The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time preview – Link faces his scariest challenge yet: the 4K era

When beloved art is revisited and revised, a familiar cry is often heard: “You’re ruining my childhood!” But with Nintendo’s Switch 2 remake of Ocarina of Time, there are also livelihoods at risk: specifically, the man running the shooting gallery in Castle Town. In the original 1998 version of the game, he’d rip off players as they funnelled rupees and fudged the then still novel analogue-stick aiming. But in 2026 we have more responsive frame rates and a motion-controlled slingshot that allows precision adjustments. His targets tumble on the first go, and with them his entire business model. Even in Hyrule, the death of the high street seems inevitable.

Bad news for him but great news for Link, a child of the forest who, as in 1998, steps into a vast fantasy kingdom to vanquish a great evil, but now does so with a number of improvements. The boy can now sprint, preventing the ignominy of endless roly-polies to zip across grassy plains. He has a manual jump, free-rotating camera, a scrolling inventory bar that replaces menu screen faff and, crucially, a fatter wallet for holding all those gems he fleeces from struggling shooting gallery owners. Yes, we are being asked to applaud features that have been the norm for decades elsewhere, but it’s undeniably striking to enter familiar territory with a hero who feels this different under the thumbs.

The dilemma facing any remake, let alone of a game recognised as a genre-defining classic, is how closely you hew to the past. As with this year’s Star Fox revamp, Ocarina of Time finds Nintendo in a celebratory mode. It’s a polished victory lap for a game with little to prove. For newcomers it means seeing what the fuss is about without having to scrutinise the N64 original on unflattering flatscreen TVs. I doubt Hyrule Field – once a byword for video-game freedom – will ever conjure the awe it did in 1998, but seeing the sun catch in puddles and grass growing from the floor helps mask what is an obviously artificial pen, compared to Breath of the Wild’s sprawling continent.

For some returning fans, the more controlled shape is precisely the appeal. After the “make your own adventure” ethos of Switch’s open-world Zeldas, there is comfort in slipping into traditional dungeons, where every room has a characterful beast to chop up or a mechanism to unpick with a growing kitbag of tools. My great fear was that some of the puzzles are simply too iconic to be forgotten and solved again. Yet here I am, sweatily hunting ghosts around the Forest Temple, and surreptitiously peering at my neighbour’s demo pod to remind myself that, yes, you have to … [redacted for your benefit]. Given that, in 1998, these were many designers’ first attempts at a 3D level, it is astonishing how fiendish they are and how you’re expected to hold complex architecture in your head to get the run of them.

Also worth assigning headspace for: the newly orchestrated soundtrack. Melodies that fought through compressed N64 instrument samples to burn into the brain are given their own galloping freedom. I love the tentative brass when you lock an enemy into a duel – the musical equivalent of gnawing your lip.

Link’s look is more contentious. Where Hyrule is prettied up with expected detail – swaying nettles in a forest home, marbled sunlight on a riverbed – its hero is radically made over. His large glassy eyes, and fat cheeks which reflect the light as if varnished, have led critics to accuse Nintendo of crudely pursuing a textbook next-gen sheen. Bells and whistles for the sake of filling 4K TVs with surface detail, rather than honouring the original artistic intent. In the past, some eager fans attempted to remake Zelda in more capable game engines and were ridiculed for mistaking technological grunt for artistry, and as evolving hardware opens those graphical avenues to Nintendo itself, it would be ironic if it fell for the same allure.

In truth, Ocarina of Time looks coherent in motion on Switch 2. If anything, the layer of 4K specificity evokes another Zelda game, Twilight Princess, itself an attempt to apply a more mature, realistic lens to Hyrule. And could Link, with those overblown features, perhaps be nodding to another cultural pastime? As some corners of the internet scoffed at our newly “yassified” hero, the Nintendo veteran and former Legend of Zelda art director Takaya Imamura wondered if the character model drew from Zelda creator Shigeru Miyamoto’s own tastes. “[His] love of ningyogeki (puppet drama) is strongly reflected here,” Imamura wrote on X. Porcelain doll skin would certainly explain the uncanny sheen.

While we can only guess at tight-lipped Nintendo’s intent, writer and translator Paul McQuade explains it is not an impossible leap. “In Japan, puppetry is not considered an art form strictly for children, which is largely how it’s perceived elsewhere,” he says. “It’s a rich art and is highly respected.” He thinks Miyamoto could easily have been influenced by puppet shows aired by Japanese broadcaster NHK in the Shōwa postwar era.

And besides, there is something poetic about the notion. “It’s doll-like and intentionally juvenile,” McQuade says of Link’s chubby features and blushing nose. “It captures the essence of that forest where the children don’t ever grow up. Miyamoto, as a fan of puppetry, would of course draw on the vocabulary of dolls to make characters in that mould.”

I like the idea of Nintendo honouring a community frozen in time in this way, while also acknowledging that time has moved on outside the game. With that passing comes an opportunity to tweak and massage. In an adventure where a boy can magically become a man and back again with the toot of his ocarina, it makes sense for timelessness and timeliness to be in conversation. With virtual bones this strong, it would be difficult to argue that anything has been truly ruined. Unless you run the shooting gallery, of course.