It shouldn’t be possible to feel nostalgic for a memory that isn’t yours. But playing Nintendo’s remake of The Legend of Zelda: The Ocarina of Time for the first time in 2026 feels like remembering a long-forgotten childhood adventure. Though I’ve only spent a few hours with the game so far, I’m besotted with its chipper cast of storybook oddballs, refreshingly unfussy combat, and compact open world.
While I’m not a total Zelda neophyte, the series is a major blind spot for me. (As a child, I had zero patience for both block puzzles and games with archery as a central mechanic. Frankly, I still don’t love either of these things, but I’ve learned to tolerate them.) After several false starts over the years, 2023’s Tears of the Kingdom was the first Zelda game to really sink its teeth into me. Having bounced off Breath of the Wild, I appreciated that the Ascend ability promised to bypass all those painstaking, breathy climbs up sheer cliff faces. But it was doing the questlines in Hateno and Lurelin villages — and watching those towns meaningfully change as a result — that truly got me. After Tears of the Kingdom, I went back to Breath of the Wild, and then all the way back to the SNES-era A Link to the Past. And I loved all three. But that’s where my Zelda experience ended.
Until now, anyway. I start a new game in Ocarina of Time and am greeted with a barrage of ‘90s nostalgia to accompany its intricate 2026 visuals: a sleepy-head protagonist, a wise sentient tree, daunting village youths who fade into the background after 20 minutes.
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