The Ocarina of Time remake on the Switch 2 smashes together the past and present. The game retains much of the original N64 experience while updating it with modern graphics and gameplay that make it feel contemporary. But the mingling of time periods also extends to the development team. While Ocarina’s remake was led by producers Eiji Aonuma (a director on the original game who is now the franchise’s steward at Nintendo) and Hidemaro Fujibayashi (best known for directing Breath of the Wild and its sequel), the team also featured a number of younger developers, including some who had never played the original. According to Fujibayashi, those new voices provided some much-needed perspective that shaped the remake.
“What really impressed me was the fact that they really embraced the theme of what not to change from the original,” Fujibayashi tells me ahead of Ocarina of Time’s launch when explaining the influence of the younger team members, who approached the project “very carefully.” He adds that “I feel confident that they weren’t necessarily pursuing something new for the sake of novelty when it might be unneeded and clutter the experience.
