Grand Theft Ocarina Could Be Gaming’s Barbenheimer

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Three weeks have passed since the massive Fire Emblem: Fortune’s Weave, and only two weeks are left until Nintendo Switch Sports Resort. Time for the hands-on previews, then, and Polygon’s Mike McWhertor duly reports that Switch Sports Resort is a perfectly chill compilation that channels WaveRace, Pilotwings, and even Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater, as well as the mighty Wii Sports.

We all know this is just the build-up, though. Just two weeks after Switch Sports Resort comes The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, a remake so consequential, of a game so revered, that it effectively has the status of a brand-new mainline Zelda game. I’ve heard a plausible but unverified rumor that this is how it’s being treated internally; that, rather than entrust the remake to an outside developer like Grezzo (which handled Ocarina of Time 3D and the Link’s Awakening remake), Nintendo made it in-house.

There’s certainly a sense of event about it, only added to by Nintendo’s bold decision to release the game in November. It’s the only publisher daring enough to bring a major new release to retail in the same month as Grand Theft Auto 6. This heavyweight clash was noticed and spoofed by the staff writers at Saturday Night Live last weekend, in a sketch that had Link and GTA 6‘s Jason making their competing pitches: guns vs. fairies, sex vs. puzzles.

The sketch is silly and a bit cringe, but it’s not condescending to games (any more than SNL is to any other object of its satire), and it’s fairly even-handed in its ridicule. Link is prissy, Jason is a dumb boor. Under the surface, Zelda and GTA may have more in common than you think (especially post-Breath of the Wild Zelda), but it’s easy fun for SNL to contrast their wildly divergent embodiments of video gaming cliché, knowing a general audience will get it. That makes them effective counterprogramming.

The SNL sketch posits GTA 6 vs Ocarina of Time as a kind of Barbenheimer, a confluence of release dates that sets the stage for an amusing, all-in-good-fun culture clash. That’s probably overstating things — the two games’ release dates are actually two weeks apart, and Ocarina, for all its cachet, is a production on a dramatically smaller scale that can’t hope to challenge GTA in sales terms. Last month, I wrote about how Nintendo’s bravery is really just common sense, since the games appeal to very different markets outside core gaming fans.

Yet there might be something to it, all the same. Link might be the butt of more of SNL‘s jokes than Jason, but it’s Zelda, and Nintendo, that stands to gain from exposure like this. GTA 6 had been viewed as a monopoly of all of gaming this fall, but SNL portrayed it a duopoly, a contest of equals. If this culture-clash event catches on in the public imagination, Ocarina of Time could get sucked along in GTA 6‘s slipstream to even wider awareness, and Nintendo’s gamble will have paid off.

eShop game of the week: Order of the Sinking Star

Puzzle purists have a new holy grail: This extraordinary epic, which reworks and combines four separate variants on the theme of Sokoban (the classic block-pushing game) in a head-spinning map of conundrums that sprawls out in all directions. It’s a flawed but fascinating theoretical exercise in puzzle design.

Nintendo Classics game of the week: F-Zero GX

Jealous of players on other systems who can play Star Wars: Galactic Racer? You can laugh them off as mere dilettantes in the world of blisteringly high-speed anti-grav racing if you load up this GameCube iteration of Nintendo’s series by Sega’s Super Monkey Ball team. Goes harder than just about any racing game in history.

Nintendo Music track of the week: “Primordial Thicket” from Pikmin 4

Plucked from Nintendo’s fall playlist, here are some delightfully off-kilter atmospherics in the classic Pikmin style: a seemingly random sequence of twanging mouth harp, plonky percussion, chirping woodwinds, and chiming keyboard. Shouldn’t work, but it totally does. (You can find a playlist of all Switchboard’s Nintendo Music picks here.)

This week’s most interesting releases

Order of the Sinking Star

• Oct. 8
• Switch 2
• Confounding, supposedly 500-hour puzzle epic led by Jonathan Blow

Kingdom Hearts Collection [1-3]

• Oct. 8
• Switch 2
• Native, non-cloud versions of the entire Square Enix x Disney saga, available separately or in one mega-bundle

Neon Abyss 2

• Oct. 8
• Switch
• Chaotic action roguelike with 4-player co-op

Dragon’s Dogma 2: Dark Arisen

• Oct. 9
• Switch 2
• Capcom’s ambitious, ornery RPG arrives on Switch 2 with its brand-new expansion

Just Dance: Decades of Hits

• Oct. 13
• Switch
• Ubisoft’s indefatigable dance workout returns with a decades-themed journey through time