The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time remake for Switch 2 is very faithful, but it also takes some liberties and notable updates. From our wide-ranging interview with producers Eiji Aonuma and Hidemaro Fujibayashi, it sounds like this was something of a training ground for younger staffers to understand the world and dungeon design of a classic Zelda format, but they also weren’t too beholden to the original design. In fact, Aonuma said he would push back against young developers who defaulted to the original design.
In response to a question about dungeon design, Fujibayashi said the senior staff would play “memory erasure” exercises, pretending that this is their first time seeing a dungeon to approach it with fresh eyes. Even though they know the solutions, they would act a if they don’t to push the staff to think about whether the design was intuitive.
“One interesting experience for me, that comes up occasionally when we’re doing this playtesting and I have to clear my mind and play as a beginner, is if I struggle with something, but then they’ll say to me, ‘But that’s how it was in the original,'” Aonuma said. “And that’s my moment to say, ‘Well, yes, of course, I know. I worked on the original, I was there.’ [laughs] So that’s not enough of an end to the conversation for me. They have to go a little bit further and analyze and think about the reasons. And perhaps there is good cause for us to take a different approach here based on what a new player’s experience would be. Just stopping at ‘that’s how it was before’ is not going to be enough.”
That refusal to be too precious about some of his own original design from 1998–Aonuma worked primarily on dungeons design at the time–is one reason why the remake is so stellar. The main changes are elements like the jump button and equipment bar, but there are lots of subtler changes too, like clearer signposting in the Water Temple.
Zelda received a 9/10 in our Ocarina of Time remake review, and it’s currently the top-rated game of 2026 on GameSpot sister site Metacritic.
