Yes, this is a blog post about the The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time remake. In part inspired by Christian Donlan’s I’m trying to untangle my response to how the Ocarina of Time remake looks on EuroGamer and in part because of my huge initial distrust when I saw the first real gameplay trailers. What exactly happened in my head was something along the lines of: This is not right, it’s not supposed to look this way! Why is this hyper realistic? Is this a From Software game ported to a finally capable Nintendo machine? Is this Ocarina of Time (OOT) or is this Breath of the Wild, where you can scope out a point in the distance from a tower, glide down and actually visit that place? Go back to point 1: it’s not supposed to look/work this way! Seventy bucks for a game that I already own on multiple platforms including the perfectly reasonable polished 3DS edition? I don’t think so. The chickens are not supposed to have more than three polygons. Now they look like plastic. Where’s the fog? Why can we see that much? Et cetera. Since that initial shock, I’ve mostly come around. Well not really, but good enough to tolerate it’s a remake, not a remaster, and it’ll please the youngsters who don’t even know what proper Zelda gameplay is, since Breath and its direct successor don’t even feature proper dungeons. Young Link running around in the Hyrule fields. Where you can actually see stuff in the distance. Crazy. Let’s take a step back. I’ve been mulling over the purpose of a remake/remaster (let’s keep the distinction out of this discussion for now) and came to the conclusion that the reception of games like these can be categorised in the following taxonomy. On the one hand, you’ve got people who never played the game before. They are either young enough to never have witnessed the original (and have not heard enough about it to care), or people who missed the original release and are now reminded of its existence. This is exactly what a remake is for: to push the original game forward into the future, ready to win the hearts of another generation. In case of OOT, I doubt any self-proclaimed gamer will deny its presence in nearly all top of all time lists, but in the case of the average game from the nineties that since has fallen into obscurity, a remake is a sure way to try and resurrect it from the dead. On the other hand, there are folks who already played OOT. These are the critical annoying folks who’ll tell you Breath of the Wild is not a true Zelda game (look who’s talking). We can further categorise these into grumblers who want to preserve the exact experience from back then and the folks who are open to reliving its core message whilst marvelling at a completely revamped engine or even fleshed out storyline. Given my affinity with nostalgia—good or bad—I tended to side with the grumblers. That’s indeed shrewd usage of past tense. My first raw reaction when seeing Young Link in motion, built out of 3446833 polygons instead of just 10 was definitely a grumbly one. But like I said, I’ve come around. Why do I buy and play so many remakes/remasters? A non-exhaustive recent selection: Paper Mario 2: Thousand Year Door Mario RPG (remake? Debatable) Soul Reaver Anything from Nightdive Studios such as Rise of the Triad: Ludicrous Edition, DOOM (again) or the Turok trilogy Wonder Boy: The Dragon’s Trap (remake) Bio Menace Remastered … Why do I buy and play so many retro-inspired new games? A non-exhaustive recent selection: Shooters like Project Warlock, DUSK, Nightmare Reaper, Wizordum Shovel Knight et al. SKALD Ruffy and the Riverside Adventure games like The Telwynium, Crimson Diamond, The Aching, Gobliins 6, and even The Drifter Forbidden Solitaire … Why do I buy and play so many retro collections? A non-exhaustive recent selection: The Castlevania collections (Dominus, Advance, Anniversary) The Turtles Cowabunga Collection The Turok trilogy The Duke Nukem collection 1 for Evercade … Clearly, I am the ideal target audience for a game like the OOT remake. Yet my first reaction was scoffing—why? Because that’s not how Link is supposed to look like and how the field of vision is supposed to work on authentic Nintendo 64 hardware? There are a plethora of HD ports out on the PC such as Ship of Harkinian, offering modern controls, widescreen, and other quality of life stuff we’re all addicted to nowadays. Including me. Including me: the first thing I did when replaying Might & Magic VIII, a 26 year old PC game from 2000, was apply a patch that improves the field of vision, adds widescreen, and fixes some of the controls. The first thing I did after installing Ultima Underworld was patching in “modern” mouse controls. It turns out that I’m less of an authentic player than I thought I was—yet I refuse to play Serious Sam HD and stick with my Windows 98 PC for that one. Why? Because Serous Sam is supposed to be low-res that used to be enormously high-res and cutting-edge. The HD version looks too different compared to the original that in my personal context has a tight affinity with the ATI Radeons and GeForces of the early noughties. I didn’t want to alter how Ultima Underworld and Might & Magic VIII looks or sounds—merely how easily I can manipulate its world. Yet if you give me the choice to play Paper Mario 2 on the GameCube or on the Switch, I’d choose the latter in the blink of an eye. This is coming from someone who spent forty hours on both games, in 2004 and in 2024. Stuart Gipp from The Retronauts podcast recently interviewed the editor in chief of UK’s Retro Gamer magazine who was shocked to hear that some people collect PAL versions of console games as opposed to NTSC ones. We in Europe were never treated with good framerates, but why would you not want them, given you can now access everything through the internet? Because they wanted to experience a restorative nostalgic moment; to perfectly recreate their childhood memories. In practice, it’s never that black and white. I like the HD version of Age of Empires II, but I would still play the original on my old hardware if I felt like it. The “remastered” version of Warcraft III is a gigantic trainwreck. I don’t want to touch Diablo II: Resurrected. But that’s just me pretending: my hardware currently can’t handle it. I want to play it so bad: it’s recently got a new playable class—for a gameplay loop that’s twenty-six years old, that’s just crazy! Wait, the game is out on the Switch?? Yet I’d never want to play the blurry mess that was the GameCube version of Paper Mario again if I can spin up a crispy clear version on the Switch that even comes with cleaned up and in my opinion an improved soundtrack. So where does that leave us with the upcoming Ocarina of Time remake? Just set aside that €70. You know you’re screwed—might as well admit it now. Related topics: / nostalgia / games / By Wouter Groeneveld on 12 September 2026.  Reply via email.