the classic look as realistic as possible. In early in development, the team used phrases like “a puppet-show feel” and “the analog feel of practical effects films” as concepts to aim for.

"We wanted to rebuild Hyrule as a rich, dense world that felt as though it could truly exist, while retaining the feel of the original. At the same time, we wanted its colorful and quirky characters to feel like a natural part of that world. Figuring out how to strike the right balance became one of the main themes of the art development," she says in Nintendo's Ask the Developer series.

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"Neither puppet shows nor practical effects films reproduce reality exactly as it is. Even so, both create a convincing sense that the characters truly exist within their respective fantasy worlds," Aya adds.

(Image credit: Nintendo)

The team began by drawing sketches of Link, Zelda and the other characters and creating a 3D model of the Great Deku Tree. Although the N64 designs and the new ones look very different due to the exaggerated features in the former, Aya says the aim was to preserve familiarity, which included paying particular consideration to how characters look from a distance "so that players would feel they were still the same characters they remembered, even after 28 years".

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A lot of attention also went into the textures of the characters’ clothing. While they're much more detailed, they couldn't be took perfect. For example, the young Link's clothes needed to look handmade to be believable.

"We started by asking what kind of fabric those children might actually weave and wear," Aya reveals. "We looked at materials in museums and even experimented with making our own fabric from thread to get a better sense of what it should be like. For this game, the hardware allowed us to depict that level of detail, but that also meant we needed to do our research until we had a clear idea of what we wanted to create. As a design team, we often talked about imagining the story behind every object in the game as we created it."

Ocarina of Time almost had a big change in its world exploration

(Image credit: Nintendo)

While the objective was always to be faithful to the original game's focus on the joy of exploration, The Legend of Zelda series producer Eiji Aonuma reveals that the Ocarina of Time remake could have ended up with warp points like in Breath of the Wild.

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"In the original The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, you could get around a bit faster by spamming forward roll, so I think a lot of players spent their time doggedly rolling across Hyrule Field whenever they needed to be somewhere in a hurry. I thought we needed to address this in this new version," he said.

However, developers discovered that adding the warp points to Ocarina of Time eliminated an important part of the game: the moments of discovery.

"Through this development process, we were reminded once again just how important those moments are to the very structure of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. So even though I was the one who proposed adding warp points, they just weren't working for me in the end, so I got the team to take them all back out again," he says.

One gameplay change that did make it into the remake is the addition of a dedicated jump button for Link, whereas he hopped automatically off certain ledges in the original. This will take some getting used to, especially mid-fight, but should be a welcome change for fiddly moments.

The Ocarina of Time remake could influence future Zelda games

(Image credit: Nintendo)

Eiji also commented on the reason for remaking Ocarina of Time in the first place as the franchise approached its 40th anniversary. He says that a significant part of the motivation was to ensure that the team working on the Zelda series today truly understands the original game's significance to the series as a whole.

"By learning the game structure and development style behind the original The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, and by actually rebuilding it as a full remake, it may trigger new insights that they can carry forward into future development," he suggests.

The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time launches on Nintendo Switch 2 on 5 November, 2026.

You can read the full interviews with developers on the Nintendo website.

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The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time (Digital Code)

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The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time (Physical Edition)