A number of the developers who rebuilt Ocarina of Time for the Switch 2 had never played the 1998 N64 game. Producer Hidemaro Fujibayashi says that worked in the remake’s favor, because the newcomers were careful about which parts to leave untouched.
Fujibayashi directed Breath of the Wild and its sequel. He co-led this project with Eiji Aonuma, who was a director on the N64 original and now oversees the Zelda franchise at Nintendo. Before launch, the two producers talked through how they brought the first 3D Zelda to a new audience.
Newer staff held back on changes
According to Fujibayashi, the younger members of the team handled the project “very carefully,” and he was struck by how restrained they were.
“What really impressed me was the fact that they really embraced the theme of what not to change from the original,” Fujibayashi said. “I feel confident that they weren’t necessarily pursuing something new for the sake of novelty when it might be unneeded and clutter the experience. They’re looking for elegance. Only what is needed, only what was important in the original, and how to carry that forward as their focus. And I think that’s a perspective they’ll be able to bring to future projects as well.”
Much of the N64 experience survives in the remake. Modern graphics and gameplay updates sit on top of it so it plays like a current release.
A single background designer in 1998
Aonuma worked on both the original and the remake, which few people can say. For him, the largest change between the two is how big the production has become.
“We used to have maybe just one person designing the backgrounds, and that’s something that you couldn’t do nowadays,” Aonuma said. “A lot of the process is not so different compared to the N64 days, but the scale [is different]: There’s a lot more time involved, a lot more people involved, and because of that it can be harder to manage these teams.”
The rebuilt visuals combine realism with fantasy art, in a style that sets the game apart from other Zelda entries. Aonuma said the goal was to “bring out details of the world that people weren’t able to see in the original Ocarina of Time.” He described that as “something that we wanted to do in the original, but we didn’t have the technical compatibility at the time in terms of hardware output.”
Jumping anywhere forced changes to the world
Players aren’t the same as they were in 1998 either. Ocarina was Nintendo’s first try at a 3D Zelda, and some of it feels dated. The N64 version gives you no camera control and only lets you jump in set spots. Anyone who has built a flying machine in Tears of the Kingdom will notice those limits quickly.
In the remake, players can control the camera fully and jump wherever they like. The changes are meant to tie the remake to the recent games, and they meant the team had to rework the world.
“When you’re developing a game like this with the free jump, we have to adjust the world to compensate for that freedom of the player,” Aonuma said. “I wasn’t quite sure about doing this in this title, but as soon as I felt it I thought, ‘Okay, this is a really good way to give players another way to approach a goal in the game.’ It adds just a little bit more freedom compared to the original Ocarina of Time. For me, bringing forward a little more freedom in this title is helpful because it carries something forward from Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom. Having that connection to the recent titles I think was really helpful.”
Compared with other early 3D games, the underlying design has held up. Fujibayashi was working at Capcom when Ocarina came out in 1998, and he recalls watching to see how Nintendo would handle the problems that early large 3D worlds kept running into. One answer was Z-targeting, which locks the player onto an enemy so fights are easier to follow.
“The solutions are something that still stick with me as a foundation for when I create 3D games,” Fujibayashi said.
Navi speaks up less often
Aonuma also took the chance to fix parts of the original that bothered him. The best-known case is Navi, the fairy who guides Link, whose constant help could tip over into nagging. She still travels with you for the whole game in the remake, but she says far less.
“One of the things that we were thinking about in [the N64] development process is: How do we lead the player to the end of this adventure?” Aonuma said. “Can they follow along with the story? Something that we used was the Navi hints, and some of these were added just because we felt in that moment a palpable need for the player to have a little extra information. But it’s something that’s a hard balance to hit. You don’t want to give an answer outright to a player, you want a little bit of an information gap so that they have an opportunity to think for themselves and make that stretch. The more hints you add, the more Navi would talk, and that would change the player experience. [In the remake] we were looking for ways to make all of that more comfortable and more streamlined. And so using in-game text to chronicle your adventures up to that point, so people could remind themselves what they’ve done on the quest so far, helps us get people to the end goal.”
An easier Water Temple
The Water Temple took more work. Many players rank it as the original’s hardest dungeon, and Fujibayashi said it was “quite difficult” when he first played it. On the N64, players struggled with an awkward camera and had to open a menu again and again to swap important items. The remake updates much of that, so it’s easier to find your way underwater and the dungeon drags less.
Aonuma was happy to hear that the new version of the dungeon felt much easier. “I think when people make comparisons from their memory now to the original version of the Water Temple they’re going to feel quite a difference,” he said. “So this is really nice to hear. As soon as you said that I thought, ‘We did it.'”
Classic Zelda structure for year 40
The series reaches its 40th anniversary this year, and Aonuma said he wanted Ocarina’s more traditional structure to stay available. Breath of the Wild turned Hyrule into a true open world, and Echoes of Wisdom combined classic top-down play with a new kind of puzzle. Ocarina is the more direct choice, and Aonuma said that variety helps explain the series’ long run. “You need different approaches,” he said.
He expects the newer developers, many of them working on Zelda for the first time, to carry that thinking forward.
“We’ve had opportunities to add to the playbook of Zelda, if you will, and the language of development,” Aonuma said. “You get to see the progression of these ideas across the franchise. And now, working with younger staff on this remake, we’re having the opportunity to bring in additional new ideas. I really look forward to the future and what’s possible coming from the new staff.”