// THE VERGE — MODA & SOCIETÀ
The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time never gets old
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The franchise has evolved since 1998, but the first 3D Zelda stands up incredibly well in its Switch 2 remake.
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Breath of the Wild changed everything. Two decades after The Legend of Zelda made the transformational shift to 3D, Breath of the Wild reinvigorated the franchise with an open-ended adventure that was built around player freedom and expression. Instead of following a set path, players could go wherever they wanted and tackle challenges in a variety of ways. That philosophy filtered down to subsequent games, letting players author their own creative solutions to puzzles in titles like Tears of the Kingdom and Echoes of Wisdom. As a result, Zelda has never been bigger, and the traditional, more linear Zelda games had become a thing of the past. Or so it seemed.
For one of the biggest Switch 2 exclusives so far, Nintendo has gone back to Ocarina of Time, which originally launched on the N64 in 1998. It’s one of the most influential and revered games in the long-running franchise, a game that showed that the classic Zelda formula — one that used a large world to connect a handful of intricate, puzzle-filled dungeons, creating a grand adventure — could work in three dimensions. Now Ocarina has been remade for the Switch 2 in a way that accomplishes exactly what a good remake is designed to do: preserve the core of the original experience while making it more accessible for modern audiences. And it shows there’s still some life left in the traditional Zelda formula.
The story remains unchanged from the original. It’s a third-person action-adventure game where you play as a little forest dweller named Link who gets pulled into an adventure to save the fantasy realm of Hyrule from a villain named Ganondorf. That’s true of basically every Zelda title, and here the twist comes from a musical instrument (the titular flute-like ocarina) imbued with magical powers. Over the course of the game you learn songs that can change the weather, warp you across the landscape, mess with the flow of time, and more.
The original Ocarina was renowned both for its large 3D world and for the intricacy of its dungeons, which required using the ocarina, along with various other items, to solve puzzles in clever ways. At a certain point you’re even jumping back and forth in time, navigating spaces as both tiny Link and his adult version. The challenge steadily grows in complexity right up until you face Ganondorf in his castle, forcing you to use a huge range of items at your disposal.