Upon accepting Nintendo of Europe's invitation to spend two hours with the Ocarina of Time remake, my expectations were so astronomically high that it felt almost unfair. Over time, we all learn to temper expectations, to sidestep disappointment and maybe even inject some pleasant surprise into our lives, but it's difficult to do that with something this formative.

The kid in me — the one who first encountered The Legend of Zelda with an N64 pad in hand — wanted more than another enjoyable dip into the back catalogue while Switch 2 awaits a genre-definer to call its own. More than that baseline Nintendo polish and quotidian competence, I was jonesing for wonder.

Ocarina defined childhoods, putting many players and developers on a path with the medium. And it's that childhood connection that's the biggest hurdle for any remake. Our attachment makes it dangerously personal. It's really not Nintendo's game they're remaking; it's ours.

An impossible task, then. Yet you wouldn’t bet against Nintendo threading that needle, would you? And you shouldn't. After a couple of hours with it, the impossible feels, if not assured, then within reach.

Hey listen!

The demo covered four main areas across two sessions, the first featuring Kokiri Forest and the Deku Tree up to the big web-breaking jump, then a run across Hyrule Field to Castle Town.

Kokiri Forest serves as a fine (re)introduction and quickly convinces you that negotiating this precarious tightrope between nostalgia and modernity is possible.

Controls-wise, the remake spit-polishes an ageing classic with mod-cons from the more recent instalments while retaining just the right amount of restriction to keep it feeling 'old-school' Zelda. The visuals shock initially, but this is still Ocarina of Time.

By ‘restriction’, I mean a very specific, authentic-feeling curtailment of control freedom. If you're coming directly from Breath of the Wild or Tears of the Kingdom with hundreds of hours of muscle memory, unclimbable rocky outcrops on Hyrule Field will feel jarring. Sprint is mapped to 'A' here, but you will instinctively hold 'B' at first. You will leap off a ledge and go to open your paraglider.

Alternatively, Ocarina veterans might run off ledges and forget to jump at all. There is an adjustment period.

From presentation and mechanical standpoints, this has the expected Nintendo-grade quality. Whichever specific team developed this thing, they're bringing their AAA game.

In the hands, it feels exactly as it looks: Ocarina of Time with a control and presentation infusion from BOTW.

The glow-up is immense across the board - overwhelming, even, with new details to marvel at in every crevice. Cracks in temple walls, dirty patches behind paintings, tassels on the hem of Link's tunic, refracted light beneath spinning heart pieces, billowing mist... There’s just so much going on, everywhere.

Ocarina 3D contained a hundred tweaks but still felt like ‘how it always was’. This is totally overhauled.

Sitting so close to the screen for this preview (as per Nintendo's capture requirements - apologies for the dude obnoxiously chewing gum in the footage below) did it a disservice, highlighting minor artefacts and shimmering in characters' hair that would be less noticeable from a natural distance. I wasn't able to test undocked, either, so no handheld impressions yet.

With so many positives to mention, it's actually far easier to point out the thing which really didn't land with me - an old chestnut given fresh form.

Don't need the comments

I never had much of an issue with Navi prodding me to investigate things with her trademark "Hey, listen!", but her nagging has become the stuff of memes. Many will be delighted to hear that she seems less vocal this time, at least audibly.

Your fairy friend retains her bulbous, spherical form and leaves a floating fairy-dust trail in her wake. She illuminates the surroundings beautifully (the lighting across the board is ostentatiously pretty), and her original function as overzealous guide seems largely transferred to the new Threads of Time, the glorified quest log accessible from the pause menu. "Great!" say all the veterans.

However! Floating text boxes now display new Navi dialogue as you explore dungeons and the wider world. Evidently, the devs want to keep you connected to the character, but these (mercifully non-vocalised) insights pop up right in the middle of the screen, commenting on remarkable things that would be more impactful sans remark.

