Considering that the first trailer for Nintendo’s upcoming The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time remake showed next to nothing, it makes sense that fans have a lot to talk about. There’s a Hyrule Field’s worth of open space to debate what the remake should change as it reimagines one of the greatest — if not the greatest — video games of all time. Poke around the internet, and you’ll find plenty of fans wishing for an open-world pivot and dungeon redesigns.

While there’s certainly room to modernize a 1998 Nintendo 64 game into a 2026 Switch 2 exclusive, I’m hoping that Nintendo doesn’t go too overboard with its remake. Many features that feel dated today are partially what made Ocarina of Time so, well, timeless. Rather than dreaming up a list of features I hope Nintendo fixes, I’ve found that I have a longer list of things that I hope don’t get touched at all.

1 Leave Hyrule Field alone

If you didn’t play Ocarina of Time when it first came out, know that it’s impossible to describe how massive Hyrule Field felt at the time. It was an expansive traversal hub that felt as large as Breath of the Wild feels today, even though it was tiny in retrospect. I’ve already seen fans clamoring for the remake to expand that space, perhaps even turning it into a full open-world, but this is one area where I hope Nintendo practices some restraint. Dropping hours of extra exploration onto a game where nothing feels out of place would threaten to turn an immaculately designed adventure into a time sink. Just look at Metroid Prime 4: Beyond’s Hyrule Field-like desert for a worst-case scenario of how it could go.

Rather than going big with a mess of extra content, I hope Nintendo can find a way to recapture the........

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