Ocarina of Time is better than you remember

Yeah, that's a sound I didn't need to hear again. But I probably blocked the memory of that whole level when this game first came out decades ago. Now Nintendo has remade The Legend of Zelda The Ocarina of Time. To be clear, the sounds are mostly the good. If you're a Zelda fan, you know the sounds are what make it special. The slashes, the thunks. And the ocarina itself is pretty satisfying. You can even hum the tunes into your Switch too. Oh, that's nice too. The game clearly looks amazing too. It's shinier, you feel Hyrule Kingdom breathe, it's colorful and detailed, even heart containers look like that thing the lady threw off the boat at the end of Titanic. Which, by the way, was still a crisp reference when this game first came out in 1998. Epic boss fights finally look, well, epic. It's all still a cartoon fantasy, but characters look more fleshed out and dimensional, even the weird ones. Mui. Mui. Mui. The sound and the visuals help make the remake super satisfying, but with good memories comes the limits of living in the past. Yes, Epona still feels like a minivan to handle at times. Yep, gorgeous boss fights are still just a few whacks away from being over. And yes, while Hyrule looks grand in scale, this is not the vast open world of the last two new Zelda games. But maybe that's not a bad thing. Look, Breath of the Wild, Tears of the Kingdom, these things took me more than 100 hours to finish, but I got a kindergartner now, so a tight and bright experience in 2026, that's welcome. And this remake stays true to all Zelda games. You know the formula, you know what you love about it, from the grand to the simple. And Nintendo is banking on you wanting to love it again and again.