The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time review – a dream come true

It’s always a worry, returning to a formative piece of art from your childhood. Will your jaded adult sensibilities render you unable to locate the magic that captivated your child self? Will revisiting it reveal that it was never actually that good, and that your tastes are built on a foundation of lies? With video games, there is the added complication of technological advancement: decades-old games can look so basic and feel so treacly to play that it’s hard to explain why they were mind-blowing at the time.

Light-touch remasters aim to bring such games up to modern graphical standards without fundamentally changing them; an ambitious remake attempts to transform the work into something that can stand alongside any modern masterpiece. Ocarina of Time is the latter. And I could not be more delighted to report that it is a dream come true.

Let’s start with what hasn’t changed. This is a clever, challenging game about a lonely boy who travels back and forth through time to save the world, and its flow and structure remain the same. We visit all the same places in the same order, emerging from misty Kokiri Forest into the expanse of Hyrule Field, onwards to the active volcano Death Mountain with its good-natured rock people, to Lake Hylia and its sunken treasures, through Kakariko Village and Castle Town and their small but memorable cast of strange inhabitants. Intimidating dungeons and temples still hide in plain sight in these places, and the solutions to their ingenious puzzles remain the same, whether you are lighting a stick on fire and rolling over cobwebs to burn them up inside an ancient tree, or searching with a magic lens to find invisible gaps in the crumbling walls of a crypt. If you played this game as a child you may find, as I did, that the solutions to these smart spatial and logical conundrums rise unbidden from the very depths of your memory, and you will feel suddenly compelled to shoot an arrow in the direction of the rising sun for reasons you can’t quite recall.

What has changed is how all of this is framed. Ocarina of Time’s story was once told through necessary understatement: you could not fit reams of dialogue and hours of cinematics on to a Nintendo 64 cartridge in 1998. Text chatter with Hyrule’s denizens has been spruced up and expanded here, so that the world feels more alive: it’s funnier and more colourful. But more importantly, pivotal moments in this story play out in fully voiced cutscenes (don’t worry, Link himself remains silent) that recall 2023’s Tears of the Kingdom.

I anticipate that these scenes will prove divisive – this is a good time to remind Ocarina of Time purists that the original is still there, if you want it – but I found that they brought out the latent epic drama in a previously sparse tale. They really boost the pathos. First encounters with important characters are now more impactful; there are pre-battle face-offs with temple bosses that keyed me up for the action. The desert king Ganondorf in particular comes off as thrillingly evil. An entirely new scene at the story’s most vital juncture, when young Link pulls the Master Sword from the stone in the Temple of Time and is frozen in time for seven years, had me close to awestruck. I found that knowing what was going to happen enhanced my anticipation of these moments: I was excited to see how each would be remade.

Ocarina of Time used to look like a dream: angular, fuzzy around the edges, full of evocative but simple colours and textures. It now looks like very detailed theatre scenery. Link is doll-like, with glassy eyes; his clothes are richly embellished with decorative stitching and his tools – boomerang, sword, bombs, a bow – look exaggerated and prop-like. Other characters are less detailed; something about this aesthetic choice speaks to how the important details of a story stand out in the memory. There are some changes that I didn’t like – I was disappointed to find that the warrior Sheik had lost a lot of his androgyny – but nonetheless I was won over by this art style, reminiscent of puppet shows and handmade toys. It is not so much realistic as hyperreal. The places, meanwhile – Hyrule Field under the setting sun, atmospheric dungeons filled with menacing lizard soldiers and scowling skull-spiders that curl up and evaporate in puffs of blue-purple smoke when you defeat them – are straightforwardly beautiful. There are an abundance of visual flourishes here, such as the glowing red eyes of the awful zombie creatures that can freeze Link in place with a shriek.

A couple of important but less obvious changes make Ocarina of Time easier to play. Link can jump anywhere now, with the press of a button, where previously he could only leap over predetermined gaps. All of his trinkets and tools are quickly accessible via quick-select buttons and a horizontal selector like Breath of the Wild’s, rather than buried in menus. (You will be extremely grateful for this when you enter the sunken Water Temple, and find that you can take Link’s iron boots on and off with blessed ease.) Fighting feels a little faster, more dramatic, as you draw Link’s sword and circle an armoured skeleton. And the all-timer of a score, redone with a full orchestra, is newly powerful and portentous. There are playful touches, too: irresistibly, you can now play Link’s ocarina with your voice rather than your controller, humming those familiar tunes into the Switch 2’s microphone.

Despite all of this new sheen, Ocarina of Time retains its understated melancholy. There is an essential tragedy to this tale about a boy hero whose childhood is stolen by an evil king. It is a dark fairytale that begins with a nightmare and the death of a forest god, sometimes scary and, like all children’s tales that stand the test of time, totally unpatronising. It is preoccupied with the sadness and inevitability of the passage of time, and the alignment now between that story and the real-world circumstances of this remake is impossible to ignore. The first time I stepped into the Temple of Time and pulled the Master Sword from its stone, I was myself a child. Re-entering that place as an adult gave me shivers I can’t quite describe. It got me thinking very deeply about how we pass down our cherished stories to the next generation.

I cannot make any pretence of objectivity about Ocarina of Time. It was one of the most important games of my childhood and indeed my life; a game that showed me the possibilities of the form when the rules of video games were still being written, and cemented my love of games. I cannot play it without the influence of nostalgia, and like Link, I often felt returned to my child self as I played. But even without that powerful attachment, I think anyone would be moved by this game. Nintendo’s modern Zelda team have turned one of the best games of the 1990s into one of the best games of the 2020s, and made time-travellers out of us all.

• The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time is out on 5 November; £59.99