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Nintendo’s Switch 2 remake of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time launches today, 5 November, and it arrives with the sort of reviews usually reserved for a cure for the common cold. It holds a Metacritic score of 96 from 42 critics, every one of them positive and 25 of them handing out full marks. That makes it the highest-rated game of 2026 by some distance, ahead of Phantom Blade Zero, Resident Evil Requiem and Pokémon Pokopia. GamesRadar gave it five stars and called it “a remake for the ages”, which is a brave thing to say about a game that is itself mainly about the ages.
And yet. The 1998 Nintendo 64 original still sits on a Metacritic score of 99, the highest Metacritic has ever given a video game, and the remake, for all its orchestral score, voiced cutscenes and newly discovered jump button, has not dislodged it. The 2011 3DS version managed 94. Nintendo has now remade the same game twice and been beaten by itself both times, which must be a deeply strange feeling for a company. Imagine Peter Jackson reshooting The Fellowship of the Ring shot-for-shot and the critics still preferring the version with the VHS tracking lines.
The likely explanation isn’t anything wrong with the remake, which by every account is lovely. It’s that a 99 for Ocarina isn’t really a score any more; it’s a memory. The original was the game that taught 3D action games how to aim at things, the first time a generation rode a horse across a field at dawn and felt something they couldn’t quite name. No amount of 60 frames per second can compete with being twelve. When we covered the previews last month, the talk was of a proper jump button, a camera that finally listens, and an ocarina you can play by humming into the Switch 2’s microphone. All present and correct, apparently, and the critics are delighted.
For fantasy readers, there’s something pleasingly circular about all this. Ocarina borrowed from the great quest narratives: the boy from the forest, the sleeping hero, the seven years lost, the princess hiding in plain sight. It went on to shape a whole generation of fantasy writers who grew up with a Nintendo pad in their hands. Now it has been retold, as old stories always are, and found worthy of a 96. Not bad for a tale whose hero has never once said a word.
Whether the Water Temple has finally been made less of a swine, we shall find out for ourselves. Some things are eternal, and some of them are iron boots.
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