Today’s big summer Nintendo Direct just closed with huge, if already-known-thanks-to-leaks, news: The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time is getting remade for the Nintendo Switch 2. And it’s out later this year.
But beyond that simple fact, a brief look at a tapestry, and a glimpse of the hero himself fast asleep, we genuinely don’t know anything else. Like, at all. So of course, I have many questions. Here are ten of those questions, in the order in which I thought of them as I have pondered the trailer over the last hour. The trailer answered none of them; hopefully future trailers do, and soon.
1. What does Link actually look like in action?
A lot of folks are (not entirely unfairly) criticizing the way Link looks in this trailer and, look, I get it. It is giving “hire this man” vibes. But also, like, he’s just asleep in a dark room, man. It’s sort of weird that this is what Nintendo chose to show, honestly, because I don’t feel like anyone looks their best in the middle of the night, Link included. What I really want to see is Link running around the world, interacting with other people, moving. I feel like until we actually see him in action we can’t get an accurate picture of whether or not this graphical style is doing something kind of Skyward Sword/Twilight Princess-y or if they really did hire the man from the meme to make Unreal Engine 5 grass.
2. Is this a faithful remake, or will it include significant changes?
This one is the big question, right? And it’s one I thought for sure Nintendo would answer when they announced it, even just in vague, broad strokes. But no! We have no idea if this is a faithful, more-or-less 1:1 recreation of Ocarina with maybe a few technical tweaks, or if this game is getting a total overhaul with bigger dungeons and new areas and story and whatnot. There’s just no way to tell.
Opinions may vary, but for me the ideal situation would be a mix of the two: a mostly-faithful remake with updated controls and tech, and maybe a smidge of extra content thrown around here and there, perhaps a bonus dungeon or something. Maybe some originally cut content restored? That’d be cool. This is probably one of the biggest questions, and one that will likely plague the game until and after it’s out, given that everyone is likely to have a different opinion on whether Nintendo gets this right or not.
3. Do I really have to go through Jabu-Jabu again?
Really? Almost certainly? And carrying Ruto around? God damn it. I hope they at least make it so she doesn’t disappear and respawn back at the start every time a stray breeze wafts past her.
4. What will the world look like?
This is maybe a bit of a riff off the question above of what Link will look like, but I’m also very, very curious how Hyrule is going to look. Now that we’ve seen the enormity of Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom‘s Hyrule, it’s going to be challenging for something like Ocarina to evoke that beauty and vastness in quite the same way. At the time it originally came out, Ocarina‘s Hyrule seemed massive. I don’t know how you conjure that feeling again in 2026!
What I do know is that I want the world to be colorful. The one thing that concerned me in this early shot was that Link looked a little bit drab, rather than vivid as he was in Ocarina and in other recent games. It’s a bit too Twilight Princess-y for me. Admittedly, again, it was a dark shot. No one looks good asleep. I hope that the light of day will reveal a Hyrule bursting with color and contrast, and I’m eager to see whatever they come up with for Hyrule Field now that they’re no longer shackled to the N64’s outdated textures and limitations.
5. Is Nintendo updating the controls?
I feel like Nintendo has to do this, right? When Ocarina came out, the notions of enemy targeting and camera lock-on were novel ones, and this must have felt ridiculously good to play. Well, as of January 2026, it feels like ass. The camera swings around wildly and gets stuck behind objects, I can never quite jump at the right angle, and constantly having to go into the menu subscreen to swap items is a drag. There’s no way the Ocarina remake doesn’t have a different system, it being on a different system with a totally different controller for starters, but I hope they don’t waste a ton of time trying to make it feel like the original. It’s okay to admit that 3D adventure games have learned from Ocarina and grown significantly since it pioneered this stuff.
6. Are they going to tone down Navi?
I hope not! In fact, I genuinely hope they make her even more obnoxious. Though I’m now actually desperately curious to know how they handle her voice. Navi’s “Hey!” at the exact pitch and cadence we all remember it has become infamous, and if it sounds just a tiny bit off, it’s going to bother people (me).
7. Are they going to tie this in with the movie?
The Legend of Zelda‘s big movie adaptation is coming out next year, in April, and we still don’t know what Zelda game story, if any, it’s going to follow. We’ve seen a couple of images from the film’s production that suggest it could be drawing on Breath of the Wild a bit, but other images are hinting at something more like Ocarina of Time. Obviously, releasing the game version of Ocarina of Time would be a great way to tee up a film that tells the same story, but whether there will be any further connections remains to be seen.
8. What…is Link wearing in this scene?
Seriously, what is that? Not the tunic, the other thing. Is that armor? I don’t think he ever wears armor in Ocarina of Time. Certainly not as a child, and certainly not to bed. One of my weird video game trope pet peeves is when protagonists lay down on beds to sleep in full armor. I understand that this happens because no one wants to put in the hundreds of hours required to model them either removing their armor or donning pajamas they’ll only wear for a few seconds, but that doesn’t make it any less weird to see people sleeping in this sort of gear. It’s like falling asleep in jeans. It simply is not done.
Anyway, kiddo, please remove your armor before bedtime. Put on some footy pajamas like Tingle wears, it’s fine. We don’t have to live like this.
9. Who is developing this?
We just learned today that Velen Studios is working on the Star Fox revival, and Nintendo has been more and more comfortable in recent years entrusting its major franchises to outside studios like Grezzo, Koei Tecmo, and others. A lot of these games have done extremely well as a result; just look at Pokopia. I could see the argument that you’d want Ocarina of Time to be made by the Zelda team itself, with veterans of the original advising. But I could also see the argument for handing it over to a group that has grown up as superfans of the original and who are full of new ideas on how to improve and polish the gem that’s already there. There’s no perfectly right answer here, and since Nintendo has a weird history of avoiding questions about who is making its games, we may not even find out until after the game is out.
10. When will we see more?
That’s the big one, right? Most of the above questions can be cleared up with a 10- or 20-minute Nintendo Direct focused just on this game, which I assume we will get before its launch. If I had to guess, I’d say Nintendo wants to get its marketing cycle clear of Star Fox before it starts telling us more about what Link is up to, so we’ll probably have to wait a few more months to learn more. Ocarina of Time is out this year, which is a pretty confident proclamation given there are only six months left in it, so we can’t wait for long. For now, we can only wonder and speculate on the very important questions, like why Link doesn’t own proper pajamas and if our souls can handle going through Jabu-Jabu one more time.
