During Tuesday’s Legend Of Zelda 40th Anniversary Direct, Nintendo finally fully revealed its Ocarina of Time remake, and while many fans are sharing their excitement, plenty of others just don’t seem to be fully on board. Between critiques of its eerily realistic “Nintendo, hire this man!”-esque art style, its lack of changes to the original, and the validity of its entire existence as yet another remake, it’s clear that the game hasn’t quite won everyone over just yet.
What I haven’t seen enough people complaining about, however, is the real tragedy here: the remake’s incorporation of Zelda Notes.
Zelda Notes is a feature that was added to the Nintendo Switch App in 2025 to coincide with the Switch 2 Editions of Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom. With it, you can essentially use your phone as Hyrule Google Maps to navigate to new locations in both BotW and TotK. The app also gets you some small bonuses, extra voice-acted logs, the option to view gameplay stats, and the ability to share items with friends. Until now, Zelda Notes felt like an unnecessary afterthought that didn’t really impact the way you played these games, which is why it was fine.
But with Ocarina of Time, Nintendo is going all-in on Zelda Notes, incorporating it into a game’s launch for the first time. The app’s OoT edition will come with a virtual ocarina, a trivia minigame, and a stats page, which are all fine and mostly negligible gimmicks, I guess. The real problem here is that it will also introduce something called Gossip Quest, which seems like a genuinely endearing GeoGuessr-style string of quests in which players track down locations based on images to earn ocarina sheet music. The location hints are apparently only available through the Zelda Notes app, which means you’ll have to keep your phone out as you wander around Hyrule to confirm that you’ve found these locations and claim your rewards.
As a big dork and former avid player of the fan-made HyruleGuessr, I would love to play Ocarina of Time’s official version of GeoGuessr. I really would! But I don’t want to take out my phone to do it, and I’m sure a lot of other fans feel the same way.
The thing is that, in 2026, most people don’t actually want to be on their phones. Things are incredibly grim right now, which is why my YouTube feed has recently become drenched in videos titled things like “I replaced Doomscrolling with the Switch 2. Here’s what happened.” Most of these videos feature BotW and TotK, as folks posit their boundless exploration as a healthier alternative to infinite scrolling. It’s apparent that we’re in a weird cultural moment in which people have to actively make an effort to ditch their phones and reconnect with their hobbies, which makes it an especially weird time for Nintendo to double down on the second-screen apps that most companies left behind in the 2010s.
What makes this even more frustrating is that Nintendo has clearly already opted to change the structure of Ocarina of Time quite a bit by adding new dialogue, a jump button, and a few expanded areas. Adding something like a new NPC or an unassuming little requests board in Hyrule Castle Town that sends you on these quests wouldn’t have hurt the game’s faithfulness to the original at all, and it would have resulted in a much more engaging chunk of side content.
Plus, Zelda games have always been fairly outdoorsy and solitary, making this quite literally the worst major franchise for Nintendo to infuse with second-screen apps. Sure, you can make me open an app to check Splatoon match stats or type messages quickly while making a trade in Animal Crossing: New Horizons. But do I want to shatter my immersion by having to get out my phone while I’m riding my horse through a gorgeous field set in a beautiful, phone-free world? Absolutely not!
Nintendo, feel free to do whatever you want to do to Ocarina of Time. Bake it in a few more layers of shiny, DLSS 5-style realism, delay its unexpectedly close November release date by a few months, whatever—just please don’t make me use my phone to get the full experience.
