// KOTAKU — GAMING
15 Things The Legend Of Zelda: Ocarina Of Time Remake Is Changing From The Original On N64
The Legend of ZeldaThe Legend of Zelda: Ocarina Of Time
Is it November yet? I am currently overloaded with games to play, but I also really just want to play the Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time remake. It’s hitting Nintendo Switch 2 on November 5, 2026, which is just over a month away, and that is just simply not soon enough for me. I keep thinking about it!
Ocarina of Time is still fresh in my brain. I actually played it for the very, very first time just this past January, and apart from how clunky and old it felt to control, I really enjoyed it! So I’m rather excited to give it a second shot but with nice, smooth, and shiny modern controls and some of the new updates being introduced with this remake.
Because there are changes, beyond just the visuals. And I’ve watched the trailers a lot and puzzled over them with friends, and I think I’ve managed to identify what I consider to be the 15 biggest ones. Some of them were pointed out directly by Eiji Aonuma in the gameplay presentation, but others are significantly more subtle. Let’s consider, shall we?
While the original Ocarina of Time had some grunts and yells and other little vocal cues that played when characters spoke, the remake has fully voice-acted cutscenes.
Link can jump now, on cue! No more having to line up sprinting at a cliff’s edge for his auto-jump to work correctly; you can just control it now, and even jump in all sorts of other places, too.
Link can also swim now, properly this time, with a little speed boost on a button press, and underwater too! He has a short stamina bar that depletes while he’s underwater, so he can’t go under indefinitely, but you no longer have to do weird maneuvers with the iron boots to hang out underwater.
You can rotate the camera around freely now rather than having to rely on a mixture of a clonky targeting system and snapping the camera back behind Link to see what’s going on. This is also the case in areas that used to have a fixed camera, like Castle Town, so you can see a lot more of these areas, including spots that were never visible before.
As before, Link can do a little roll, but if you hold down the A button when you roll he’ll start sprinting out of it and move even faster than before.
A lot of very smart people have pointed out that Ocarina of Time seems to have tweaked some of the mechanisms in dungeons so that while they are still the same for the purposes of gameplay, the manner in which they function is a bit more in keeping with a world in which actions have a proper cause and effect. The most commonly cited example is in this room, where instead of a floating platform, there’s a log bridge that crumbles under Link. Then, once he has the slingshot, he shoots a switch that causes two stone panels to move and release a ladder. Before, Link just shot some webs and the ladder seemed to mysteriously drop from them as a result. This is a bit more believable!