I only have 43 minutes at night to replay Ocarina of Time, so I expected the older design to feel like the obvious reason for a remake. Instead, the slow text boxes and repeated menu switching bothered me more than the visuals. I also noticed I stopped to line up jumps and check the map more often than I remembered. Do others see the same thing, and does that justify Nintendo remaking it, or should Ocarina of Time be left alone?
Don’t rebuild the whole game just because its interface wastes time. The issues you noticed sound less like bad level design and more like old hardware conventions: text that crawls, constant equipment swapping, limited camera control, and vague navigation. Those problems stand out much more when you play in short sessions.
I’d rather see Nintendo make a careful remaster with faster text, streamlined item controls, improved camera options, clearer maps, and optional navigation hints. Keep the dungeon layouts, combat timing, music, and visual atmosphere mostly intact. A full remake risks “fixing” the deliberate pacing and slightly strange mood that made the game memorable.
So yes, it deserves another update, but it doesn’t need to be reinvented. Make the friction optional and leave the actual adventure alone.
The 3DS version already proved a total rebuild isn’t necessary. Put those interface fixes into an accessible modern release, preserve the odd visuals and atmosphere, and spend remake-level effort on a Zelda game that hasn’t been rereleased repeatedly.
It needs a remake, but the graphics are the least important reason.
The bigger issue is that Ocarina of Time was built around long, uninterrupted play sessions. Saving often preserves your progress without preserving your exact position, which means a short evening session can begin with several minutes of travel, menu setup, and repeated dialogue before you reach anything new. An emulator-style suspend point helps, but that is a snapshot rather than a proper game-aware save system. A remake could add reliable autosaves, dungeon checkpoints, skippable conversations, and equipment shortcuts without changing a single puzzle.
I slightly disagree that the handheld release settled the question. It demonstrated how much better the game feels after basic interface work, but it was still adapting the old structure rather than reconsidering how players enter and leave a session. Nintendo could rebuild the software layer while treating enemy behavior, room geometry, animation timing, and music as protected specifications.
The original should remain available too. Preservation and remake arguments only become hostile when the remake replaces the source material. Keep an accurate version for people who want the historical game, then make a new edition that respects players who cannot dedicate an entire evening to reaching the next useful stopping point.
Compare what happened with Metroid Prime Remastered and the Link’s Awakening remake. One kept the actual game underneath and just modernized controls and visuals. The other rebuilt everything from scratch and, whether you liked the toy-diorama look or not, it changed the feel of moving through the world. That gap is the whole argument here, and I think a couple of people are underestimating how far it stretches.
@silverninja7253studi makes the strongest case in the thread, but the phrase ‘protected specifications’ is doing a lot of heavy lifting. You cannot rebuild the software layer and guarantee the movement stays identical. Link’s roll timing, the way he catches ledges, the exact spacing on backflips, the slightly floaty jump attack, all of that comes out of the original engine’s quirks. Rewrite the engine and you will drift, even if the room geometry is a perfect copy. Anyone who grew up with that muscle memory notices immediately.
The autosave and dungeon checkpoint idea is genuinely good though, and it is the part I care about most. Saving that drops you back at your file’s fixed spot is the single most annoying thing about revisiting it now. You lose ten minutes just walking back to where you were. Fixing that costs almost nothing in terms of preservation risk, since it does not touch a single puzzle or enemy.
Where I disagree with @syssudo1 is the assumption that ‘make the friction optional’ is cheap. Optional toggles multiply testing. Every skippable cutscene, every fast-text mode, every equipment shortcut has to be checked against triggers and softlocks, and OoT is full of scripted sequences that assume you watched the thing before the door opens. That is real work, not a checkbox.
Honest answer: it does not need a from-the-ground-up remake, and I would be nervous about one, because the odds of them sanding off the weird atmosphere are high. A serious modern rerelease with proper save handling and interface fixes would cover ninety percent of the actual complaints. Save the full rebuild for a Zelda that never got a second life.
Don’t make Hyrule bigger. That is the fastest way to turn a remake into a worse game while everyone congratulates it for having more grass. The original field is sparse, but it functions as connective space. Expanding it, stuffing it with crafting materials, or adding twenty side activities would make those short nightly sessions even less productive.
That is my biggest concern with a full remake. Developers rarely get permission to rebuild a famous game and then leave its size alone. Somebody will want extra caves, longer story scenes, more elaborate towns, additional collectibles, and an extended tutorial for players who have somehow never pushed a block before. The old friction disappears, only to be replaced by modern friction wearing nicer lighting.
I agree with @xturbopandax that optional features require real testing, but I don’t find that especially persuasive as a reason to avoid them. This is Nintendo updating one of its defining games, not somebody patching a hobby project over the weekend. Fast text, button remapping, instant equipment selection, cutscene skipping after the first viewing, and sensible save points are exactly the sort of boring work a premium rerelease should include. If scripted doors break because the text moves faster, fix the scripts. That is what the budget is for.
Where I push back on the preservation argument is that identical movement is not automatically the highest priority for every release. Keep the original available for speedrunners, longtime players, and anyone whose hands expect every strange little animation delay. A new edition can feel slightly different without becoming a betrayal. The important line is whether the changes improve control or start redesigning the game around current trends. Smoother aiming is useful. Turning every enemy into a drawn-out combat encounter because modern games need dramatic parries is not.
So no, Ocarina of Time does not need a giant from-scratch reinvention. It needs an edition made by people who understand that less waiting is good and more game is not always better. Preserve the scale, puzzles, soundtrack, strange tone, and brisk dungeon structure. Remove the needless repetition around them. If Nintendo cannot resist adding a crafting tree and several hours of map icons, then yes, please leave it alone.