A remake of the 1998 original, scheduled for 5 November
Nintendo's remake of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time was scheduled to reach the Switch 2 on 5 November, 28 years after the original game launched on the Nintendo 64 in 1998. According to The Verge, it is the first Zelda release that is exclusive to the Switch 2. Nintendo first teased the project in June with a brief trailer that revealed little, and the release date was confirmed later during a stream held for the franchise's 40th anniversary.
IGN reported that, when it published its release guide, Nintendo had not yet said when the game would appear on the eShop. Based on the company's habits with big releases, the guide expected a launch at midnight local time in every region on 5 November. In North America that means midnight in the easternmost time zone, so the game would go live at 12am Eastern on 5 November, which is 9pm Pacific on 4 November. The remake takes up 24.5 GB of storage, and players who want it ready on day one need that much free space.
The same guide described a workaround that some owners use to start a day early: linking a Nintendo Account to another region, or creating a new account, which the guide calls the New Zealand trick. That route requires a New Zealand credit card or eShop cards to add funds, and the guide warned that buyers end up paying more than the US dollar price. For people who would rather celebrate in person, Nintendo has announced in-store events at its San Francisco and New York shops.
Prices are reported differently by market. The Guardian's review lists the game at £59.99. The roundup of coverage said the physical edition carried a $10 discount at Amazon and Walmart before launch, and that after release it would almost certainly rise from $59.99 to $69.99, while the digital edition would stay at $59.99.
Nintendo had also launched a special version of the Switch 2 and the Switch 2 Pro Controller decorated with Triforce imagery to accompany the game. The accessory maker Hori lists a $49.99 electronic ocarina on its website, which was briefly shown during the anniversary event. The instrument lets players pick out their own songs with buttons, play one of 12 pre-programmed songs from the games, use the device with the remake's sound recognition feature, or connect headphones for a private session.
What is different from the Nintendo 64 game
The roundup describes the remake as having a much more realistic visual style and several modern additions: a jump button, a way to sprint, full voice acting and a progress marker called Threads of Time that can be viewed from the pause screen. It also connects to the Zelda Notes feature in the Nintendo Switch app, which lets players look at game maps and other information on a phone. Even so, it said, many elements appear to stay faithful to the classic release.
In a developer interview, Nintendo staff said they wanted to “preserve the experience of spamming the Roll Attack to forward roll your way across Hyrule Field.” The writer of the roundup confirmed that the move survives, and added that players can now also dash. The interview is a lengthy developer question-and-answer session, and Nintendo had released only its first half in the days before launch. That half covers the gameplay changes and the new visual style.
The art director, Aya Shida, said the style was inspired by puppet shows. “Neither puppet shows nor practical effects films reproduce reality exactly as it is. Even so, both create a convincing sense that the characters truly exist within their respective fantasy worlds. We also felt that there was some overlap between these forms of expression and the distinctive nostalgia evoked by the original game.”
Nintendo also revealed that it held blind voice auditions for the remake and ended up casting an actor for the same role they played in the original. The roundup, citing another games site, said that actor was apparently Kaori Mizuhashi, who played Navi in the original and is listed as Navi's Japanese voice in a leaked credits sequence. The credits have not been confirmed by Nintendo in the material reviewed here.
The newspaper's review adds detail about the writing. Text chatter with Hyrule's inhabitants has been expanded, and key story moments now play out in fully voiced cutscenes, though Link himself stays silent. The critic compared the cutscenes to those in 2023's Tears of the Kingdom. The same review noted that the orchestral score has been re-recorded with a full orchestra, and that players can now play Link's ocarina by humming the familiar tunes into the Switch 2's microphone rather than using the controller.
How reviewers described the way it plays
Eurogamer's reviewer said the game is more or less the one people played in 1998. The adventure still has Link travelling between different eras of Hyrule to defeat Ganon, it still starts in Kokiri Forest, and it still has Epona clearing the fence at Lon Lon Ranch. The world is still divided into small areas that fade out and in as players move between them, and the reviewer said an existing guide for the Nintendo 64 game will almost always get a stuck player through a dungeon.
What has changed is the camera and the controls. The reviewer said the remake has dropped every fixed camera in favour of movement on one thumbstick and camera control on the other. Hyrule Castle Town, which the reviewer remembered as a place viewed from a central camera, now has cobbled paths running in every direction that can be explored with the camera following behind. The reviewer wrote that the game's spaces feel less like elaborate machines and more like ordinary video game spaces, and called that a trade-off, while adding that children who were not born in 1998 should feel at home in it more quickly.
The reviewer also described how individual places have been redrawn. The route to Zora's Domain is now a scramble over cliffs and arcing crags, Jabu Jabu's Belly is built from bold 1990s Nickelodeon colours and glossy textures, and the Water Temple is a drowned Art Nouveau palace. The Forest Temple, which the reviewer called a favourite among all Zelda dungeons, is now a parquet-floored mansion overtaken by trees, with dark wood-panelled corridors and pieces of a church sticking out of the foliage.
