// KOTAKU — GAMING
Four Small Changes In The Ocarina Of Time Remake That Zelda Fans Have Found And Aren’t Thrilled About
The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time remake has been out for about 11 hours now, and fans who played the original are scouring Nintendo’s Switch 2 version of Hyrule for any changes, big or small, from the source material. The game’s puppet-inspired look makes everything look equal parts lush and uncanny, but broadly speaking, it’s still the Ocarina of Time you know and love. However, some small changes here and there do stand out for people who have played the game multiple times over the past 28 years, and while some are silly, others are actually tripping up long-time players, myself included.
Some of the changes aren’t actually consequential, but they’re fun to point out and laugh at. In the original, there’s a notorious scene in which King Zora, the leader of the sea-faring Zora people, scoots out of the way so you can reach the next dungeon. The moment is painfully drawn out, as man can only move his body a few inches at a time, so you sit there for a ridiculously long time while he gets himself situated. In the remake, the scene has been shaved off by about seven seconds.
“Then what’s even the point of playing this game?” a TikTok comment jokes.
“I feel like seven seconds is a fair trade off for the comedy of the camera angle switching up,” another says.
There are some changes that only the sickest among us will find. In the original game, players could find secret rupees at the top of the Castle Town gates by walking up the chains on the drawbridge, but it appears that’s no longer possible in the remake.
嘘だろ青沼ぁ！！！#NintendoSwitch2 #ゼルダの伝説 #時のオカリナ pic.twitter.com/fh5nVGkUZ3
The stuff that’s really going to affect anyone who’s played the original game are some of the mechanical changes that even I have struggled with a bit as my decades-old muscle memory keeps tripping me up in the early areas and dungeons. The Ocarina of Time remake adds a manual jump button, whereas the N64 original had Link automatically leap across platforms by running off an edge. Now, if you don’t press the button, he’ll fall, usually holding onto an edge instead, and you have to actually hit the jump button to get where you need to go. It hasn’t resulted in any embarrassing deaths for me yet, but I’m not the only one who’s falling down when they’re supposed to be jumping.
[OoTHD] [Kokiri Forest] Proof that I'm a veteran byu/TrunksSSJ inzelda
This is the kind of change that makes the game harder for veterans while also probably making it feel more natural for newcomers. It’s one example of the effort Nintendo put into making the game more approachable, and any time that a remake sands away friction that was present in the original game, it leads to conversations about what that friction helped evoke. IGN’s Logan Plant talks about this pretty extensively in his review:
I never get tired of entering a new room, taking out the enemies within, and then figuring out what it’s asking of me, like which block I need to push where or what switch I need to hit next. However, there are a number of small changes that add up to make a big difference in how these dungeons feel to work through, not always for the better. For example, a few locks are now placed on doors closer to their respective keys. This effectively shrinks the explorable space in these moments – if you run into a locked door and don’t have the key, there aren’t that many rooms it could realistically be in. It doesn’t ask you to think about the broader layout quite as much as a result.