The giant leap into the Deku Tree web, for instance, is now accompanied by a "So high..." dialogue bubble. "So many people..." she comments as you arrive in Hyrule Market. "Twisty!" she exclaims at the iconic contorted corridor in the Forest Temple - and "Not twisty!" after hitting the switch to straighten things out. Indeed.

It's mostly harmless flavour text, but after the silent grandeur of BOTW — the ultimate lesson in 'show-don't-tell' game design — and with the Switch 2-powered visuals here communicating the scale and beauty of this world like never before, it's a genuine shame that your first steps onto this reimagined Hyrule Field are accompanied by Navi's needless, "Wow, the world is so big!"

The Deku's in the details

Okay, back to the good stuff. The amount of visual loveliness in every frame cannot be overstated. Coming straight from a recent N64 replay, I spent an inordinate amount of demo time just examining foliage, knotted woodgrain, stonework, and other textures.

Hyrule's basic geography — what I've seen, at least — is broadly faithful, so the Know-it-all Brothers still live in the bottom-left corner of Kokiri Forest and everything else is where it ‘should’ be.

But finding the differences is the real delight. Crawling through to retrieve the Kokiri Sword, upon turning a familiar corner, I saw...a ladder? The first chest is now perched atop the central platform the big boulder rolls around.

It’s not a change for the sake of it, though; this design forces you to use the new jump button, coaching new and returning players to hit ‘X’, just as you do in BOTW.

The revised controls tripped me up a little, specifically in combat where the strong jump attack, which once lived on the ‘A’ button, now requires a manual jump plus mid-leap sword-swipe. Not complicated, but even after a couple of hours, I hadn't quite adjusted.

the scale is impressive despite the original's compact, compartmentalised nature; a landscape overhaul helps sell this as a more open kingdom than it is.

Combat strikes a balance between the more free-form, athletic Link of BOTW while feeling appropriately contained. That familiar sensation of having Z-targeting locked and shuffling forward a bit too slowly with the enemy just out of range is present and correct. Maybe a dash could have helped, but it feels like Ocarina should.

A radial dial for your inventory might have been nice, but holding ‘R’ and hitting the stick to move along a line works just fine, and the pause menu is still there if you prefer.

Moving out onto Hyrule Field ("Wow, the world is so big!"), the scale is impressive despite the original's compact, compartmentalised nature; a landscape overhaul helps sell this as a more open kingdom than it is. It's hard to tell without direct comparison, but it certainly feels like Nintendo has played with the scale, bumping it up a few percentage points while adding hundreds of tiny touches.

Glowing marks left by fairies now hide hints around the world, and updated topography — with rocks, ruins, and rivulets — refreshes a very familiar space. The kingdom seems to have more verticality now, too, to better frame distant waypoints.

Again, the lighting is sensational. I didn't notice the day-night cycle in action, but I can't wait to see that HDR sunrise. You’ll be reaching for the screenshot button a lot, and the ability to hide on-screen prompts and dialogue suggests Nintendo knows as much.

I wasn't allowed to investigate, but entrances to other areas appeared tantalisingly contiguous. NOE kindly suggested leaving the Peahats alone and making my way to Hyrule Market, so on I went.

Going to town

Translated from the static renders of the original into a fully 3D space, Hyrule's bustling square and its connecting alleys look as lovely as everything else, even the inaccessible 'backstage' areas between buildings. I spent a good amount of time jumping at fences to glimpse what was behind.

Dialogue bubbles appear as you approach marketgoers, and buildings can now be entered without any loads or transition screens. A bug-catching bottle moment in the potion store is new, but other elements are identical to the original; I shot a perfect Shooting Gallery score first try, thanks to the targets appearing with the exact same pattern from 1998. Gyro aiming also helped.

The Temple of Time was out of bounds for this demo (it looked spectacular from the outside), as was venturing up the Castle path. Assuming every area in the game has this level of detail, there's a lot to look forward to, whether you're anticipating the old or the new.