Smaller changes, the reviewer argued, matter more than the scenery. Link has a jump button in place of the original's contextual jumps. Usable items can be swapped from a trigger mini-menu, a feature the reviewer said was borrowed from the 3DS remake, and boots and headwear can be changed with the directional face buttons. In the Water Temple, a dungeon known for its difficulty and for requiring Link's iron boots to be put on and taken off repeatedly, that means players can change the water level and experiment without stopping to open a menu. The reviewer said the intrusions from Navi the fairy and the owl have been pared back, and that the wallet now holds more rupees from the start. The reviewer admitted struggling to spot most of the tweaks with confidence.
The newspaper's critic took a more emphatic line, describing the remake as an ambitious reworking rather than a light-touch remaster and calling it “a dream come true.” The critic said the game visits the same places in the same order and keeps the same puzzle solutions, and that those solutions rose from memory while playing. A new scene at the story's most vital point, when young Link pulls the Master Sword from the stone in the Temple of Time and is frozen for seven years, left the critic close to awestruck. In the critic's account, combat feels a little faster and more intense, and the remake borrows the horizontal item selector familiar from Breath of the Wild.
The roundup collected hands-on impressions from its own writers. One said the game is a lot of fun to play, that the graphics and art style are fantastic, and that the controls have been modernised so that people used to third-person action games can pick them up more easily. Another, writing from early hands-on time, said it was “shaping up to be the best-looking, best-playing version of the game” and could be surprisingly terrifying at times. A third writer's verdict was that the remake does what a good remake should: “preserve the core of the original experience while making it more accessible for modern audiences.”
Where critics saw trade-offs
Neither of the two full reviews quoted here was entirely uncritical. The games site's reviewer said that the reviewer's wife, a big fan of the original who wandered in and out of the room during play, often felt the game she remembered had more character in its visuals. The fight with Dark Link has lost a little of its glitchy, in-between quality, the reviewer said, although the staging, with an old tree in the middle of a vast smoky room, is still strange. Late in the game, in Gerudo territory, the reviewer wrote, “It's pleasant to look at, but it sometimes doesn't look specifically like Zelda anymore.”
The newspaper's critic was won over by the art style, which looks like very detailed theatre scenery, with a doll-like Link who has glassy eyes and richly stitched clothes. The critic described the effect as “not so much realistic as hyperreal”, which sits differently from the roundup's description of a much more realistic look. The critic did dislike some changes, including that the character Sheik has lost much of his androgyny, and predicted that the voiced cutscenes will divide players, adding that the original game is still available for purists who prefer it.
The critic also made a point of acknowledging bias. Ocarina of Time was one of the most important games of the critic's childhood, the review said, and the critic could not play it without nostalgia. Even so, the verdict was that Nintendo's modern Zelda team had turned “one of the best games of the 1990s into one of the best games of the 2020s.”
A crowded autumn for Nintendo
The roundup framed the release as Nintendo's own fall juggernaut, arriving ahead of Rockstar Games' Grand Theft Auto VI. It said the two biggest games of 2026 were set to launch only a few weeks apart in November, and that the Zelda remake was one of just a few big-budget titles launching in the same month as the Rockstar game.
After the June presentation in which the remake was announced, a writer for the same site argued that the showcase had been a chance for Nintendo to sell new audiences on the Switch 2 as it headed into its second holiday season, one in which the hardware would be more expensive because of a price rise. That, the writer said, is not quite what happened: there was little that felt truly new, and the two major Switch 2 exclusives rounding out the 2026 calendar were both remakes from the Nintendo 64 era. At that point the writer described the Ocarina of Time remake as due to follow a Star Fox remake that was launching later that month.
Where the remake sits in the Zelda series
The roundup placed the release against the recent history of the franchise. It said Breath of the Wild reinvigorated Zelda with an open-ended adventure built around player freedom, and that the philosophy carried into Tears of the Kingdom and Echoes of Wisdom. As a result, the writer said, Zelda has never been bigger, and the traditional, more linear games had seemed to belong to the past. The Ocarina remake is the first major release in the franchise since 2024's Echoes of Wisdom, which starred Princess Zelda and followed 2023's Tears of the Kingdom, a direct sequel to Breath of the Wild. The roundup added that Tears of the Kingdom and Breath of the Wild both received upgraded Switch 2 versions alongside the launch of the new console.
Nintendo's own description is conservative. The longtime Zelda producer Eiji Aonuma described the remake as “a faithful interpretation using modern technologies.” The roundup's writer said that going back to the game that first showed a classic Zelda structure could work in three dimensions, a large world connecting a handful of intricate, puzzle-filled dungeons, shows “there’s still some life left in the traditional Zelda formula.”
For the two reviewers who wrote at the greatest length, the subject is time. The games site's reviewer said Ocarina of Time is preoccupied with time because a central mechanic takes Hyrule seven years into the future, turns Link from a child into an adult and then lets players go back, and noted that the adult Link goes through variations of the same dungeons that the young Link did, only harder and more consequential. The newspaper's critic wrote that the story keeps its understated melancholy, and that the real-world gap between the original and the remake makes that theme impossible to ignore. Both reviews were published on 4 November, a day before the scheduled launch.
This report was prepared with AI assistance and checked against the sources it relied on. Read our editorial standards and methodology.
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