Link has never had a jump button in The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. In the Nintendo 64 original he leapt on his own whenever he ran off a ledge, and every gap in Hyrule was measured against that automatic hop. Nintendo’s remake for Nintendo Switch 2 hands the jump to the player, and that single change says more about the project than any of its new lighting.

The remake is developed and published by Nintendo and runs only on Switch 2. The story stays where it was: a young Link is tricked by Ganondorf, the King of the Gerudo Thieves, into opening the Sacred Realm, then travels between childhood and adulthood to gather the power of the Seven Sages and repair the damage he helped cause. Nintendo Life’s read after the reveal was that it looks mostly like a one-to-one remake, modernised around the edges with rebuilt environments and quality-of-life changes.

It is a heavy thing to touch. The original holds a Metacritic score of 99, still the highest on the site, and it set rules that 3D action games followed for decades. Its lock-on camera, Z-targeting, turned a sword fight against one enemy into something a single analogue stick could manage, and one context-sensitive action button decided for you whether to climb, grab or roll. Automatic jumping belonged to the same design. It removed a precision task that the hardware of the time made unpleasant, and the dungeons were built around it.

The remake unpicks that system piece by piece. Link now jumps at the press of a button, runs, rolls and dashes across Hyrule Field with no stamina gauge attached, and swims faster. The right stick gives full manual camera control, aiming can be done with motion controls, and cutscenes are fully voiced, with expanded dialogue and a symphonic orchestral score.

Two changes reach deeper than the controls. Time no longer freezes inside towns, as it did on the Nintendo 64, so the day and night cycle keeps running wherever Link stands. Hyrule Castle Town, a small fixed-camera hub in 1998, becomes an area you can walk through and explore. A new log called Threads of Time tracks story beats and current objectives, a concession to anyone who puts the game down for a week and forgets which Sage comes next.

The ocarina itself gets the most unusual treatment. Songs can still be played on the buttons, but the Switch 2’s built-in microphone also accepts them hummed or whistled. HORI is selling an Electric Ocarina of Time accessory for $49.99, released the same day as the game. It is an electronic toy rather than a wind instrument: you press a mouthpiece button and finger keys instead of blowing, and the console picks up the sound through the game’s sound-recognition feature. A Free Play mode lets you pick out melodies note by note, and an Auto-Play mode performs any of the game’s 12 songs at the press of a button. Nintendo’s Zelda Notes service, inside the Nintendo Switch App for smartphones, adds an interactive map, progress tracking, an on-screen ocarina and quiz questions.

The look is the part dividing the audience. The art direction has been described as stylized realism, a blend of modern realistic rendering and fairy-tale shapes. Some fans have called the character models uncanny and compared the footage unfavourably with AI-generated imagery; others have praised the environment design. Both camps are arguing from a few minutes of gameplay, which is all Nintendo has shown so far.

This is the game’s third major version. The original launched on the Nintendo 64 in November 1998, Grezzo’s Ocarina of Time 3D brought it to the Nintendo 3DS in 2011, and the N64 version remains playable through the Nintendo Switch Online + Expansion Pack subscription. The Switch 2 remake was first teased at a Nintendo Direct on June 9, 2026, and shown in motion at the Zelda 40th anniversary Direct on September 8.

The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time launches on November 5, 2026, exclusively on Nintendo Switch 2, at $59.99 for the digital edition. The download is estimated at 27 GB, the game supports HDR and VRR output, and new amiibo figures of Young Link and Young Zelda, which unlock special masks, are planned for 2027. Nintendo has not explained how the dungeons were re-tuned for a player who can jump whenever they like, and that is the question the first playthroughs will answer.

Tags: gaming, nintendo, Nintendo Switch 2, remake, The Legend of Zelda, HORI