Why Ocarina of Time Is Still My Favourite Zelda, and Why the November Remake Makes Me Nervous

Nearly 30 years after I first played it, Ocarina of Time is still my favourite Zelda game. I have been quietly nervous about the remake coming in November. I have always spoken about it very positively, but I have not admitted until now that it makes me uneasy. I think it will settle something I have carried since I was 10, and I am not sure I am ready for the answer.

Here is a question I genuinely want answered: if you could completely erase one game from your memory so you could play it again for the first time, which would it be? I have been chasing that exact feeling since I was about 10, when a good school report earned me a three day rental of Ocarina of Time from Blockbuster.

A good school report and a Blockbuster rental turned my bedroom into Hyrule

I am not saying Ocarina is objectively the best. It may simply be the effect it had on me the first time. That summer, my bedroom became Hyrule. If you had your own first trip to Hyrule, or a game that did the same thing for you, I think you will recognise every detail of this.

Some context matters here. In the late nineties and early 2000s there was school, bad haircuts and no money, and your whole social life was basically decided by whether your mum agreed. I did well at school. I cannot remember exactly whether it was a parents' evening or a positive report, but something good happened. We drove to a building, borrowed a game for three days and brought it back, which was normal then. Kids today probably think we grew up during the war.

My cousin is the reason I started playing. He had already finished it and would not stop talking about it: the horses, the temples, the swords, how huge Hyrule was. Eventually I thought, "Okay, I'll see what all the fuss is about." I took the game home, went up to my room, put it in the N64, and that was that. The room was Hyrule for as long as I was allowed, and my house had strict rules. Only one person could use the internet at a time, back when someone picking up the landline ended your online life, and my mum was also convinced that more than one person on the computer would cause an alien invasion. So nobody sat next to you to help. If you got stuck, you stayed stuck, or you asked your cousin, which meant admitting he knew something you did not.

Hyrule Field felt like Middle-earth at 10, and the music takes me back to my room

The first thing I remember is Hyrule Field. You leave Kokiri Forest, Death Mountain is over there, the castle is in the distance, and nobody tells you what to look at. It is not actually big. You could probably fit the whole field in a corner of Tears of the Kingdom. But at 10, it felt like Middle-earth.

It had a frightening side too, with ReDeads screaming at you and Wallmasters dropping from the ceiling. I am in my thirties, I pay taxes, and I still do not need that kind of stress in my life.

The important thing, I think, is that I do not remember the music as a soundtrack. When I hear Gerudo Valley, I see the place. When I hear Saria's Song, I am back in the forest. Yet in the end the music takes me back to my room rather than to Hyrule. I do not remember Link on the horse. I remember being 10, sitting in front of the television, with nothing on my mind except whether I could squeeze in a few more hours before Blockbuster wanted the game back. Honestly, that sounds pretty good right now.

The Water Temple, with only a cousin as a guide, was a lesson in stubbornness

Then there is the Water Temple, which I think we need to talk about. No guide, no forum, not even a stranger on YouTube explaining where you went wrong. Just you, putting the Iron Boots on, taking them off, putting them on, taking them off, and opening the same door for the sixth time.

Technically I did have a guide, in the form of my cousin. But using him meant admitting you were stuck, so you would obviously rather stay lost for another three hours, because he was determined never to let me forget it.

Sometimes a rumour would go round at school: someone's older brother's friend's cousin had found the Triforce. It was all complete nonsense, but back then we believed everything.

Pulling the Master Sword feels different now that I am an adult

Then you pull the Master Sword, seven years pass, and suddenly you are adult Link. Everything is bigger, the sword, all of it, and you feel far more capable. It is brilliant. Then you step outside and the whole town is dead.

As a kid, I thought that was cool. Playing it later as an adult, it makes me a little sad. You leave somewhere as a child, come back years later, and everything has changed. I think that is an accurate description of adulthood, delivered by a game in which I was chasing a chicken around a village.

Yes, it is nostalgia, and that should not disqualify it

If Ocarina is your favourite Zelda, someone will eventually say, "Okay, but that's just nostalgia." I think it obviously is nostalgia, but I do not understand why that is supposed to rule it out. Nobody tells someone their favourite Christmas film does not count because they watched it every year with their dad. That is the main reason it is their favourite.

Games are not spreadsheets. We do not rank them by the distance between drawers or the number of mushrooms Link can cook. Breath of the Wild gives you total freedom to go in any direction. I spent most of lockdown between Destiny 2 and Breath of the Wild, and you can simply disappear into that game. I love that. But Ocarina is more focused. You sort of remember the dungeons. Kakariko was Kakariko. Gerudo Valley was Gerudo Valley. I did not need 900 markers on a map to be convinced the world was interesting. Breath of the Wild made me want to explore Hyrule, but Ocarina made me feel like I already knew it, and I think that is something different.

I think the same applies to World of Warcraft. Honestly, 30 seconds of the right music and I am back playing my night elf druid. The same goes for an old Warhammer book. That is what people miss when they say it is just nostalgia. Nostalgia is not misremembering the polygon count on a tree. It is remembering who you were when you saw that tree. The bedroom, school, Blockbuster, my cousin, not knowing what to do: all of that is part of the game, whether you like it or not, and I do not particularly want to separate the two.

The November remake is about to show me what Hyrule really looks like

This might be the slightly silly part: I have not fully played it through as an adult, and I will not yet. Not before the remake in November, which, as I said above, I am a little anxious about. It is not because I think it will be bad. I really do not think that. It is because Nintendo is about to show me what Hyrule actually looks like, and I have spent thirty years remembering a completely different version. In my head it is still huge. I know it is not. I have seen it: a big green field with some heavy fog. But that is not the picture I carry.

I see two ways this could go wrong for me. Either they remake it faithfully and I walk out of the forest thinking, "Oh, is that it?" Have I spent thirty years remembering Birmingham as if it were Middle-earth? Or they do the opposite and make the world vast, filled with side quests every five metres, and suddenly it does not feel the same. That does not seem right either. So maybe the emptiness was the point. Maybe having all that open space in front of you at 10 is what lets your imagination do half the work.

So I do not really care whether Nintendo can remake the game. What I care about is whether they can remake my memory of it, which makes no sense at all. It is an absurd thing to ask of them, and strangely fitting, because I think that is the whole idea. Link leaves as a child and comes back as an adult, and everything is familiar but different. I think we are all about to do the same thing.

Everyone has their own Ocarina, and you only get one first time

I do not think it matters much which game it is, because everyone has their own version of this. Maybe yours is Zelda, or GoldenEye, or Final Fantasy 7, or Pokémon, or World of Warcraft: the game whose menu music alone makes you feel 12 again.

I am not trying to convince anyone that Ocarina is objectively the best. I just want you to think of your favourite, the one you would erase from memory to feel it properly again, because you only get one chance to play a game for the first time. Ocarina was mine. And in November, it might sound strange, but I am about to go home. I am really excited.

Which game would you erase from your memory so you could play it for the first time all over again?