Ocarina of Time Returns November 5. Aonuma Himself Admits the Game Lacked a Jump Button for 28 Years

The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time lands on Switch 2 on November 5, twenty-eight years after its N64 launch. Nintendo showed the first gameplay during a Direct marking the series' 40th anniversary on September 8, with full voice acting and Matthew Mercer returning as Ganondorf, a role he already played in Tears of the Kingdom. Series producer Eiji Aonuma presented the title himself, which on its own signals that Nintendo treats this remake as an internal, priority project rather than an outsourced job. It's a Switch 2 exclusive, a console that jumped to $500 three weeks earlier because of the global memory crisis, so Nintendo is counting on a title of this weight to help justify the hardware's higher price.

The game that got the first 40/40 in Famitsu

1998's Ocarina of Time was the series' first 3D entry and still regularly tops lists of the greatest games ever made. Famitsu gave it the magazine's first-ever perfect score of 40/40, an achievement only twenty-six games have matched since. The game defined the action-adventure genre for decades to come: the Z-targeting system, the dungeon structure, the open-world construction of Hyrule, all things that feel obvious today, first appeared in this form here. The footage shown at the Direct keeps that same Z-targeting as the core of combat, the same dungeon structure, and the same coming-of-age story built around Link's journeys through time, with no rewritten story and no new areas added to Hyrule's actual map.

Aonuma himself admits what was missing

The changes shown at the Direct go exactly where fans have been complaining for twenty-eight years. The loudest one: a jump button. In the original, Link jumped automatically at ledges, with no player control over height or timing; the remake adds a normal, button-mapped jump. The second, even more fundamental change is free camera control: the original never had it at all, which by today's standards makes exploration feel rigid. Aonuma admitted this himself directly, saying free camera movement sounds like a basic expectation for a 2026 game, but Ocarina of Time shipped without one. On top of that comes the ability to dash out of a roll by holding the A button, and a new quest log in the menu that tracks your objective and progress.

A price leak sparked panic about a "1:1 remake"

Before the Direct even happened, a price leaked from the Nintendo eShop: $59.99 digital, $69.99 physical. Some fans read that as a bad sign, expecting a full remake of the series' most important game to cost closer to $70-80, with the lower-than-expected price suggesting a reheated old game without a real systems overhaul. The gameplay shown partly dispelled those fears, since the control and camera changes aren't cosmetic, but not every fan hoping for a full overhaul of the dungeons, music, and pacing got exactly what they were hoping for.

The 40th anniversary is bigger than one remake

Ocarina of Time is just one piece of a wider Zelda 40th anniversary celebration. Filming on the live-action Legend of Zelda movie wrapped in April 2026 in New Zealand, the same locations used for The Lord of the Rings, with a theatrical release set for April 30, 2027, after which the film heads to Netflix, which bought the streaming rights. The main cast includes Benjamin Evan Ainsworth as Link, Bo Bragason as Zelda, Dichen Lachman as Impa, and Uli Latukefu as Ganondorf. Nintendo is deliberately stretching the anniversary across several separate announcements spread over more than a year instead of condensing everything into one event, building a longer media attention cycle around the brand than a single spike of interest around the actual birthday date.