I Think I Needed to See Less of Link
The aesthetic of the 'Ocarina of Time' remake enters a strange part of the uncanny valley—or at least one character in particular does.
This week, after a brief tease this summer, Nintendo fully unveiled its lavish remaking of one of the most revered video games ever made, Ocarina of Time. Immediately, as with most Zelda games, the title sparked furious debate online about why it Looked Like That.
Zelda as a franchise is no stranger to debates about art styles. The series is as aesthetically inconsistent as it has been enduring over these last 40 years, and that is part of its charm—outside of direct continuations, rarely does one slice of Zelda ever really look stylistically similar to the other. Wind Waker and Twilight Princess and Breath of the Wild and A Link to the Past all coexist together as Zelda games, and while there are certainly aesthetic hallmarks that carry across the franchise, they all look radically different to one another.
The new Ocarina of Time remake is no exception, and it shouldn't be. But it's also coming at an interesting time for Nintendo more holistically when it comes to both the power of their contemporary platform and their approach to remaking old games. This summer we saw a similar argument break out when the publisher announced a surprise remake of Starfox 64 for the Switch 2, trading generations of more stylized approaches to Fox McCloud and his ragtag crew of anthropomorphic animals for something that instead heavily skewed to a more realism-driven artstyle. The Switch 2 represents the most graphically capable piece of console hardware Nintendo has ever made, allowing it to push power that, while not exact, puts it in the ballpark of what other platforms have been able to do for the past 5-10 years.
It's these two ideas that have merged to give us what can only be described as an Incredibly Greebled Link.