Nintendo has finally revealed its The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time remake with a lengthy gameplay demonstration and luscious release date trailer. This long-awaited revival of the seminal masterpiece looks incredible, and is poised to be a very faithful take on Link’s first 3D adventure.
But this dedication doesn’t mean that Nintendo isn’t introducing a bunch of new features to the game or updating aspects of the experience so it looks and plays better than ever. Here are eight major changes coming to the Ocarina of Time remake and why they might impact how the game looks, plays, and departs from the 1998 masterpiece.
The jump button changes everything
In the original Ocarina of Time, and several iterations of Zelda afterward, there was no dedicated jump button. Instead, Link simply had to run toward a ledge and hopefully use this momentum to land on a nearby platform without plummeting to oblivion.
While the game was ahead of its time several decades ago, the lack of a jump button is awfully frustrating to anyone hoping to revisit it in 2026. Unless the angle was just right or you had wrestled with the camera ahead of time, there was always a chance of Link accidentally yeeting himself in the wrong direction. You could die or end up back at a much earlier point in a dungeon all because the controls refused to play ball.
The remake is going to be much more fun to play in the moment with a jump button that offers more control over Link’s movement, not to mention when trying to reach treasures that sit just out of reach. Heck, I wouldn’t say no to a platforming challenge or two.
Free camera movement transforms our vision of Hyrule
While Ocarina of Time didn’t have a completely fixed camera like Resident Evil or Dino Crisis, the original game did limit exactly how the player could view certain locations. It prevented the player from moving around some of its three-dimensional spaces with an absolute sense of freedom, meaning places like Castle Town or the Temple of Time housing the Master Sword were designed to be viewed from one perspective alone.
The remake removes that restriction entirely and gives players the freedom to move the camera around however they like in presumably every single location in the game. This really excites me, and should utterly transform how we approach places like Castle Town, which previously left so much up to the imagination. With any luck, Nintendo will fill these additional nooks and crannies with secrets that weren’t present in the original game.
