The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time Remake Needs an Overworld Overhaul

The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time Remake Needs an Overworld Overhaul

Ocarina of Time is still the almost-perfect game. Almost.

Geoff Keighley’s Summer Game Fest has grown to feel more like a season of mid-year game previews that crop up alongside the main one-night showcase. Case in point, Nintendo aired its usual Nintendo Direct summer showcase on June 9, in the vicinity of Keighley’s show on June 5, giving fans a look at what's coming to the Switch 2 (which is now a year old!) through the rest of 2026 and into 2027. This year, Nintendo's Just One More Thing™ at the end of the presentation was a remake for The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. How exciting!...Right?

The easy answer is "Hell yes." Ocarina of Time, Link's full 3D adventure, was a mind-blowing game for 1998. It was the reason to own an N64. The trek through 3D Hyrule and its complex dungeons still feel like a miracle journey stuffed into a cartridge. Ocarina of Time re-invented adventure games as thoroughly as Super Mario 64 had re-invented platforming games a couple of years earlier.

Still, this reveal comes with a twofold problem. One: The trailer for the Ocarina of Time remake showed us surprisingly little for a game that's coming out in 2026. There's a good chance this is Nintendo's holiday game, but the trailer only gives us a sliver of Ocarina of Time's famous opening narrative from the Deku Tree. (Paraphrased: "There's a boy without a fairy living in my village of pointy-eared kids children who all have faeries, and it's causing a scandal.") What we saw looked quite lovely, to say nothing of that rising three-note ocarina sting that creeps into the background of the Deku Tree's monologue. We just didn't see much of anything about how this Ocarina of Time remake plays.

This ties into problem number two. Ocarina of Time is a timeless game…depending on who you ask. Some parts of Ocarina of Time have aged better than others. The dungeons and towns remain iconic. But its overworld, so expansive and jaw-dropping in ‘98—especially when you finally got to travel it astride Link’s horsey friend, Epona—felt small and empty by the time The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess came to the Wii and GameCube in 2006. Even Majora's Mask had a much livelier overworld than its predecessor thanks to its use of the N64's RAM expansion pack. Unfortunately, Nintendo left Ocarina of Time's overworld untouched when the game got its first remake for the Nintendo 3DS in 2011, which is where it became glaringly obvious that there's little to do in that iteration of Hyrule other than harass a few peahats.

Whatever Nintendo has planned for the Ocarina of Time remake, it's going to have a lot to live up to in our post-Breath of the Wild / Tears of the Kingdom world. That's certainly not to suggest the new Ocarina of Time needs an overworld that's near as expansive as the Switch's current kings of the action RPG genre, but we'll need some kind of overworld that's worth exploring.

Nintendo's Direct presentation was crowded, so it's likely we'll get a separate Zelda Direct sometime in the near future. In the meantime, there's good reason to believe that Nintendo has something neat cooked up for its Ocarina of Time remake. For now, though, it's anyone's guess whether the remake will be as comprehensive as Final Fantasy VII's remake project (which is good), or something more akin to Super Mario RPG’s Switch glow-up. (Also good.) Nintendo's remakes of its classic games, like the aforementioned Super Mario RPG for the Switch, have been excellent. Feel free to exercise cautious optimism.

It's also important to acknowledge that there is no rebuilt version of Ocarina of Time that will let us re-experience that delicious jolt of terror we all felt when the sun went down over Hyrule for the first time and skeletons sprang up around Link. Some thrills are a one-time childhood experience.

Oh, that's not to say the Ocarina of Time remake won't find new ways to terrorize us. There is a pale, eyeless monster that dwells beneath Kakariko Village – a multi-armed mutant that snags Link, oozes towards the boy on stumps, then shreds him with bloody human teeth the size of piano keys. Do you remember the monster? Do you remember meeting Dead Hand at the blood-stained bottom of Kakariko well? Do you remember meeting it for the first time while you were playing Ocarina of Time by yourself at the darkest hour of the night? Because Dead Hand remembers you. And it's ready to meet you again in 4K.