Fans have been speculating for a while now that the original voice of Navi, Kaori Mizuhashi, is returning to reprise her role in the Japanese cast of the Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time remake. While Nintendo still hasn’t confirmed that, it has confirmed that at least one actor is returning from the original, and what’s more, the game’s design leads had no idea they were rehiring the same person until they’d made the decision.
The latest Ask the Developer interview from Nintendo talks about Ocarina of Time‘s music and sound with sound director and music lead Masato Ohashi. Ohashi first talks about the sound, saying that the team composed new music to go with a lot of the game’s new cutscenes, adding up to over 150 pieces of background music in total.
At one point, he says that some pieces “combine a live full orchestra with sounds from the original Nintendo 64 version,” then goes on to clarify that “[w]e didn’t use the audio output from Nintendo 64 as is. Instead, we used the original Nintendo 64 sound source as a reference to faithfully recreate some of the sounds. We wanted to do something only Nintendo could as a way of bringing back memories of that time.”
Link’s house music is offered as an example of this, with a snippet of the new track embedded in the interview. I’ll be honest, I’m struggling to understand exactly what he means here, because I don’t hear any of the sounds from the original track in the new one. I think what’s being said is that they listened to the original sound source (before any of the sound was processed through the N64) and then recreated some of those sounds for the remake, but I’d happily hear from audiophiles in the comments if I’m misunderstanding it, and I’ve asked Nintendo for comment.
Ohashi goes on to talk about layering in more subtle sounds, like leaves rustling or water running over rocks, to fill out the world. The ocarina songs are played from recordings of a real ocarina, so you can hear the breathiness to it.
“This game supports 5.1-channel surround sound, making the sounds of the game world feel more three-dimensional. Even without a home theater setup, you can experience the game’s rich ambient sound in Kokiri Forest and many other locations by connecting headphones to your Nintendo Switch 2 system. I hope you’ll give it a try.”
But the bit that stood out to me the most was the conversation about voice actors. Fans already suspected that the original Navi had rejoined the Japanese cast of the game for the remake, even as the English version gets a new Navi voice. While the team stops short of confirming that Kaori Mizuhashi is back for the remake, director HokWai Ng confirms that the team did conduct totally blind auditions for all the roles, with the top priority being to pick “voices that recreated the sound and feel of the original game.” Eiji Aonuma adds that they deliberately hid the voice actors’ names during the Japanese auditions, “[a]nd as fate would have it, one of the actors we selected had actually voiced the same character in the Nintendo 64 version. None of us saw that coming.”
I’m just trying to imagine being Mizuhashi and showing up for a voice audition for a role I’d performed 28 years ago, trying to nail the performance by making it as close to the original as possible, and obviously slam-dunking it. God, what if she hadn’t been cast? There’s always a (slim, admittedly) chance Aonuma is referring to someone else. Did any other original voice actors show up and not get picked? Yikes?
