We’re celebrating the 40th Anniversary of The Legend of Zelda, so when series producer Eiji Aonuma politely sidesteps a question, as he did recently in an interview with YouTuber Andres Restart, you kind of learn to read between the lines a bit, and his latest non-answer about a possible The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time remake feels exactly like that, not a confirmation, not even really a tease, but enough to get people talking again and sending fans into feverish speculation.
This is on top of Aonuma hinting at a remake in 2023 during a Game Informer interview, and it comes at a time when credible leaker Nate the Hate mentioned an Ocarina of Time remake on his podcast. So all the stars are aligning, but Nintendo is silent, and yet even silence in game rumour terms speaks volumes, apparently.
But a remake of Ocarina of Time feels a little more than just bringing back a classic game for nostalgia’s sake, as this is one of, if not the game, that perfected and showed how 3D could work, how a camera should behave and how space should be designed in a game of this kind of new, as it was then, storytelling. In this respect, it’s more than just ‘a classic Zelda game’.
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Which is why a remake could be risky, as seen by the fan-made Ocarina of Time in Unreal Engine demo, and why Nintendo has so far been side-stepping the official news, or any news. The game’s visual style was due to the N64’s limits, the need for low-poly models, simple texts and heavy fogging used artistically made the game’s art direction what we love. If that’s updated completely, with ray-tracing and high-res everything, it could diminish and even flatten the original’s art.
Here’s where things get interesting, because if this remake is real, then it’s not just a technical job, it’s an art direction problem, and there are a few obvious ways they could go, none of them easy.
(Image credit: Nintendo)
They could do the straight remake, keep everything as-is, but polish it, which would probably look nice and sell incredibly well and also be the least interesting option creatively.
Or Nintendo could go further, push it towards the looser, more expressive style of modern Zelda, something closer to Breath of the Wild, where light and atmosphere do more of the talking than geometry, which would be a bigger swing and also the kind of thing that risks upsetting people who just want their memories back in HD.
But the version that makes the most sense, to me, and also the hardest to pull off, is that in-between space, where you keep the bones of the game’s art style, but modern artists are reinterpretting how it’s all rendered, not chasing realism and not stuck in nostalgia, but something in between. Think Demon’s Souls by Bluepoint Games, or Shadow of the Colossus by Bluepoint Games… I miss Bluepoint Games.
Eiji Aonuma hasn’t said anything, not really, but if this remake happens, you can bet everyone will have an opinion. So why not get ahead of the pack and share your thoughts in the poll below?