... Why are We Remaking Ocarina of Time?
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So it seems like we're getting an Ocarina of Time Remake... But why? Okay, money, obviously. A lot of people like remakes, and Ocarina of Time is one of the best-regarded games Nintendo has ever released. It's the kind of thing that makes a lot of business sense. So maybe instead of why, I guess my question is how? How do you remake Ocarina of Time? I guess we'll get to see later this year.
See, I think Ocarina of Time is so beloved not because it's a perfect game that is better than every game after it. It's remarkable for how perfectly it translated the 2D Zelda formula - which keep in mind had only been truly figured out two games earlier with Link to the Past and was still fresh - into 3D. And this is not to slight the developers. They were visionaries. It's easy to forget today, when we have decades of 3D games to pull from. It's easy to make something passable today by just doing things like other games. But in the PS1 and N64 era, 3D was a new frontier. Developers had to figure out how to make 3D games and make them good. Many games, including from existing franchises, struggled with the leap. Ocarina of Time stuck the landing so well that every 3D Zelda game after it would mostly stick to small iterations and refinements, along with unique mechanics to keep things fresh. Up until the formula got tired and got retired with BotW. I am reluctant to say old games "hold up" - it implicitly implies a newer is better narrative. But Ocarina of Time comes from an era where a lot of games don't hold up (though many do). Where often going back to play even the great games of the era comes with a lot of rough edges and things you have to get used to. But OoT is a game I think any Zelda fan from the Gamecube or Wii era could jump right into with little issue.
It speaks to what people loved about Nintendo in this era: The polish and refinement of their games were well ahead of most of the rest of the industry, which wouldn't catch up for years. But you just can't recapture that. An Ocarina of Time remake that simply brings things up to "Modern Standards" wouldn't change all that much and would likely resemble a remaster more. Maybe tweak some rough edges. Add minor improvements like being able to assign the boots items to a button to quickly equip/remove (something I believe the 3DS remake did) or enabling cycling through special arrows like Wind Waker did. Maybe add some detail to Hyrule Field. Sure you could change more? But Ocarina of Time, unlike a lot of games that get remakes, is a gameplay kind of game. And thus really illustrates my issues with remakes: If you change too much in the name of "modernizing" it, you don't really have Ocarina of Time anymore. You have a new game that is calling itself a remake in order to justify being highly derivative. And that game may still be good. But pretending it's anything close to a replacement for the original does the player a disservice - instead of playing 2 good games, they only play 1 and ignore the other because they falsely believe they've had the experience already.
There's also the big, open-world elephant in the room. Breath of the Wild reinvented Zelda at a time where most people who weren't devoted fans were starting to feel things were getting repetitive. Now, maybe the old Zelda formula has been on break long enough to be exciting to people again? I never got sick of it, but... From Ocarina of Time to Skyward Sword was 13 years - Skyward Sword was when people started to seriously tire of the formula. But Skyward Sword was now 15 years ago. And there hasn't really been a totally new Zelda game that has returned to the formula since. A Link Between Worlds was closest, but still experimented quite a bit with the formula. Since then the classic Zelda formula hasn't gone away, but has mostly been confined to remasters or very faithful remakes. But I feel like some people will be very adamant about wanting this to be in the style of BotW. Or at very least judge it in comparison to BotW. Because that's what modern Zelda is like. And while I do think that could be interesting - seeing a BotW-style game in a smaller and more focused world... It would be very different from Ocarina of Time. And comparing the two doesn't feel particularly fair when they're clearly aiming to be different things.
Look, maybe this could be a highly faithful remake - something like the admittedly excellent Link's Awakening remake on Switch. That would, honestly, be fine by me. I don't think it needs it - especially when Ocarina of Time is available on the Switch Online Expansion Pack. But it would probably be fine - people who don't like how old games look will probably enjoy it and maybe play a classic they would have otherwise skipped. But also a dramatic teaser trailer for a game that's mostly just a prettier version of a classic feels like overdoing it. And I'm sure some people would want more... Or maybe this is just my latest complaint about remakes in general. I think old games are fine as they are. And I think fixating on remakes does the industry a disservice. Old games are being recreated, but rarely are they being learned from...