It's business time

Speaking of new, you can now summon a Business Scrub at will by throwing a consumable Business Scrub Seed. If you’re running low on potions or supplies in a dungeon (and you’ve got the rupees), you can restock on the fly, retaining the seed if you don’t buy anything. Handy.

Carpets are rumpled, brickwork weathered, with ethereal light bathing the entire structure, nailing the aura of the 64-bit version

Ocarina was always good about supplying in the environment whatever you needed to beat a particular enemy or puzzle via pots and plants, and those items remain. Still, the Scrub Seed is welcome if, say, you could do with more arrows before facing Phantom Ganon.

Which brings us to the Forest Temple, a personal favourite for many, myself included. With an hour to spend inside, much of my time not duelling Stalfos was once more spent just looking.

Quality-of-life touches (a handy new lift in the big block-pushing room, the removal of the time limit for assembling the Poe picture) accompany the reinterpreted art elements. Carpets are rumpled, brickwork weathered, with ethereal light bathing the entire structure, nailing the aura of the 64-bit version, filling in blanks left by '90s bitmaps that wouldn't suffice to texture Link's eyeball these days. It's genuinely breathtaking.

Aural fixation

One thing that hasn't changed is the music; or rather, the tracks (so far) remain extremely faithful to the originals.

They've all been glowed up with real instruments, naturally, but if the visuals are pushing envelopes, Nintendo is keeping those nostalgic ties with the soundscape. With the eerie Forest Temple piece, in particular, you could almost mistake it for the N64 version.

Maybe it's finally time to learn to play that Ocarina I've had on the shelf for decades.

Elsewhere, item-get jingles have gotten an instrumental upgrade similar to the piano trills from BOTW, and, as demonstrated in Aonuma's video, the Ocarina itself can be played via the console's microphone. You could play a real instrument if you're flashy, or hum the tune yourself - either works.

Unfortunately, the perspex case entombing my Switch 2 demo unit prevented testing, despite several attempts with the Song of Time (apologies to everyone else in the room). I appreciate that Nintendo is leaning into the Switch 2's feature set where appropriate, but not jamming in waggle options for the sake of it. Maybe it's finally time to learn to play that Ocarina I've had on the shelf for decades.

As for voice work, Saria sounded too similar to Navi to my ear (a breathless, anime-style vocal, but I really need to hear more), and the Deku Tree’s gravitas, while suitably theatrical, felt like a seasoned thespian doing their finest thespianing in a booth. Other performances sounded great, though - particularly Japanese Ganondorf.

I enjoy imagining that Link will utter his first proper word at the very end of the game ("No!"), but so far his conversation skills remain limited to his silent, swirly explanatory gestures. He communicates more than ever, though, brushing nettles out of his path with subtle animations and shifting his eyes in awkward moments. I quickly got used to his cherub-y features, and he looks spot-on in adult form.

Delight, but also surprise

So, my first impressions were coloured by the game's sheer level of detail. Cumulatively, the carts and boxes piled up in Hyrule's backstreets, the flowers and foliage across Hyrule Field, the rocks and ruins and fairy lore and exquisite animation all work in tandem to sell this older-style kingdom and its inhabitants in a modern context.

The biggest takeaway, though, was that there is still space for surprise. Even in this restrictive demo scenario, other players stumbled on things I didn't, and vice versa. A bearded NPC with the uncanny ability to track other bearded characters across Hyrule? I'll be hunting him down on launch day.

Happily, the game elicited excited conversation between sessions, firing up those feelings from 1998. For all the reimagined finery, these brand-new elements stirred me most. It's encouraging that Nintendo still isn't afraid to experiment when the stakes are so high. ("So high...")

Expectations remain extremely lofty, then. From what I've played, this has a shot at satisfying almost everybody. And would it really be Ocarina if Navi didn't get on your nerves?

The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time is out for Switch 2 on 5th November. Travel and accommodation for this preview were provided by Nintendo.