The Zelda: Ocarina of Time Remake Sounds Meaningfully Better Than the Original

Previews indicate Nintendo really cares about this one

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Guess what — Nintendo's all-in on physical media. This unsurprising fact became news this week after an executive for Nintendo in Latin America made some mild and extremely uncontroversial comments to the effect. "We know how much the fans like it," Bill van Zyll said, while pointing out that the company had just launched a new platform, in Switch 2, that supports physical cartridges. This is only worth noting due to Sony's unpopular decision to end production of physical PlayStation games starting in 2028, but still: good to know.

As a family-oriented company which still has strong ties to toy retail, Nintendo enjoys a far higher proportion of physical retail sales than any of its competitors, so this position just makes a boring kind of sense. But it also has more to lose; as pressure on memory chip prices continues, Switch game cards are surely much more expensive to manufacture than Blu-ray discs. Hence the functionally empty game-key cards most third-party publishers have resorted to. But when it comes to its own titles, Nintendo still insists on shipping the full game on the card, and hang the expense.

You can tell what matters to Nintendo by what it chooses to spend money on. It typically doesn't go overboard on development budgets for its games, reasoning that expensive graphical fidelity won't add a proportional amount of fun. (It would also take up more of those costly gigabytes). But Nintendo goes out of pocket to put all of, say, next month's Zelda: Ocarina of Time remake on a game card, because it is a proportionally better experience. Imagine being nine years old, unwrapping the game for Christmas, putting it in your Switch 2 and then having to wait for it to download. Unacceptable.

First hands-on impressions of the Ocarina remake were published this week, and Polygon's Michael McWhertor found it "snappy, streamlined, and polished in ways that make it feel totally fresh." Here again, Nintendo's priorities are instructive.

Nintendo has revisited this game several times before, but this time is different.

The 3DS' Ocarina of Time 3D was handed to an external team, Grezzo, as was the pretty but laggy 2019 remake of Link's Awakening. But Ocarina 2026, unlike its sister N64-era remake Star Fox, appears to have been allocated to one of Nintendo's precious internal teams, and the difference is apparent. Beyond the lush visuals, previewers all noted how frictionless and responsive the remake is, a huge correction of the biggest historical flaw with one of Nintendo's greatest games. (The original N64 game runs at a sluggish 20 frames per second, and you can really feel it.)

Nintendo has the same cynical reasons for leaning on remakes to pad out the release schedule as every other publisher. Games are risky endeavors, and new ideas are hard to come by. But in this case, it seems Nintendo also saw an opportunity to make a classic game meaningfully better, and — just as with its first-party game cards — refused to take half measures. This is about legacy, about brand reputation. And there's little Nintendo cares about more.

eShop game of the week: Ratatan

The PlayStation Portable cult classic Patapon, a rhythm-action game about a line of little marching warriors, has been reimagined by some of its original developers in a roguelike spiritual sequel. It doesn't quite hang together, but it's a powerful nostalgia trip all the same.

Nintendo Classics game of the week: Castlevania: Bloodlines

As the excellent Castlevania: Belmont's Curse arrives on Switch, it's a good moment to revisit this half-forgotten Sega Genesis entry in the series. It's not the Castlevania you know; instead, it's a perfect, technologically impressive expression of a more straight-ahead action game like the NES originals.

Nintendo Music track of the week: "Guru-Guru's Song" from The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask

The strange, funhouse-mirror atmosphere of Ocarina of Time's direct sequel is captured perfectly by this carnivalesque retread of the "Song of Storms" melody, as if performed by a circus organ-grinder and their monkey.

This week's most interesting releases

Castlevania: Belmont's Curse

• Oct. 15
• Switch
• The other half of Metroidvania returns in the hands of Dead Cells studio Evil Empire

Toy Story 3: Complete Edition and Toy Story: Retro Roundup!

• Oct. 15
• Switch, Switch 2
• Much-loved tie-in game and other Toy Story titles get the Digital Eclipse interactive museum treatment

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4

• Oct. 16
• Switch 2
• CoD returns to Nintendo as a consequence of Microsoft's Activision takeover

Resident Evil 2, 3, and 4

• Oct. 16
• Switch 2
• Capcom's acclaimed remakes come to Switch 2

Frostpunk

• Oct. 19
• Switch
• The cult survival city-builder from 2018 finally arrives on Switch